Much has already been made about Republicans' 2020 over-performance among Hispanic voters in places like South Florida and the border region of Texas. The GOP is surging along the Rio Grande, with Latino voters increasingly open to backing the conservative party, with a new generation of Hispanic Republican leaders emerging. A local election outcome over the weekend may signal that last cycle wasn't a fluke, and that the trend Democrats fear is quite real. A Republican candidate has won the mayoral race in a border city that is overwhelmingly populated by Hispanics:
??ED Projection ?? We can now call that the GOP has flipped the mayorship of McAllen, TX. This is a somewhat surprising local result in this city of 140,000 that is almost 85% Hispanic.
— Elections Daily (@Elections_Daily) June 6, 2021
It's true that turnout was low and that the race was technically nonpartisan, so perhaps the lessons from this result shouldn't be over-applied. But it was very clear which party was supporting which candidate, and prevailing in an 85 percent Latino town should be a slam dunk for Democrats, based on the "demographics is destiny" argument regarding inevitable GOP extinction. Times may be a-changin':
Republicans celebrated Javier Villalobos' narrow win in the mayor's race in McAllen, Texas, on Saturday even though the race is technically nonpartisan. "Javier Villalobos is a proven leader who cares deeply about the people of the Rio Grande Valley. Congratulations on becoming the next Mayor of McAllen!" Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote on Facebook. Villalobos, an attorney, was appointed to the Prepaid Higher Education Tuition Board by Abbott in 2018 and is the former chair of the Hidalgo County GOP...Villalobos defeated opponent Veronica Whitacre by a little more than 200 votes in a runoff election, KVEO reported. He is currently a McAllen City Commissioner. "Let me start by thanking the voters, my team, my family [and] everyone who helped run this campaign. Thank you McAllen for trusting [and] believing in me. I promise to not let you down," Villalobos wrote on Facebook this weekend. He received praise from conservatives across the country. Hidalgo County, home of McAllen, went to President Biden by roughly 17 points in the 2020 election.
Hidalgo County went to Biden by 17 points last year, but it voted for Barack Obama by 39 points in 2008, as a point of comparison. There are myriad reasons why these areas of South Texas are growing more Republican and less Democratic, including cultural issues, but it's hard to imagine the Democrat-caused border crisis, which directly impacts McAllen in a major way, didn't play a role in this upset victory. As we mentioned in a recent post, US officials are aware of at least 40,000 "got-away" illegal immigrants entering the country in April alone, in addition to the nearly 180,000 unlawful migrants who were detained that month, a multi-decade record. The White House insists that the border is secure, and that there is no crisis. The administration's point person on immigration, Vice President Harris, has not visited the border since taking office, has shown no intention of visiting the border, and has not held a press conference since the issue was added to her portfolio months ago. Her team has been busy letting reporters know what technically is and isn't her job on this issue set, seeking to "distance" her from the mess of the administration's creation. The McAllen surprise comes as Democrats are reportedly growing anxious about losing ground among people of color:
Biggest weakness in political reporting these days: treating the views of activists as representative of the larger group they claim to represent:
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) June 6, 2021
"Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group."https://t.co/kLVgT0jd1M
A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left...In part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina...Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.
Republican "misinformation" apparently entails the successful strategy of tying the Democratic Party as a whole to its unpopular, loud, and influential left-wing. Appealing to voters' concerns about wokeness and weakness based on the words of prominent progressives isn't "misinformation;" it's effective politics. If Democrats want to take the sting out of those critiques, they can consistently denounce their own base's radical ideas. Are they capable of that? And on the subject of radical, unnerving, alienating wokeness, I'll leave you with this astounding piece of journalism published on Bari Weiss' Substack platform. This is where the Left's race obsessions and "critical race theory" can actually cross a line into lethality:
This is terrifying: https://t.co/3MRfOYaZMI
— Chloé S. Valdary ?? (@cvaldary) June 4, 2021
I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics. Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work. “People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar.
When doctors do speak out, shared another, “the reaction is savage. And you better be tenured and you better have very thick skin.” ...“Wokeness feels like an existential threat,” a doctor from the Northwest said. “In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems, but that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.” “Whole research areas are off-limits,” he said, adding that some of what is being published in the nation’s top journals is “shoddy as hell.” ... An ER doctor on the West Coast said he sees providers, particularly younger ones, applying antiracist principles in choosing how they allocate their time and which patients they choose to work with. “I've heard examples of Covid-19 cases in the emergency department where providers go, ‘I’m not going to go treat that white guy, I'm going to treat the person of color instead because whatever happened to the white guy, he probably deserves it.’” Some in medicine would like to see such race-conscious bias mandated on an institutional level...
Read the full, eye-opening piece, which reminds me of a Princeton mathematics professor's recent warning that basic STEM disciplines are being poisoned by woke, racialized ideology. As I tweeted over the weekend, "anyone who debates or refuses treating a patient based on skin color or political views is a dangerous bigot who has absolutely no place in medicine."
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