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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has been a loud anti-abortion crusader throughout his political career.
But as reproductive rights loom over the election season as a key issue for voters, Cruz is uncharacteristically quiet.
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The Texas Republican, running for a third term in the Senate, is locked in a tight race against U.S. Sen. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, who has made restoring access to abortion and blaming Cruz for the toppling of Roe v. Wade central to his campaign.
This past week, Allred’s campaign, boosted by an influx of cash from Senate Democrats, began airing an ad on TV and streaming platforms across the state that blasted Cruz for his anti-abortion record.
Texas has banned almost all abortions — including in cases of rape and incest — since Roe was overturned. Since then, Cruz has been more careful about how he engages on the topic. He has repeatedly called abortion a state issue, while offering more vocal support for in vitro fertilization.
Cruz, through a spokesperson, declined a request for an interview. The Texas Tribune reached out to his campaign eight times over six weeks to ask about his positions, posing nine initial questions via email and several follow ups on topics ranging from his past support for a national abortion ban to how he squares his belief in fetal personhood with his support for IVF — a process which routinely involves the disposal of fertilized embryos.
Cruz’s campaign did not respond directly to questions, instead providing links to previous statements he had made on the topic in other interviews. Those statements did not address several specific questions.
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While Democrats have not won statewide in Texas in 30 years, the issue could pose a risk for Cruz, who squeaked to victory in 2018 against Beto O’Rourke by less than three percentage points. Though polling shows Texans prioritizing issues like border security and the economy over abortion, more Texans believe that the state’s abortion laws are too strict, and Democrats are banking on the issue boosting turnout nationwide in a presidential election year.
The most important Texas news, sent weekday mornings.
Abortion ban
When the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, Cruz celebrated the decision as “nothing short of a massive victory for life” that would not outlaw abortion across the country, but leaves “abortion policy up to the states and returns power to the American people.”
“This is a momentous day, and yet the fight for life doesn’t end with the Dobbs decision,” he said in a statement after the ruling. “It simply begins a new chapter. I’ve been proud to stand for life in the U.S. Senate, and I will continue to do so as we navigate the path ahead.”
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Republicans have faced scrutiny in recent months about their past efforts to pass a federal abortion ban, with Democrats warning that former President Donald Trump would press for further restrictions.
In 2021, before Roe was overturned, Cruz cosponsored a 20-week federal abortion ban, which included exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. He cosponsored a similar ban at least six times over his Senate career. He did not sign onto a 15-week ban when it was introduced in September 2022. In 2023, he co-introduced a bill that would allow states to exclude medical providers that perform abortions from state Medicaid funding. None of those measures advanced through Congress.
Cruz did not respond directly to a question about whether he still supports a federal ban. But in a past interview his campaign provided to the Tribune, he said that abortion policy is up to each state.
“Questions of what the rules of abortion are will be made by state officials in Austin, the state legislature, the governor. And the situation we have right now, every state makes different rules,” Cruz said in an August interview with WFAA.
Trump, during the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1, said on social media for the first time that he would veto a national abortion ban, after backing a series of shifting positions over the course of his third campaign for the White House.
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Abortion exemptions
Cruz declined to directly answer whether he thought Texas should add carveouts for rape and incest and if he thought the state’s exception to save the life of the mother was working.
In the WFAA interview, he pointed to legislation he has supported with those exceptions, while reiterating that the decision would be made at the state level.
But during his 2016 presidential run, Cruz said at a town hall in Wisconsin that he did not support an exemption for rape.
“When it comes to rape, rape is a horrific crime against the humanity of a person, and needs to be punished and punished severely,” Cruz said. “But at the same time, as horrible as that crime is, I don’t believe it’s the child’s fault.”
Texas law allows abortions only in instances where the life of the mother is at risk. Critics, including Allred, say that exemption is unclear and has resulted in women — such as Kate Cox, who was denied an emergency abortion by the Texas Supreme Court after finding out her pregnancy was no longer viable — being unable to access necessary medical care.
