Along the banks of the Rio Grande River lies Starr County, Texas, a key to understanding the political realignment that sent Donald Trump back to the White House. Both the most Hispanic county in the nation and one of the poorest, Starr was also once one of the most resoundingly Democratic; Barack Obama won it by 73 points in 2012. In 2020, the county swung harder rightward than any other county in the U.S., by 55 points. And in 2024, it voted Republican for the first time in 132 years: Trump was on top by 16 points.
Two years before, on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, I decided to pay Starr County a visit. As someone who’s worked in professional politics for more than two decades, most recently as a pollster studying realignment, I expected to see a pitched two-party fight in this newly minted political battleground.
In Rio Grande City, the county seat, I instead found a politics more parochial than anywhere else I’ve visited in America: Elections for the school board capture the public’s attention far more than elections for governor or Congress. And this parochialism is a big part of the reason Starr County’s politics shifted so far so fast.
Politics throughout much of the country used to be like Starr County’s, a patchwork of localized traditions only tangentially connected to voters’ ideological leanings. In many cases defined by ethnicity and religion, these “ancestral” local party attachments produced quirky and random results—a Democratic West Virginia, a Republican Vermont. And although Hispanics had been a solidly Democratic group until recently, the one-party nature of Democratic rule along the Rio Grande Valley was an outlier—especially in relation to other Texas regions with large concentrations of Hispanic residents, who were always a competitive voting bloc.
The realignments of recent years—the midwestern white working class toward Trump’s GOP and the suburbs toward the Democrats—can be understood as the process of ideological and education sorting coming for groups that were the most out of place in the new political realm: rich suburban Republicans and culturally conservative working-class Democrats. In 2020 and 2024, this realignment came for the nonwhite voters once at the center of Barack Obama’s coalition, especially working-class Hispanics, and most especially those in the rural outskirts of the Rio Grande Valley.
Starr County’s tradition of machine politics, manifest in an unusually strong preoccupation with local elections, marked a place ripe for a sudden political shift. Not unlike the Democratic majorities in the big cities of mid-century, which continue at some level into the present day, political dominance in the region was built not through allegiance to liberal ideals but through political machines that delivered tangible benefits and shaped the political identity of new immigrant groups. This is evident in polling today showing that nonwhite Democrats are much more moderate and conservative than their white counterparts. For a time, ideological differences were subsumed to the work of advancing group interests through machine politics. But in an era of declining party organization and an emptying out of majority-minority cities in favor of more integrated suburbs, the tide of ideological voting could be held at bay for only so long. Once it poured in, America shifted into a new era of politics, from one forged by social connections at the neighborhood level to today’s cultural and ideological polarization, where you vote Republican if you have conservative cultural beliefs, regardless of race.
For Black voters, voting for Democrats as an act of group solidarity didn’t require urban machines like Tammany Hall. A Republican Party that was viewed as leading the backlash to civil rights was summarily dismissed—and those who strayed were subject to social sanction. In South Texas, the rationale revolved around class; the Democrats were viewed simply as the party that would do right by the poor.
As these old partisan ties begin to weaken, it’s worth remembering that something similar has happened before, when the white working class’s status as the bulwark of the old Democratic Party began to unravel in the 1960s. That was also a time of rapid social change, when a politics once focused on meeting the material needs of the working class instead started to revolve around questions more abstract: of war and peace, of race and sex. And on key points, the working class—meaning the white working class early on and a more diverse group today—was not on board with the Democrats’ growing cultural liberalism.
The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from winning 81 percent of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to just 58 percent in 2024. And these voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.
This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.
Starr County was one of the last holdouts from ideological sorting, and I could feel the tension between new and old-school politics when I visited. The early- voting centers I visited in the Rio Grande Valley’s urban areas were plastered with signs for congressional races that were competitive for the first time in generations. But the farther I ventured out into rural areas—places such as Starr County—the less voters seemed to care about national races. Here, the focus was close to home, and the smiling faces of school-board and county-office candidates covered nearly every available public surface.
From his office—a clubhouse on the main drag in Rio Grande City—Ross Barrera led the nascent county Republican organization. When we met, I asked him why local elections here seemed to garner such outsize attention.
His answer helped me solve a piece of the puzzle of Starr County’s sudden political shift.
Rio Grande City is run not so much by parties, Barrera explained, but by rival factions with a strong resemblance to the machines of old. School-board elections are officially nonpartisan, but the voting is organized around competing candidate slates. The slates are like parallel political parties, but able to endorse across party lines for partisan races. These factional operations are far more sophisticated than the formal party structures. Candidates for the statehouse in Austin will simply pay these slates to serve as their get-out-the-vote operation, forgoing traditional campaign activity.
