The Republican flip of the Rio Grande Valley was the result of years of strategic planning

Few people were shocked on Tuesday evening Texel was called for former President Donald Trump. But how adroitly the now president-elect carried the Lone Star State showed huge Republican gains compared to just four years ago.

Trump won more than 56% of the vote in Texas in some cases 14 points higher than Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. In 2020, Trump defeated President Joe Biden by just six percentage points.

Such a seismic shift didn’t happen overnight — and experts and Texas Republicans say it wasn’t a fluke, either. Texas GOP Chairman Abraham George told The Texas Newsroom it took years of work.

“We started working very hard in the South Texas region. We’ve done that over the last few years, probably over the last four or five months, since I became chairman. One of my campaign promises was that we would turn around South Texas,” he said.

That work has paid off, as Republicans have managed to flip 16 counties since the 2016 presidential election.

Kevin Kearns, a political scientist at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said he noticed increased attention to the region from Republicans.

“Even here in Corpus Christi, we’ve seen Governor Abbott coming out and campaigning on a regular basis,” said Kearns, who also highlighted Senator Ted Cruz’s activities in the area. “Even if you just look at political candidates coming to South Texas – I mean, in 2022, in the midterm elections – President Trump was here.”

It wasn’t just Republicans’ frequent campaign stops in South Texas. The Republican Party’s gains in Texas can also be attributed to the makeup of the region and the party’s message to voters there, said Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s important to note, especially in South Texas, that we’re not necessarily talking about college-educated or even Hispanic voters in the city,” Blank said. “We are talking, in most cases, about non-college-educated voters in suburban and often rural Latin America who, for all intents and purposes, were likely to lean Republican, regardless of their racial or ethnic identity.”

Non-college-educated voters, often referred to as the working class, have long been seen as an important voting bloc for the Democratic Party. But Blank said the party is now more often than not seen as “reflecting the tastes and policy preferences of a core group of college-educated voters.”

Blank pointed to Harris’ plan to give first-time homebuyers $25,000.

“Well, that sounds kind of fun. As long as you can find a house that costs less than $250,000. And that represents 10% of a down payment, after which you can hopefully get a bank loan at a very high interest rate,” he said.

But given house prices in 2024Blank said that program likely didn’t resonate with working-class voters, who wouldn’t have been able to save enough money to benefit from such a program in the first place.

That ties into a larger issue that voters were concerned about in this election: the economy.

“Many rural parts of Texas are turning red because the economy is not doing so well,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “And the threats to the oil and gas industry that people think comes from Democrats drives communities to vote Republican.”

The change was not subtle. In Starr County, Biden defeated Trump by five points in 2020. Four years later, voters there chose Trump over Harris by 16 points.

Rottinghaus said the biggest takeaway from that is how “the economics intersects with issues of racial attachment to the Democratic Party.”

Craig Goldman, former Texas House GOP caucus chairman, and now elected congressmantold The Texas Newsroom that people in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley “are realizing that Democrats’ policies don’t favor them, and that Republicans’ policies are more aligned and better aligned with that.”

Not so long ago, Democrats pale make a profit in Texas. But after this election, Goldman said, “Texas is not getting bluer. Texas is getting redder, and that is evidenced by what happened in the Rio Grande Valley.”