The Indifferent and the Defiant
Battered by poverty and coronavirus, South Texas should have been deep blue turf for Joe Biden. It wasn’t. But in the Rio Grande Valley, the story is less about growing conservatism than about the rise of nonvoting — and despair.
The town of Roma in Starr County, South Texas. (CMH/Flickr)
In the weeks following the presidential election, pundits puzzled over the Democratic Party’s miserable performance in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, where the poverty rate is double that of the state as a whole.
These four counties along the US-Mexico border had gone blue in every presidential election since 1972. They did this time, too — but barely. The Democrats’ numbers looked like they’d been cratered by a meteor.
The arresting trend prompted a national conversation about the mindset of the average Latino Hillary-Clinton-to-Donald-Trump voter in South Texas and what it suggests about the future of the nation’s partisan alignment. Predictably, however, this conversation elided the most decisive voting bloc: those who don’t vote at all.
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