McBride also said to be wary of posts from national politicians or candidates for political office. With the presidential campaign hitting its final stretch, both candidates might be prone to exaggeration or hyperbole to serve their goals. Instead, defer to your local officials and leaders.

“The more local you can go, the more likely it is you’re getting accurate information,” she said. 

Fifth step: Read laterally, as Mahadevan puts it.

If you see something online that looks questionable, try to corroborate it across multiple outlets. Don’t put all your stock in a single person online. Be sure to check official federal sources like the National Weather Service, or trusted news sources. 

If you see an image that looks like “movie magic,” you should try to find the same event from multiple angles to be sure it’s a recent photo and not generated by artificial intelligence, McBride said.

“This won’t work perfectly,” she said. “I saw that there was a photo of I-40, between Asheville and Knoxville, where a couple of police (cars) were washed out, and there was rumors circulating that it was a fake image and it turned out to be a real image. It was just so unbelievable that people thought for sure it wasn’t real.”

But Mahadevan said, generally, a lot of misinformation can be combatted by being a more active consumer of news. Instead of getting information by scrolling through TikTok, Instagram or Facebook, seek out the news you want.

“Social media newsfeeds have completely made us passive consumers of information,” he said. “So now we’re just kind of passively scrolling. What I always encourage people to do is think more consciously about what you’re consuming.”

But for many residents of the rural parts of South Carolina, finding reliable, local sources of news can be difficult.

News deserts

South Carolina has seen a precipitous decline in local, daily newspapers in recent decades, a trend that can be tied directly to the rise of online misinformation, Mahadevan said. The “information vacuum” created when a local paper folds typically will go unnoticed by many residents until a massive storm or other disaster starts bearing down, he said. Without a local metro paper, people might flock to social media sites like Facebook and NextDoor for information.

NEWPORT, Tenn. — Marlon Espinoza and Daniel López are sitting outside their cabin one recent evening. The sky is filled with stars and the air is crisp in northeastern Tennessee.

The two men are farm workers from Sinaloa, Mexico. They pick tomatoes. It’s their fourth season working on this farm, they say.

“We get good pay, and we can help our families back home,” says Espinoza, who is 32.

“But this season has been harder,” adds López, 24. He’s wearing a T-shirt with the picture of an eagle, and a land of the free, home of the brave, America logo.

Hurricane Helene ravaged the Southeast just over a week ago, including where the tomato farm sits outside Newport.

“We lost our food and other belongings, like clothes,” López says. “The refrigerator was knocked down by the water, and all the food spilled out. We didn’t expect it to be that bad.”

López says he and the other workers knew a storm was coming, but they didn’t think the river would rise so quickly. He says they all scrambled to get whatever belongings they could and moved to higher ground.

“Water came up to here,” says López, pointing to his knees.

Marlon Espinoza, 32, and Daniel López, 24, pose for a portrait at the tomato farm where they work near Newport, Tenn.

Marisa Peñaloza

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Marisa Peñaloza

This disaster is of unprecedented scope. More than 200 people across the Southeast U.S. have been killed by Hurricane Helene, and recovery has been slow in the mountainous area of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Communities in this part of Tennessee are relying heavily on nonprofit groups and on neighbors’ good will to provide water, cleaning supplies and food. For the Hispanic community in flood-ravaged parts, though, getting help is complicated by language and cultural barriers, leaving some people feeling isolated, especially these farm workers.

The larger Latino community is reaching out to help Latinos

On a clear night, a group of volunteers descend on the tomato farm bringing food and water to Espinoza and López and the other farm workers here.

“We want to tell you that what we are doing tonight is the least we can do for our people,” pastor Alexis Andino says as the workers gather around. “It’s the minimum a Hispanic can do for another Hispanic. We thank God we are alive.”

Andino came from Honduras, and he’s lived in Tennessee for almost three decades.

Julio Colíndres, a volunteer, walks around with a box filled with food bags.

