Headline Roundup • June 16th, 2022
What Does a Republican Victory in South Texas Mean for Hispanic Voters in 2022?
2022 Elections,Texas,Mexico,Elections,Hispanics,Latinos,Politics,US House,US Congress,Republican Party
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Political media speculated on the partisan leanings of Hispanic voters after a Latina Republican won a House seat in South Texas’ deep-blue Rio Grande Valley region.
Mayra Flores, who will become the first Mexican-born congresswoman, defeated Democrat Dan Sanchez and two other candidates in Tuesday’s special election with 50.1% of the vote. She will serve until January to finish the term of former Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela, who resigned in March to join a lobbying firm. Flores will also defend the seat against Democrat Vicente Gonzalez Jr. in the 2022 midterm elections.
“The Democrat Party has been in control here in South Texas for over 100 years and feel entitled to our vote,” Flores told Fox News (Right bias) on Wednesday, adding, “we sent a strong message to Democrat Party that you have to get to work. If not, you’re going to get voted out.”
Coverage across the spectrum speculated on what Flores’ victory meant for Hispanic voters nationwide. Coverage from the right often portrayed the election as spelling “doom” for Democrats in November; coverage from the left was often more mixed, although some headlines said Democrats were venting their “fury.” Update 6/16/22 7:41 p.m. ET: Previous version said Flores was the first Mexican-born member of Congress; there have been Mexican-born congressmen, such as Rep. Chuy García (D-Ill.)
Featured Coverage of this Story
Associated Press/Eric Gay
Republicans are holding up Mayra Flores’s win in the special election for Texas’ 34th Congressional District Tuesday as the latest sign Hispanic voters are shifting toward the GOP and hoping her win is the first of many this year for Republicans running in heavily-Latino districts.
But the race also showed Republicans may need to make large investments to capture such seats, and the unusual nature of a low-turnout special election using district lines that will change in just a few months makes it difficult to say if the contest was a...
REUTERS/Veronica G. Cardenas
After a redistricting proposal made Texas’ 34th Congressional District more blue last fall, the top Republican candidate for the seat, Mayra Flores, traveled to the state Capitol in Austin to plead with lawmakers to reconsider.
It seemed, she said, that despite all the new Republican talk about competing in South Texas, the GOP map-drawers were “sending the message of not really caring about” voters there, depriving them of a competitive district.
But lawmakers were unswayed and eventually passed a map that transformed the 34th District from one that President Joe...
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
To the extent that Democrats are still banking on Latino voters to carry them to durable national majorities, the result in Tuesday’s special election in the Texas 34th congressional district should be an alarm bell. Joe Biden carried TX-34 by four points in 2020; Filemon Vela, the incumbent Democratic congressman, won it by 13.6. But Vela resigned to work for a lobbying firm in March, triggering a special election to finish out his term — and this time, voters in the South Texas district opted for the Republican candidate by more than seven and...
