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The district includes Cameron County, one of the largest counties on the Texas border, where Hillary Clinton beat Trump by a 2-to-1 margin in 2016. Vela's district is heavily Hispanic, voters who traditionally lean toward Democrats but with whom Trump made gains in his reelection defeat last November. For growing, Republican-controlled states such as Texas, that means the new lines will be drawn to help GOP candidates. The Republican drive will be aided by redistricting, which occurs once a decade as House seats are redistributed among the states to reflect the latest Census. “In January 2023, this seat will rightfully return to Democratic hands.Two Teenage Girls Involved in Central Texas Amber Alert Found: Police “Tonight’s disappointing news aside, we applaud Dan Sanchez and his team for their hard-fought grassroots campaign – and for exposing the truth about the Republicans who purchased this seat: that they’re just using the working-class Hispanic families of the Rio Grande Valley as pawns in their partisan culture wars,” Hinojosa wrote in a statement. State party chair Gilberto Hinojosa, who is from Brownsville and has faced internal criticism over Dems’ backslide in South Texas, claimed Republicans were only able to snatch the seat with the help of outside dark money and Governor Greg Abbott’s control of the special election date.
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Flores ended up narrowly winning Cameron County, one of the bluest counties in the state, by a point.ĭemocrats took pains to downplay the significance of the special election win. Sanchez, the Democrat, tried to cast Flores as an extreme Trumpist. The GOP is favored to win that seat in November.įlores campaigned in the special election on her story as an immigrant from Mexico and the wife of a Border Patrol agent, blasting national Democrats for selling out the Valley. Gonzalez opted to switch seats after Republicans targeted his current seat, centered in neighboring Hidalgo County, in redistricting. The district, as currently drawn, went for Biden by four points in 2020, but come November, candidates will be competing on a redrawn map that would have gone for Biden by 15 points.
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The race was a predictably low-turnout affair with just 7 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot.īut the real test of South Texas GOP strength will come in November, when Flores faces Congressman Vicente Gonzalez in the general election race for a newly redrawn 34th district. National Republicans pumped significant resources into the special election race while the national Democratic party only dipped its toe in. Texas Democrats have a terrible track record when it comes to winning special election races in predominantly Latino, traditionally blue districts. Vela, who won reelection in 2020 by 13 points, had already announced that he planned to retire, but his premature swing through the revolving door prompted a special election scenario that was ripe for a Republican pickup. The only reason that Republicans had a chance to pull off this upset was because Democratic Congressman Filemon Vela, who represented the district for four terms, abruptly announced in March that he was resigning his seat early to take a job with the powerful K Street lobbying firm Akin Gump. “The RED Tsunami is here!”īut the significance of the win in terms of the GOP’s prospects in South Texas is filled with caveats. “Congresswoman-Elect Mayra Flores and the people of Texas have a message for Joe Biden!” Flores’ campaign tweeted. The win, Republicans will say, is proof that the inroads that former President Donald Trump made among Hispanic voters in South Texas were no mere fluke, and that the long-blue region is on the verge of a historic political realignment. Flores’ victory is a boost for state and national Republicans eager to gain ground along the Texas border. Democratic candidate Dan Sanchez, a former Cameron County commissioner, trailed with 43 percent. She’ll serve the remaining six months left in the congressional term. Flores, a Mexican immigrant, won the race outright with nearly 51 percent of the vote and avoided a runoff.