“Ya tiene bolsita?” Do you have a baggie already?” he asks.

“Frijoles!” beans!” Colíndres shouts to the crowd.

Rogelio Morales, from Guatemala, stands in the field clutching his food bag. “I got two pieces of bread, water, a bag of sandwiches, a can of beans, a can of pears,” he says with a smile on his face.

“This is the first time we get help” since Helene made landfall here, says Morales. “We survived on Maruchan.” He’s talking about the popular instant noodle soup.

Seeking help outside the farm is unfathomable to him. “I really don’t know how to navigate the area,” he says.

“I’m so grateful to these people, it feels good to have something,” he says, his voice trailing. “It’s good to know that there are people who think about us, people who are in need.”

Sandra de Leon (right) hands out supplies to people from the community of Newport, Tenn. She and her husband, Ruben Aguilar, came to the U.S. from Guatemala decades ago and now manage 180 properties in the nearby town of Pigeon Forge.

Rubén Aguilar

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Rubén Aguilar

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Morales smiles again just thinking of what’s next. “We are going to have dinner now,” he says with a laugh.

For some volunteers, this work is personal

“This hit really close to home,” says Sandra de Leon, talking about the storm and its impact on the farm workers. She and her husband are the main drivers of this grassroots aid effort tonight.

De Leon, 43, says so many people have been generous — sending donations even from out-of-state: “People have been calling me asking, ‘What do you need, what do people need?’ ”

She and her husband, Ruben Aguilar, came to the U.S. from Guatemala decades ago.

“We’ve done what they’ve done,” she says. “We’ve migrated. We’ve picked tomatoes. We’ve cleaned houses, we’ve done everything.”

Today, the couple are successful owners of a cleaning business. They manage 180 properties in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and it’s some of these cabin owners who have been pitching in since Helene hit.

De Leon says it’s also important to help farm workers because they help feed society. “They pick the fruits and the vegetables that we buy. So they are very important and they’re the people [who] get less attention,” she says.

The couple is also helping their all-Latino workforce, they say.

Grateful to have a job

Hurricane Helene left the tomato farm in bad shape, and Espinoza says they went days with no work and no power and water. Work resumed a few days ago; power and water have come back, as well.

López laments the changes that Helene brought. “We were harvesting, and there’s no more harvest now. We are doing clean-up work now — we are cleaning all the mess the hurricane left behind,” he says.

But both men say they feel grateful. And when their contract ends at the end of this month here in Tennessee, they say they’ll head to Florida for their next job.

The gathering on the farm dwindles, and Pastor Andino calls for a prayer.

“Thank you, God, for this day, for giving us this gift,” he prays. “Thank you for the opportunity that you’ve given these men and women working here to survive, for allowing life and health to persevere in the midst of destruction and suffering.

“Amen.”

Back in 2015, when Donald Trump first descended from his golden escalator in New York City, Alexis García was attending high school in the Texas border town of Rio Grande City. In those days, it seemed, everyone in his classes hated Trump. The town of 15,000 serves as the seat of rural Starr County, which is 97% Latino and has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election for the past 100 years. García was too young to vote in 2016, but he supported Bernie Sanders. That year, Hillary Clinton destroyed Trump in Starr, winning 79% of the vote.

But after Trump took office, García began to find himself drawn to Trump’s bombast. He liked the nicknames Trump came up with for his opponents — they reminded him of his own nickname, Pelón, meaning baldy for his buzzed hair. “Trump is like a schoolyard bully,” García tells me, meaning it as a compliment. By the end of 2017, as a high-school senior, he’d become a full-fledged Trump supporter.

At first, seeing how his classmates went after other Trump fans, García chose to keep his political conversion to himself. “Tienes nopal en la frente,” his friends would tell Trump supporters — you’ve got a cactus on your face. The meaning of the insult was clear: You’re only Mexican on the outside. When García finally told people he liked Trump, he was denounced as a racist. “How can you do this to your own kind?” people would ask.

