Commentary
Mayra Flores’s victory in the Texas-34 special congressional election attracted a lot of attention, and deservedly so.
The rapid movement of Mexican Americans in Texas, and Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans in Florida, to the Republican Party has shaken the left to its core, who for years have confidently pinned their future political hopes on demographic destiny and the idea that Hispanic voters would be a permanent fixture of their electoral base. That base appears to be slipping away, though what happens from here is still very much up in the air.
For all her dynamism and work ethic, Flores did not achieve victory on her own. She benefited from a growing shift, which also manifested itself in the 2021 election of a Republican mayor for McAllen, Texas—a supermajority-Hispanic border city within a historic Democratic stronghold—and the by-now famous rightward shift of south Texas Mexican Americans in the 2020 presidential race. Nevertheless, Flores’s victory was a clear win for the Republicans. Her “God, Family, Country” slogan represented everything anathema to the modern left. It was a full repudiation of the woke anti-capitalist ideology that has become a secular religion among liberals….