For months leading up to Tuesday night, polls and media coverage told of South Texas on its way to rebuke the GOP and the policies of President Donald Trump at the polls. But to what degree wasn’t understood until late into the evening, when it was clear that the region had corrected for its foray into the Republican party and then some.
All of the Rio Grande Valley’s four counties voted between roughly 60 and 70-plus percent for Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and Texas Governor candidate Gina Hinojosa, the latter of whom was raised in the Valley. The same margins more or less applied to the region’s Democrats in congressional and state races, margins too high for the GOP’s area candidates to recover from.
Democratic U.S. House incumbent Vicente Gonzalez handily won against Eric Flores for Congressional District 34, after being targeted for pickup by the GOP. Congressman Henry Cuellar did the same against Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, in his Laredo-Rio Grande Valley district. Bobby Pulido, combining an undeniable name recognition and centrist-populist platform, won easily in the 15th, where Monica De La Cruz, a Republican, has held office for two terms. Overall, these results shattered a would-be Republican gerrymander from last year.
Up in San Antonio, former Bexar County sheriff Johnny Garcia prevailed for Congress against Carlos De La Cruz, who is Monica De La Cruz’s brother. Katy Padilla Stout, an attorney and former school teacher, beat YouTuber and Second Amendment sycophant Brandon Herrera in CD-23.
It didn’t end in the congressional districts, either. San Benito state Representative Janie Lopez lost her HD-37 seat to Oziel Ochoa, flipping the district back to blue. In Corpus Christi, Denise Villalobos, the Republican incumbent state rep, lost too. Democrat Kristian Carranza has won against Republican Jorge Borrego in HD-118, a district encompassing the southeastern suburbs of San Antonio. Republican incumbent Marc Lahood, of HD-121, lost to Democratic challenger Zack Dunn. Down in McAllen, Julio Salinas, a progressive, Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat, won against MAGA Republican Gary Groves in HD-41. (Republican party-switcher Ryan Guillen, it seems, will hold onto his Starr County state House seat.)
Early voting turnout in the Rio Grande Valley’s counties was the first tell that a sweep was coming, even if the direction wasn’t exactly known then. Cameron and Hidalgo counties, where most people in the Valley live, turned out in early vote at levels similar to their early vote in the 2024 presidential cycle.
Trump wasn’t on the ballot this time, of course, but the Republican Party and its South Texas hopefuls have become synonymous with the president and his mass deportation campaign. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted this area specifically since Trump was elected a second time in January 2025, and it became, seconded only by cost of living, the most salient electoral issue of the region.
Since Trump’s inauguration, ICE has arrested over 50,000 people in the agency’s Harlingen and San Antonio sectors, called an “Area of Responsibility” (AOR) by the agency, according to arrest data acquired by the Data Deportation Project. Around 20,000 of those people were in ICE’s Harlingen AOR, which covers most of the Rio Grande Valley.
The people in South Texas have seen this as betrayal, whether by the GOP or by their neighbors who voted for them. This was an affront against the electorate that, for years, local, state, and national GOP factions have looked at as the greatest coalition to get—an untapped bastion of anti-establishment sentiment after years of disinvestment by the Democratic Party. That anger could fit somewhat inside of a playbook of the anti-government screeds from the Republican soapbox, and, briefly, it did work. Because the core of their messages over these last election cycles was simple: Democrats have abandoned you, but you now have a place to go.
But for an electorate that votes based more on class and industry ties and, sometimes, solely for the personality–a legacy of the region’s boss rule politics and the strength of Blue Dog Democrat figures in the region–it is not so surprising to see what happened in South Texas on Tuesday night. Put another way, South Texans voted against policies that harmed them or their livelihoods, not necessarily for the Democratic Party, which campaigned on alleviating that pain.
Years ago, local GOP boosters predicted a “red wave” would come to South Texas as disenchanted Democrats converted over. Between the 2022 and 2024 congressional and legislative races, this amounted to two U.S House seats–first Mayra Flores, who would have a nine-month stint in CD-34 after Filemon Vela left office before his term ended; then De La Cruz, who would win against Michelle Vallejo.
In 2024, the GOP’s messaging tamed in some areas and rose in intensity in others, trying to match or balance against the party’s supreme guiding force in Donald Trump. And it may have been that closeness to Trump that brought out people to vote Republican in 2022 and 2024.
But that’s over now, and the reverse has happened: The Democratic Party successfully capitalized on South Texas being disenchanted with the GOP, capturing their anger with ICE, rising costs of living, and, in the case of its support of Talarico and Hinojosa, data centers and public schools stripped of state funding.
Long a stronghold for a certain kind of Democrat, deep South Texas in particular snapped back into the blue column, with a historic ferocity.
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