The signs of a political shift in the reliably blue counties that line Texas’s southern border with Mexico had been coming. Local GOP offices were emerging in places like Starr County that had not voted for a Republican for president in a century.
Most U.S. counties shifted at least a little bit to the right on Election Day compared to 2020, but of the 15 that have lurched the farthest over the past two presidential elections, 14 are majority Hispanic or Latino. Thirteen of those are in Texas, and the 14th is Florida’s Miami-Dade, one of the most populous counties in the country.
In Starr County, where Bazán lives, voters just backed a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in a century. The predominantly Hispanic and working-class rural county, where the median household income of $36,000 is one of the lowest in the nation, gave Trump a 16 percentage-point victory margin over Vice President Kamala Harris.