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Back in January, I predicted that Latinos would help Democrats take back the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterms.
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But no one could have foreseen what happened Tuesday on election day.
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Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress, picking up at least 41 seats in the House and at least seven in the Senate. They won in South Carolina and Kansas. And, after more than 20 years of one-party rule, Texas became just as blue as California overnight — Dems flipped a Senate seat and won every major statewide race, making history in the process.
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Come January, the two most populous states in the country will be run by Mexican Americans: Xavier Becerra (the first elected Latino governor of California, and second overall) and Gina Hinojosa (the first Latina governor of Texas).
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Tuesday was a shellacking. In the words of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, “it was an extinction-level event for Republicans.”
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And crucial to this beatdown were Latinos.
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After giving Donald Trump 48% of the vote in 2024, the electorate swerved sharply to the left. According to an AP exit poll, about 6 in 10 Latino voters said they voted for the Democratic candidate in their local House race. As my colleague Andrea Castillo reported, this whiplashing shift was the result of the rising cost of living, inflation and the Trump administration’s heavy-handed and indiscriminate immigration enforcement; Pro Publica found that more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by immigration agents last year.
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For many Latinos, the midterms were about pocketbook issues and retribution.
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“Trump went against us,” said Benny Melendez, a voter in South Texas who spoke to the Guardian. “He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That’s what happened.”
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Some of this damage was self-inflicted. Republicans in Texas redrew the state’s congressional map last year in hopes of picking up five extra seats in the midterms, thinking their gains with Latino voters were permanent; they were not. They lost four of those races.
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California Democrats countered with their own gerrymander, which proved to be successful. Five Republican seats were wiped out in the Golden State, including Rep. David Valadao’s district in the Central Valley. Come January, CA-22 will be repped by progressive Randy Villegas.
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And while Democrats should feel good about how they performed with Latinos in the midterms, they mustn’t get comfortable.
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“It’s not a realignment, it’s a de-alignment,” political consultant Mike Madrid told my colleague Carlos De Loera two weeks ago. “Latinos are completely moving away from both parties and that’s what’s created this dramatic swing of 25 points towards Trump in four years and then massive swings back.”
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For decades, Democrats took Latinos for granted, thinking that demography was destiny. They weren’t entirely wrong. It’s just that said destiny belongs to us, not them.
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They can’t afford to repeat that mistake.
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(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
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Puro pinche 956 cuh!
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Is any part of the country having a better moment than the Rio Grande Valley? The South Texas borderland region, my ancestral home, played a key role in upending the political reality of the state.
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Bobby Pulido, the recently retired Tejano star best known for a song inspired by the Nora Ephron rom-com classic “Sleepless in Seattle” (yes, really), trounced Republican incumbent Rep. Monica De La Cruz by more than 20 points in the race for Texas’ 15th Congressional District, one of the five gerrymandered seats the GOP was hoping to pick up.
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The four predominantly Latino counties that make up the RGV — Cameron, Starr, Hidalgo and Willacy — heavily favored James Talarico, who picked up at least 65% of the vote in those counties on his way to becoming the first Democratic senator from Texas since 1988.
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And then there’s hometown girl Gina Hinojosa, the long-shot candidate who ended Greg Abbott’s 12-year run as Texas governor — a reign of terror in which more than 100,000 migrants were bused to liberal cities as a political stunt and he spread virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric just days before the 2019 El Paso massacre.
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“I am a daughter of the Rio Grande Valley, where the people embody the work ethic and values of our great state,” Hinojosa said in her victory speech. “Where no one would have imagined that one day a little girl from the RGV would stand before you here as the next governor of the greatest state — Texas.”
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Based on my informal polling of friends and family, RGVers are ecstatic. For some, it goes beyond regional pride.
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“When Gina thinks about and talks about [the RGV], she is not going to be thinking of it as an abstraction or as a place for photo ops with a bulletproof vest on a boat with the Border Patrol,” said Charlie Vela, a multimedia artist from Edinburg, Texas.
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He added that Hinojosa being from the region would matter when it came to her policymaking.
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“It’s literally a place she knows and a place where people she cares about live,” he said.
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It also feels particularly poetic that Hinojosa, who campaigned on a populist message of affordability and better schools, hails from Brownsville, Texas — the very place that Elon Musk is turning into a SpaceX company town.
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“The RGV is one of the most important looking glasses into the futures of the United States,” said Jonathan Leal, author of the new book, “Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape,” and an assistant professor of English at USC. “For years, that future has been dominated by militarization, astrocapitalism and tech salvation stories. But other local ideas have always been in the mix — and the recent election has only made that clear. The RGV is not a political prop; it is a harbinger, and its people are visionary.”
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Indeed.
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L.A. Mayoral Race
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Politics and immigration
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Arts and entertainment
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