After Years of Victory Laps, the GOP Has Actually Won a Big South Texas Race

When Mayra Flores won a special congressional election Tuesday, she made history in more than one way. In Washington, D.C., she’ll be the first woman born in Mexico to serve as a Republican in Congress. She’s also helped the GOP secure its most-desired dream for this year in South Texas: for the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican will represent the Rio Grande Valley in Congress.

The GOP has spent much of the last year trumpeting its ascendance in South Texas, ever since Donald Trump’s shocking success in the counties that stretch from Laredo all the way down the Rio Grande Valley to the Gulf. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump improved his performance in some of these counties, traditionally Democratic strongholds, by more than 50 percent. But it was hard to know whether voters were actually shifting to the right or whether the forty-fifth president was simply a once-in-a-generation candidate. Even with his success on the top of the ballot, not a single GOP candidate won a congressional race in South Texas in 2020.

Flores put the question to rest on Tuesday. For a GOP desperate to prove it’s not simply the party of non-Hispanic white people, her win in Texas’s Thirty-fourth Congressional District, which spans from Brownsville up the Gulf Coast all the way to the San Antonio exurbs, is of great significance.

But Flores’s win comes with a massive asterisk: in all likelihood, she’ll serve in Congress for only seven months. This was a special election, triggered because of incumbent congressman Filemon Vela’s bumbling retirement. After easily defeating a Republican challenger and winning another term in the Thirty-fourth in 2020, the Democratic congressman announced in 2021 that he would retire after the midterms. That decision likely wasn’t motivated by fear he would lose his seat. During Republican-led redistricting in Texas, the GOP had worked to create a conservative-friendly district in South Texas, but this only made Vela’s seat safer. Targeting the neighboring Fifteenth district, Republicans pulled Democratic voters out of that district and packed them into the Thirty-fourth, turning Vela’s district from one that Biden won by four points to one he would have won by more than sixteen.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/mayra-flores-wins-republicans-south-texas/