GOP cheers results in Texas races as promising sign for midterm elections

.

Republican victories in Texas local races on Saturday have buoyed GOP hopes for the future in a state that Democrats have targeted as fertile ground in which to grow their support.

A Republican candidate, Mattie Parker, held off a strong challenge from Democrat Deborah Peoples in the race for Fort Worth mayor. Peoples boasted endorsements from Democrats with national profiles, such as Beto O’Rourke and Housing Secretary Julian Castro, but still fell roughly 8 points short of wresting control of the city away from the GOP.

In Arlington, a suburb of Fort Worth, some on the Right cheered the election of a pro-police mayoral candidate, Jim Ross, as a victory for conservative politics in the type of suburban area that has trended away from Republicans in recent years. Municipal elections in Texas are nonpartisan, meaning candidates do not run with their party affiliations listed on the ballots.

A GOP victory in the mayoral race in the border town of McAllen, Texas, drew the most applause from Republicans after their candidate, Javier Villalobos, notched an unexpected but narrow victory over Democrat Veronica Whitacre. Villalobos won by roughly 200 votes.

REPUBLICAN WINS MAYORAL RACE IN MAJORITY-HISPANIC MCALLEN, TEXAS

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said the McAllen result shows the GOP it has a chance to win in a Democratic region if it puts up quality candidates.

“South Texas, while historically blue, does provide opportunities for Republicans in large part because the population, while traditionally voting Democratic, is relatively conservative in terms of its policy preferences,” Jones told the Washington Examiner.

“We see that in the Texas Legislature,” Jones added. “The most centrist, or nonliberal, Democrats are all from South Texas to a person.”

McAllen is situated in deep-blue Hidalgo County, which Hillary Clinton carried by 40 points in 2016.

But the region has been slipping away from Democrats in the past few cycles. While President Joe Biden won Hidalgo County by 17 points in 2020, the Democrat representing that region in Congress saw his support drop sharply between the 2018 midterm elections and last year’s election.

Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez held on to his seat in Texas’s 15th District, a Democratic stronghold that encompasses Hidalgo County and several others in the Rio Grande Valley, by less than 3 points in November.

But in 2018, he won the district by more than 20 points and carried it by roughly the same wide margin in 2016.

Nathan Brand, a Republican National Committee spokesman, attributed Villalobos’s victory to the “real world ramifications” of Biden’s handling of the border crisis.

Other Republicans framed the win as another sign of the party’s improving performance among Hispanic voters, given McAllen’s heavily Hispanic population.

While Biden and Democrats retained the majority of the Latino vote in 2020, former President Donald Trump made inroads with those voters in many places, bettering his 2016 performance with Latinos by 9 points.

In Fort Worth, rather than tout an electoral gain, Republicans celebrated holding on to the state’s fifth-largest city, which Democrats had hoped to run after its popular GOP mayor, Betsy Price, decided not to seek reelection after a decade in office.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Jones said Peoples ran a “hyperpartisan” campaign backed by national liberal groups, which ultimately proved unsuccessful against a candidate, Parker, who ran a relatively centrist race.

“If you’re a Texas Republican, you can look at Forth Worth, and the glass-half-full [view] is, you won and defeated Peoples despite the fact that Democrats went all out to try to flip that seat,” Jones said. “The glass-half-empty [view] is, Mattie Parker’s advantage over Peoples of 6% was notably lower than Betsy Price’s advantage over her in 2019.”

While Parker’s ultimate margin appeared closer to 8%, her victory was indeed more narrow than Price’s over the same opponent, Peoples, in 2019. Price won reelection by nearly 14 points in the last mayoral cycle, which could lead to some concerns that Democrats are making gains in the city.

Related Content

Related Content