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When asked if he thought the law needed clarifying or changing, Cruz’s campaign pointed to an interview he sat for on CNN. When asked during that interview if he agreed with the court’s ruling in Cox’s case, he said the Texas Supreme Court “was right” to direct the Texas Medical Board to “set the rules.”
“I think there’s a very good argument that she fell under that exception,” he said. “But what the Texas Supreme Court said in its opinion is it asked the Texas Medical Board go in and set clear rules.”
The Texas Medical Board adopted guidance in June for how doctors should interpret the state’s new abortion laws, but declined to provide a list of cases in which an abortion should be permitted.
IVF
This year, Cruz has become increasingly vocal about his support for IVF, which he calls a “miracle.”
In February, a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court sparked a nationwide panic about the future of access to IVF. That decision said that frozen embryos should be considered people, and that anyone who disposed of them could be liable for wrongful death. The Alabama Legislature subsequently passed a law to protect fertility treatments.
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In May, Cruz introduced a bill with U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Alabama, that he said would protect IVF on the federal level by excluding any state that bans the treatment from federal Medicaid dollars.
“It simply does what needs to be done: safeguarding the right of couples to grow their family if they choose to use IVF, because this should not be a political issue,” Cruz said on the Senate floor in September describing his bill.
The bill, which Democrats blocked, would not create a statutory right to access fertility treatments. Critics panned it as lip service and “incentivizing far-right, anti-choice policymakers in deep red states to defund health care for low-income Americans” without barring them from also outlawing IVF.
Cruz voted against Democratic legislation that would create a federal right to access fertility care, saying the bill infringes on religious freedoms — though the measure does not require medical professionals who may oppose IVF to provide any treatments.
Cruz also did not respond to a question asking if he supported an idea Trump floated to make IVF free for all Americans. Trump did not explain how that proposal would be implemented.
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Allred said he would support the Democratic IVF bill, which was backed by two Senate Republicans, and he cosponsored a related measure in the House to federally protect fertility treatments.
Cruz did not respond to questions about whether he believes an embryo created through IVF constitutes a person.
In 2015, during his presidential campaign, Cruz signed a pledge to back a personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would “guarantee a constitutional right to life for every innocent human being, from earliest biological beginning until natural death.”
He embraced personhood measures in February 2016, before ducking questions about the topic a couple of months later.
Cruz has argued that his support for IVF is not inconsistent with a belief in fetal personhood by pointing to states that have adopted both personhood amendments and IVF protections.
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“There are three states — Alabama, Georgia and Missouri — all of which have adopted personhood amendments, and all of which protect IVF,” he said on the Senate floor in June. “The Democrats maintain that IVF is in jeopardy, and yet the facts are precisely to the contrary.”
After the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision, IVF providers paused treatments across the state. Most resumed services once the Alabama Legislature passed protections for fertility treatments. But that law did not address the question of personhood, and simply provides immunity to IVF providers and patients.
Filibuster
At the same time, Cruz has characterized Allred as an extremist on abortion and accused him of supporting “abortion literally up until the moment of birth.”
Allred’s campaign rejected that claim as a scare tactic, providing a statement he made to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in response to Cruz’s allegations.
“I find it offensive that Ted Cruz would knowingly misstate not only my position but what has been the standard in this country for the last 50 years,” he said, saying a return to Roe would allow states to restrict abortions after viability while also leaving the decision of whether to have an abortion to patients and their doctors.
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Meanwhile, Allred has tried to pin the end of Roe and subsequent state abortion bans on Cruz’s support for anti-abortion state lawmakers and his position on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which advanced three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices.
“He is singularly responsible for what’s happening in our state,” Allred said.
Allred has been a consistent abortion rights advocate throughout his tenure in Congress.
After he was elected to the U.S. House in 2018, Allred cosponsored and voted in favor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would create a federal protection for abortion access. The bill passed the House in 2021 and 2022 but died in the Senate. Allred has also spoken out against local efforts to ban the use of roads and highways to obtain an abortion out of state.
“We have to restore freedom to Texas women and Texas families,” he said. “And the way we do that is going to be at the federal level.”
