Rep. Mayra Flores’s (R-TX) recent victory in a special congressional election in South Texas attracted a lot of attention, and deservedly so. The rapid movement of Mexican Americans in Texas, and Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans in Florida, toward the Republican Party has shaken the Left to its core.
By Washington Examiner – Brooke Rollins and Jorge Martínez
Aug 10, 2022
For years, Democrats have confidently pinned their future political hopes on demographic destiny and the idea that Hispanic voters would be a permanent fixture of their electoral base. But that base appears to be slipping away, though what happens from here is still very much up in the air.
For all her dynamism and work ethic, Flores did not achieve victory on her own. She benefited from a shift, which also manifested itself in the 2021 election of a Republican mayor in McAllen, Texas, a supermajority-Hispanic border city within a historic Democratic stronghold. This was also evident in the by-now famous rightward shift of South Texas in the 2020 presidential race.
Flores’s victory built upon these other successes. Her “God, Family, Country” slogan invoked everything anathema to the modern Left. It was a full repudiation of the woke anti-capitalist ideology that has become a secular religion among liberals.
The phenomenon of the Tejano shift is even making itself felt among Texas Democrats. Consider the recent primary victory, post-recount, of incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th Congressional District. The national liberal apparatus went all-in for Cuellar’s opponent, activist Jessica Cisneros. Why? Because Cuellar is pro-life – the last pro-life Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Democratic Party’s increasingly far-left base is out of sync with his district, which is why he managed to prevail.
Although Cuellar’s victory was not a victory for conservatism or Republicans, it was very much a defeat for liberalism. His and Flores’s wins both reflect the growing Hispanic rejection of woke ideology and its precepts. Each nationality within the broader Hispanic tent has its different reasons and perspectives. Americans of Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan descent recoil from the liberal enthusiasm for socialism and its mechanisms. Americans of Mexican, Honduran, and Guatemalan descent are repulsed at the thought of overthrowing law and order or abolishing the police. Nearly all of them are repelled at the fanaticism of leftist gender ideology and the rejection of religion.
The probability that the Left changes direction any time soon is low, because its funders and its intellectual leadership are in a commanding position within their own movement. Fringe voices on the Left now seem to be controlling the direction of the current administration and promoting a radical new agenda for the country.
The challenge for Republicans and the Right is to do something more than rely upon that process of repulsion to effect a full realignment. It isn’t enough for the Left to lose Hispanics – conservatives must win them over. In Texas, quiet efforts have been underway to deserve the Hispanic vote for some time.
What comes next is difficult to foresee. It is entirely possible that Hispanics writ large, even Mexican Americans in California, continue to move rightward and stay there. It is just as possible that they will normalize within the general population and become a permanently contested group, open to split or swing any given way in any given election. Either one of these possibilities presents profound difficulties for the national Democratic coalition, which would have to scramble for offsetting voting groups elsewhere.
What will not happen, though, is a return to the past. Hispanics aren’t likely going back to their days as a Democratic monolith. A growing number of Hispanics have been turned off by the extremism of left-wing policies. They are growing in support for an América First agenda that allows them to advance their education, seek gainful employment, start new businesses, keep their families and communities safe, and contribute to the success of our country.
Thus, the era of political monoculture is over. Mayra Flores wasn’t the one to end it, but her victory confirmed it.
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Read More: Washington Examiner – Hispanics are leaving the Democrats, but Republicans still need to earn their votes
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