“Coming out as a Republican was probably worse than coming out as an LGBT person,” says García, who works at a local supermarket. “They would shame you for it.”

At the time, García felt like he was part of a minority in South Texas. MAGA was a sort of counterculture among Latinos, a tiny band of provocateurs who enjoyed pissing off the dominant Democrats. But beneath the surface, a seismic shift was underway. When the results were counted on election night in November 2020, García was as shocked as everyone else to discover that Republican turnout in Starr County had nearly quadrupled from 2016. Joe Biden still won, but barely — 52% to Trump’s 47%. Trump had gained more ground in Starr than in any other county in America.

Since then, political analysts have been questioning whether Democrats are losing their long-standing advantage among Latino voters. How had a candidate who once called Mexicans “rapists” done so well in a Mexican American county? In July, before Biden exited the race, polls found his support among Latinos had fallen below 50%. And even since Kamala Harris won the nomination, polling has indicated she’s likely to win no more than 58% of Latino voters — a far cry from what Democrats used to muster. That’s especially significant this year because Trump doesn’t need to win a majority of Latino support to retake the White House. If he can peel off enough of the 36 million Latino voters, especially in hotly contested swing states such as Arizona and Nevada, it could prove to be the margin of victory.

In late July, after Biden dropped out of the race, I traveled to Starr County to see why this longtime Democratic stronghold has been shifting steadily to the right. To be sure, Starr differs from other border towns in some significant ways, especially in its relative dearth of recent migrants. But the county underscores how being Latino is becoming less predictive of how someone will vote. The area is working class, and its politics are similar to much of rural America. There’s a reverence for law enforcement and the military, a sense of economic instability, and a nagging suspicion that liberal elites in Hollywood and on Wall Street think of locals as ignorant hicks. In Trump, they see a man who offers something different. “People tell me they’re going to vote for him,” García says. “Trump is going to win.”

On a humid July morning, Benito Treviño, 77, is walking along the dirt road of his ranch, nestled among the thickets of Tamaulipan thornscrub that grow north of Rio Grande City. Reaching up, he grabs a bean pod from one of the large mesquite trees. “We can grind these into flour with a hammer mill we built,” says Treviño, a biochemist and botanist by training who now runs a native-plant nursery. Like the mesquite and huisache that thrive in this arid climate, he has deep roots in Starr County.

Treviño traces his family’s ancestry back to the earliest Spanish colonists, who made their homes on thin ranches along the Rio Grande. When the US annexed half of Mexico in 1848, those Mexican ranchers suddenly became American. Instead of them moving to America, America moved to them. Today, many South Texans like Treviño see themselves as more Tejano than Mexican American.

This explains, in part, why Biden’s campaign struggled to get traction among many Starr residents. His 2020 playbook for Latinos was built around celebrating immigrants and affording them a sense of belonging — one of his slogans was “Todos con Biden.“ But many here don’t identify as immigrants. Treviño was born in 1947 and grew up helping his parents work the lands his family had been on for generations. He’s American.

Like almost everyone in his generation, Treviño was raised as a Democrat, he says, for one simple reason: There were no Republicans in Starr County. “I never heard the word ‘Republican’ growing up,” he says. “There was no Republican Party here.” For more than a century, Democrats enjoyed complete control of local government, often running unopposed in general elections. That dominance, at its worst, led to graft and corruption as powerful families passed down elected offices like heirlooms. When Treviño’s father spoke out against the local leadership in Starr, the Democratic bosses found a way to show their displeasure: Treviño claims that when officials decided to improve a dirt road that ran through the county, they left the stretch in front of the Treviño home unpaved.