Why do the slates matter so much? In many of the poorest counties in the nation, with little private industry, the No. 1 employer is the local school district. And whoever wins the school-board elections decides who gets the relatively well-paying patronage jobs that come with those seats. That means the school-board races are uniquely high-stakes; incumbents will go to extreme lengths to safeguard their power.
The area outside the county courthouse where people were already casting their ballots was abuzz with activity from the candidate slates. Each had its own tent where volunteers were cooking up chicken dishes for voters passing by. Which tent a voter went to and spent time at signaled their loyalty. Confrontations between the two camps were not uncommon.
In the Rio Grande Valley, whom you vote for is a secret, but the list of who voted is scrutinized by political bosses doling out jobs. The same goes for primary elections, when your choice to pull a Democratic or Republican ballot is public. In 2018, all but 13 voters countywide who participated in the primary pulled a Democratic ballot. One Republican told me he was once handed a Democratic ballot in the primary—and was refused a Republican ballot when he requested one. Because all of the local officials were Democrats and general elections were frequently uncontested, people saw no point voting in the Republican primary.
Elections in this part of the state had not been free in the fullest sense of the word, unfolding in an atmosphere of persistent surveillance. After the 2012 elections in the nearby town of Donna, several area campaign workers, known locally as politiqueras, pleaded guilty for bribing voters with cash and dime bags of cocaine. South Texas has a long history of this kind of activity, going back to the notorious political boss George Parr, who, in 1948, manufactured the votes that put Lyndon B. Johnson in the Senate.
Although national politics was something of an afterthought, the region’s default was enduring loyalty to a Democratic Party known simply as a tribune for the region’s poor. Republicans, meanwhile, were dismissed as the party of the white person and the rich, something Barrera called “our own form of racism.” As McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos, a Republican elected in 2021, explained it to me, at the dinner table growing up, he would hear about the necessity of voting for the Democrats as the “party of the poor.” His response: “We don’t have to be poor.”
Something seemed to break in 2020. That pandemic year, candidates had to improvise new ways to reach voters. Barrera recalls locals’ reactions when a “Trump train”—a caravan of cars and trucks flying Trump flags—one day drove down the main county highway. People emerged quietly from their homes to witness the spectacle. And then, much to Barrera’s surprise, they started applauding.
This small display was an early warning of the political sea change that would take Trump from winning 19 percent of the county’s vote in 2016 to 58 percent in 2024. Although Trump made gains across the country with Hispanic voters, a shift of this magnitude signals something much bigger than changes in policy or positioning; it’s a preference cascade that comes about when social norms dictating group loyalty to a single party start to crumble. The Republican Party did not somehow persuade people to switch their votes with new policy positions. In areas where political machines long reigned supreme, like Starr County and the South Bronx, Republicans needed to switch votes by showing voters that their neighbors were switching as well. Two previous cycles of working-class shifts, combined with Trump campaigning in urban areas and in media popular with young nonwhite men, appeared to do the trick.
Beyond South Texas, the Democratic Party in America’s old industrial cities was built by political machines that delivered tangible benefits to working-class and immigrant voters, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. One day in the life of George Washington Plunkitt, the famed Tammany Hall district leader in New York, revealed the work it took to secure votes: At 2 a.m., he aroused from sleep to bail out a saloon keeper; at 6 a.m., he awakened to the sound of fire trucks and rose to give assistance and arrange housing for those affected; at 8:30 a.m., he went to the courthouse and secured the release of several “drunks”; at 9 a.m., he paid the rent for a poor family about to be evicted; at 11 a.m., he met with four men seeking employment and “succeeded in each case”; at 3 p.m., he attended the funerals of constituents; at 7 p.m., he presided over a district meeting; at 8 p.m., he attended a church fair and took the men out for a drink after; at 9 p.m., he was back at the office, attending to various constituent matters; at 10:30 p.m., he attended a Jewish wedding.
Today, machine politics are not held in high esteem. But they did have a way of finding overlooked voting blocs and putting them under protection. Other such examples of political organization and advocacy are remembered more fondly, such as the migration of Black voters into the Democratic Party following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which cemented a more than 9-to-1 Democratic advantage in many Black neighborhoods. But more recently, this political solidarity has been held together by social forces—the expectation by other Black Americans that their friends and neighbors will support Democrats—than by an ideological affinity for the party, as documented in the political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s book, Steadfast Democrats.
In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous. Yes, the particular appeal with which Trump was able to attract Hispanics and young Black men may last for only an election cycle or two, but the fact that those communities are realigning to a party that matches their views on issues, particularly on cultural issues such as gender, means that many are likely to stick around.
A populist shift in the form of Donald Trump’s larger-than-life persona was enough to make many nonwhite voters shed decades-long partisan loyalties. Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party, they aren’t going back.
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