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If elected to the Senate, Allred said he would support changing the filibuster to enable passage of a federal abortion protection law. The Senate requires 60 votes to move forward on any legislation — a threshold meant to protect the minority party’s power and foster bipartisanship, but which has stymied Democrats’ efforts to pass abortion and voting rights legislation over Republican resistance.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, recently reiterated her support for carving out an exception to the filibuster for abortion legislation — though institutionalists warn that lowering the threshold to a simple majority would be a slippery slope that could lead to less durable reforms and sap the minority’s leverage when the other party comes into power.
Still, Allred argued that the Senate now exists in an “ahistorical period in which the filibuster is being abused,” and that the chamber ought to return to a rule that required any senator blocking a bill to speak on the Senate floor for the duration of their filibuster.
Voting FAQ: 2024 Elections
When is the next election? What dates do I need to know?
Election Day for the general election is November 5, and early voting will run from Oct. 21 to Nov. 1. The deadline to register to vote and/or change your voter registration address is Oct. 7. Applications to vote by mail must be received by your county of residence – not postmarked – by Oct. 25.
What’s on the ballot for the general election?
In addition to the president, eligible Texans have the opportunity to cast their ballots for many Texas officials running for office at the federal, state and local levels.
This includes representatives in the U.S. and Texas houses and the following elected offices:
-1 U.S Senator (Ted Cruz)
– 1 of 3 Railroad Commissioners
– 15 State Senators
– 7 State Board of Education members
– 3 members of the Texas Supreme Court
– 3 members of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
– 5 Chief Justices and various justices for Texas Courts of Appeals
– Lower-level judges and local county offices will also appear on the ballot:
– Various district judges, including on criminal and family courts
– County Courts at Law
– Justices of the Peace
– District Attorneys
– County Attorneys
– Sheriffs
– Constables
– Tax Assessor-Collectors
How do I make sure I’m registered to vote?
You can check to see if you’re registered and verify your information through the Texas Secretary of State’s website. You’ll need one of the following three combinations to log in:
Your Texas driver’s license number and date of birth.
Your first and last names, date of birth and county you reside in.
Your date of birth and Voter Unique Identifier, which appears on your voter registration certificate.
How do I register to vote if I haven’t?
You can request a postage-paid application through the mail or find one at county voter registrars’ offices and some post offices, government offices, or high schools. You can also print out the online application and mail it to the voter registrar in your county.
Applications must be postmarked by the Oct. 7 deadline. Download your application here.
Additionally, you can register to vote through the Texas Department of Public Safety while renewing your driver’s license. You may be able to register to vote online if you’re also allowed to renew your license online. This is the only form of online registration in the state.
After you register to vote, you will receive a voter registration certificate within 30 days. It’ll contain your voter information, including the Voter Unique Identifier number needed to update your voter registration online. If the certificate has incorrect information, you’ll need to note corrections and send it to your local voter registrar as soon as possible.
The voter registration certificate can also be used as a secondary form of ID when you vote if you don’t have one of the seven state-approved photo IDs
What can I do if I have questions about voting?
You can contact your county elections official or call the Texas Secretary of State’s helpline at 1-800-252-VOTE (8683). A coalition of voting rights groups is also helping voters navigate election concerns through the 866-OUR-VOTE (687-8683) voter-protection helpline. The coalition has hotlines available in other languages. Disability Rights Texas also assists voters with disabilities.
BURNET COUNTY — Authorities are looking for two men in connection to a possible attempted church shooting in Central Texas on Sunday.
Around 10:30 a.m., Burnet County deputies were called to the Church at the Epicenter in Burnet County, northwest of Austin.
Officials said a member of the volunteer church safety team encountered two “suspicious” men in the parking lot, one of them holding a rifle.
That church volunteer pulled out their weapon and fired multiple rounds, the Burnet County Sheriff’s Office said, and the suspects fled north on US 281 in a white minivan.
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The sheriff’s office said there are no known injuries.
State and federal agencies have joined the investigation, according to the sheriff’s office.
This is a developing story.