The machine politics compelled Treviño to turn away from the Democrats. He was also prodded by his wife, Toni, a chemist turned lawyer who moved to Starr from Houston. As an outsider and self-identified libertarian, she was shocked by the county’s rampant cronyism. “Why are you a Democrat?” she asked her husband. “You’re a hard worker. You’re very conservative in your values.” The Treviños became Republicans, and today Toni serves as the chair of the Starr County GOP.

While the worst instances of machine politics were eradicated by the 1980s, many old-timers like Treviño remain deeply suspicious of the Democratic Party. In South Texas counties where Democrats have controlled local politics for generations, Republicans can offer themselves as the party of something new. And polls indicate the same shift taking place across the country: Latinos are much more likely to see Trump, rather than Harris, as the candidate offering a chance at major change.

If any place embodies the dual identity among Latinos in Starr County, it’s the Rancho Cafe in the tiny town of Roma. On the outside, the restaurant has the wooden facade of an Old Western saloon, complete with a covered wagon in the dirt parking lot. Inside, however, it’s classic Tex-Mex. Traditional Mexican dresses hang for sale along the walls of the café, and the servers greet you in Spanish.

At lunchtime, Aliriam Perez sits sipping a bowl of caldo. Both her parents are from Miguel de Alemán, a Mexican city across the border that would blend in seamlessly with Roma if it weren’t for the heavily patrolled river separating them. Perez grew up mostly on the US side, though she crossed over frequently to spend time with family. Her mother was adamant that Perez never lose touch with her culture — she didn’t want her daughter to become “pocha,” Americanized. Though Perez at times rebelled against her mother’s wishes, at 34 she’s come to appreciate the importance of her Mexican heritage. Now that she has two boys of her own, she’s raising them bilingual. “It’s part of their history,” she says. “It’s where they come from.”

Growing up, Perez wasn’t very political. But that changed when she married a local police officer. In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Perez was deeply offended by the way Democrats supported calls to “abolish the police.” It felt like an affront to her husband, who was “out there putting himself in danger,” she says. Breaking with her mother, who believes that it’s crucial for Mexican Americans to vote against Trump, Perez began volunteering with the local Republican Party. As she sees it, a vote for “law and order” Trump is a way to both honor and protect her husband and other first responders.

In one recent poll, only 9% of Latino voters cited immigration as their top priority.

Democrats maintain a significant advantage among Latinos like Perez’s mother, first-generation immigrants who speak Spanish as their first language. But that advantage weakens among the second and third generations — not because American-born Latinos like Perez are more distant from their heritage but because they’ve started to prioritize other issues in the voting booth. The top two concerns among Latinos this year are the same as those for their fellow Americans: the economy and healthcare. In one recent poll, only 9% of Latino voters cited immigration as their top priority.

Starr’s economy is propped up not only by law enforcement, including the Border Patrol, but also by the oil and gas industry. During García’s childhood, he recalls, his immigrant father would make the long drive out to the Permian Basin in West Texas, where he worked as pipe fitter. Oil production has grown under Biden, and Harris says she has no plans to ban fracking. But to García, it’s obvious that Republicans are far more keen to expand drilling. Voting for Trump, as he sees it, is his best bet to keep his dad employed.

To be sure, “oil worker” is not a big part of Latino identity in swing states like Arizona and Nevada. Democrats, in fact, have long played to Latino voters by emphasizing the discrimination they face in the energy industry and law enforcement. But that appeal is beginning to lose its appeal. Perez says she knows racism exists in America — a white worker in an Alabama Dairy Queen once refused to serve her because she’s Mexican. But she doesn’t see discrimination as the province of any one political party. “There are Democrats who are racist and there are Republicans who are racist,” she says. Latinos still tell pollsters they consider the Democratic Party more welcoming to them than Republicans. But there are signs the political cohesion of “Latinidad” is beginning to fracture. Across the country, Latino Republicans say they feel more able to wear their politics on their sleeve. When people give them a hard time about voting for Trump, they’ve adopted a proud and defiant comeback. “¿Y qué?” they reply — “So what?”

