“They have just forgotten about the brown people on the border,” says Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, and he should know. Thanks to redistricting, the House Democrat currently representing Texas’ 15th congressional district will have to run against newly elected Republican Mayra Flores in November. Gonzalez and the rest of House Democrats in South Texas now realize just how difficult it will be to keep their seats in the coming red wave, helped in no small part by Democratic indifference to the border crisis.
Less than 24 hours after the GOP flipped a congressional district in South Texas, several Latino Democrats cornered their campaign chief on the House floor with a fervent plea: It’s time for the party to make a crucial course correction.
Republicans blew up more than a century of almost uninterrupted Democratic control in that region Tuesday night, earning a special election win in a heavily Latino border district they had rarely even contested since its creation in 2012 — but where the GOP has made rapid gains in the last few years. …
But while the loss of this soon-to-disappear version of Texas’ 34th district is temporary, the trend it represents is growing more and more concerning for Democrats. The resounding win by Flores — a health practitioner and wife of a border patrol agent — marks the first flip of the midterm cycle for Republicans, and it also hands them a unique messenger as the GOP looks to capture more border and majority-Latino districts in November.
Republicans seized on the victory, declaring it a preview of Democratic losses to come in November — particularly in their one-time stronghold in South Texas. Not only did Flores handily defeat the Democrats’ candidate, Dan Sanchez, but she also showed how far the GOP has encroached on formerly blue territory in just a few years. In a handful of counties, Flores ran dozens of points ahead of Trump’s marks in his first bid for office in 2016. She even narrowly carried Cameron County, a longtime base of Democratic support.
Republicans across the state were jubilant: “South Texas has been a Democrat stronghold for over a century. To see South Texas move Republican is a seismic shift,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a brief interview after Flores, whom he endorsed, won.
Gonzalez has plenty of reason to worry, too. TX-15 parallels TX-34 in more ways than just geography in the Rio Grande Valley. Its demographics are almost identical — 82% Hispanic, only 13% rural, and part of it also sits on the Mexican border at another border-crisis epicenter in McAllen. Despite never having elected a Republican to this seat in the 102-year history of TX-15, it actually voted more Republican than the national average in 2020’s House elections, and it’s only D+3 in the Cook index.
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