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S.E. Jenkins
S.E. Jenkins is a digital content producer for CBS Texas. She has also been a Digital Content Producer in Tallahassee and Myrtle Beach. S.E. graduated with journalism degrees from Texas State University, Aarhus Universitet and City, University of London.
It was a week of upheaval in The Associated Press college football poll, with Texas returning to No. 1 on Sunday after a one-week absence following Vanderbilt’s monumental upset of Alabama.
The Commodores’ win as more than three-touchdown underdogs caused the Tide to drop from No. 1 to No. 7. The last top-ranked team to fall so far was Ohio State, which plunged to No. 11 in 2010 following an October loss to Wisconsin.
Texas, which had an open date, received 52 out of 61 first-place votes and became the first team in two years to bounce in and out of the top spot in a span of three polls. The Longhorns also were just the third team since 2008 to be voted No. 1 after not playing the day before.
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Ohio State beat Iowa for its fourth straight easy win, received nine first-place votes and moved up a spot to No. 2.
Oregon and Penn State each rose three spots, with the Ducks up to No. 3 and the Nittany Lions fourth. Georgia remained No. 5.
Miami (Fla.), which came back from a 25-point second-half deficit to beat Cal, 39-38, rose two spots to No. 6.
The mayhem wasn’t limited to Alabama.
Six of the 18 AP Top 25 teams that played lost to unranked opponents (33%), the highest mark since six of 16 (38%) lost the first week of October 2020.
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The Tide were among four teams in the top 11 to lose to unranked opponents — the first time that’s happened since October 2017.
Tennessee lost to Arkansas and went from No. 4 to No. 8. Michigan lost to Washington and went from No. 10 to No. 24. USC lost to Minnesota and went from No. 11 to out of the Top 25. The Trojans were first among teams also receiving votes.
Texas A&M soundly beat Missouri at home in the only Top 25 matchup. That earned the Aggies a promotion from a tie for No. 25 to No. 15 and the Tigers a demotion from No. 9 to No. 21.
The Big Ten dominates the top five, but the SEC maintains its grip on the top 10. No. 2 Ohio State, No. 3 Oregon and No. 4 Penn State are bookended by the SEC’s Texas and Georgia. The SEC also has Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss in the top 10.
Double-digit drops by Missouri, Michigan and USC mark the first time since Nov. 13, 2016, that three teams fell 10 or more spots in the same poll. That week it happened to Auburn (8 to 18), Texas A&M (10 to 23) and North Carolina (15 to receiving votes).
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The biggest upward movers were Texas A&M (25 to 15), Clemson (15 to 10) and Iowa State (16 to 11).
SMU (5-1) was rewarded for knocking off Louisville on the road and enters the rankings at No. 25. The Mustangs have appeared in the Top 25 all but one season (2022) since 2019. Louisville (3-2) has lost two of three and dropped out.
Pittsburgh won at North Carolina to start 5-0 for the first time since 1991 and enters the rankings at No. 22 for its first appearance in two years.
USC (3-2) has lost two of its first three Big Ten games and is out, as is UNLV, whose first-ever Top 25 appearance was spoiled by an overtime home loss to Syracuse.
SEC: 9 (Nos. 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 15, T-18, 21).
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Big Ten: 6 (Nos. 2, 3, 4, T-18, 23, 24).
Big 12: 4 (Nos. T-11, 14, 16, T-18).
ACC: 4 (Nos. 6, 10, 22, 25).
Mountain West: 1 (No. 17).
Independent: 1 (No. 11).
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Here’s the full top 25:
1. Texas 2. Ohio State 3. Oregon 4. Penn State 5. Georgia 6. Miami (Fla.) 7. Alabama 8. Tennessee 9. Ole Miss 10. Clemson T-11. Iowa State T-11. Notre Dame 13. LSU 14. BYU 15. Texas A&M 16. Utah 17. Boise State T-18. Kansas State T-18. Indiana T-18. Oklahoma 21. Missouri 22. Pittsburgh 23. Illinois 24. Michigan 25. SMU
Reporting by The Associated Press.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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 Tejanothan 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.