In his home on his ranch along the northern edge of Starr County, Rick Guerra keeps one room as a sort of museum of his time in the Army: his vest from his days as a tank gunner during the invasion of Iraq, his boots from his deployment in Afghanistan. On one wall, there’s a collection of medals and challenge coins. As a teenager, Guerra helped his father and brothers build this very house. After he retired from the Army, he moved in with his wife and two children.

Leaning conservative since he was a kid, Guerra became a dedicated Republican during his time in the Army — and he’d like to see America return to the days of George W. Bush, when the military was flush with cash. Like many Latino-majority counties in Texas, Starr sends a higher percentage of its young men and women to the military than the rest of the country. Most families have at least one veteran in their family tree, and that has contributed to the fiercely pro-military tenor of the local political culture.

There’s another dynamic at play on Guerra’s ranch: This is rural America, where Democrats have been hemorrhaging support for over two decades. Today, the political gulf between urban and rural areas is a greater divide than the split between North and South. While three-quarters of rural Americans are white, huge swaths of rural counties in Texas and other states are majority Latino. As a result, millions of Latinos are beginning to experience what demographers call “rural resentment” — like other MAGA supporters, they feel disrespected by politicians and the media on the urban coasts. And efforts by Democrats to counter such perceptions, like passing the Inflation Reduction Act to create energy jobs in rural areas, have had little effect on attitudes among Latinos and other rural voters.

“If you’re blue collar, you’re blue collar — it doesn’t matter where you’re from,” Guerra says. “And if you’re blue collar, you want a president who is going to get his hands dirty and do stuff for the country and its people.”

Trump’s working-class support in Starr has been most visible in the string of “Trump Trains” that have been taking place across South Texas. In June, at the first rally of the summer, I speak with a professional portrait photographer named Roel Reyes as he’s adjusting the flags on his motorcycle on the southern edge of Route 83. He’s flying the Texas Lone Star flag next to the Stars and Stripes; on the front of his bike are two signs that proclaim “TRUMP 2024.” Reyes smiles as pickup trucks and other bikes pull over behind him, all of them flying Trump banners. Before long, the parade of vehicles snakes 15 miles southeast from Roma to Rio Grande City.

In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, Reyes helped organize the county’s first Trump Train. At the time, the riotous parades felt like a protest as much as a rally, a way to openly flout the COVID shutdowns being enforced by local Democrats. Reyes recalls getting plenty of “single-finger salutes” from townspeople. But the trains also gave him the sense that Trump was more popular in Starr than the polls might indicate. During the rallies, he’d get waves from local folks he knew would never admit to supporting Trump in mixed company.

“Trump puts the country first. He puts God first — he’s for border control,” Reyes says. Next to him, an off-duty Border Patrol agent who has joined the Trump Train nods in agreement.

Local Democrats and Republicans agree that the trains gave Trump an electoral advantage in 2020. During the pandemic, Democrats — following strict instructions from the Biden campaign to avoid spreading the virus — stopped knocking on doors and focused instead on their digital strategy. Republicans, meanwhile, kept staging the Trump Trains, knocking on doors, and throwing well-attended barbeques and “asadas.” Democrats have become accustomed to hemorrhaging support from working-class white voters. But now it’s clear that more and more Latinos — who are overrepresented in the working class, especially in South Texas — are flocking to the Republicans. Being Latino, it appears, no longer dictates how someone will vote.

The Trump Train being held is small, but Reyes already has plans to hold larger rallies all across the border lands. This first train, he says, “will be like the trailer before the movie.” But it’s hard to hear him. Every few minutes, passing trucks honk their horns, their drivers waving out their windows at the sea of MAGA flags blanketing the dry, thorny landscape that once belonged to Democrats.

Jack Herrera is a freelance journalist who reports on how immigration and demographic change impacts individual lives. He was previously a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and senior editor at Texas Monthly.