Harlingen, Texas
The birds have been making an incredible racket. We have been making an attempt to shoot a marketing campaign industrial for
Mayra Flores
outdoors the cotton gin the place her father as soon as labored. The foreman remembered Ms. Flores from when she was a young person. She’d toiled in the identical fields, now crammed with birds so noisy our digital camera crew discovered it not possible to file. A employee retrieved a pistol from his truck and fired it into the air. The birds flew off and we received the shot.
The episode was emblematic of how out of contact the Democrats are with Texas’ conservative Hispanic group. Guns are part of life within the Rio Grande Valley, the realm Ms. Flores, a 36-year-old Republican, now represents in Congress. So are religion, household, custom, onerous work, accountability and love for America—beliefs which might be in direct battle with the politics of grievance Democrats use of their one-size-fits-all outreach to minorities.
There have been different components that led to Ms. Flores’s victory in a particular election to fill the seat left vacant by the March retirement of Democratic Rep.
Filemon Vela.
The first is Ms. Flores herself. She’s no profession politician; she is a respiratory-care nurse married to a Border Patrol agent. Though born in Mexico, she legally emigrated to the U.S. together with her mother and father when she was 6. She loves her group and grew uninterested in its therapy as a political soccer by media and political elites who do not know what life is definitely like close to the border.
The second key aspect is what nationwide Democrats have achieved to destroy their relationship with these voters. People right here aren’t woke. They don’t say “Latinx” or announce their pronouns. They have a robust religion in God and imagine within the nuclear household. Many work within the oil and gasoline business or in agriculture. In quick, they’re every part the fashionable Democratic Party is just not. And they concentrate. When Democrats speak about defunding the police or assault the Border Patrol for doing its job, they’re actively making Ms. Flores’s group much less secure.
Ms. Flores’s victory ought to alarm Democrats all over the place. The thirty fourth Congressional District at the moment has the second-largest Hispanic inhabitants (84.5%) of any district in America.
Barack Obama
received the district by 22.1% of the full vote in 2012.
Hillary Clinton
received it by 21.5% in 2016. But
Joe Biden
received it by solely 4.2% in 2020. Hispanic help for Democrats is slipping, and never solely in Texas. South Florida, which historically has despatched Democrats to Congress, turned crimson lately with the elections of Reps.
Carlos Gimenez
and
María Salazar.
Democrats have lengthy touted demographic modifications in border states like Texas and Arizona as a portent of a blue progressive future. They assume open borders will assist them win elections and overtly admit that’s their purpose. What I discovered within the Rio Grande Valley is that their insurance policies might backfire. Hispanic Americans are patriotic and hardworking. They reject the woke drift of the Democratic Party and are defecting to the GOP.
Earlier this yr the House Majority PAC ran a Spanish-language advert towards Ms. Flores making an attempt to tie her to Jan. 6—a preposterous connection that fell flat. When requested why Democrats didn’t put extra assets into the particular election, House Majority Leader
Steny Hoyer
mentioned, “I think we made the judgment that it was pretty much a Republican seat.” But till Ms. Flores’s victory, this space had been represented by Democrats in Congress for 100 years.
Ms. Flores should now flip her consideration to working for a full time period. Her opponent within the fall election can be Democratic Rep.
Vincente Gonzalez,
who at the moment represents the neighboring fifteenth District. In October he introduced he would run for re-election within the thirty fourth District after redistricting left him with the impression that it was a safer seat for Democrats. But that was earlier than Ms. Flores’s stunning victory. Mr. Gonzalez has mentioned that nationwide Democrats have “forgotten about the brown people on the border.” But they haven’t forgotten, they simply can’t work out how one can enchantment to an aspirational group that loves God and nation.
Mr. Shields is a founding associate of Convergence Media, a former RNC chief of employees and the previous president of the Congressional Leadership Fund.
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