Republicans made deep inroads among Hispanic voters Tuesday, including in El Paso, where they had their best results in decades – though fell short of winning any races.
Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win more than 40% of the El Paso County vote since George W. Bush in 2004. Republican candidates for district attorney and sheriff also surpassed 40% of the vote, something no local GOP candidate had done in a countywide race in 24 years.
Jorge Gonzalez, the chair of the El Paso County Republican Party, hasn’t responded to requests for comment from El Paso Matters. But in a post on Facebook early Wednesday, the local party called Tuesday’s election results “meaningful and transformative.”
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, who received less than 60% of the vote for the first time in four campaigns for Congress, saw the results as a wakeup call for her and other Democrats in El Paso.
Escobar, who served as national co-chair of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and who has had several Democratic leadership roles during her time in the House, said she’s going to step away from her national roles to focus more on El Paso.
“I’m not going to be running for leadership again. I’m going to be focused on far more voter engagement and voter registration here locally. So, I am pivoting my efforts away from leadership on Capitol Hill to do some more work and investment in the community,” Escobar said.
The El Paso results were part of a broader pattern that saw Republicans make significant inroads with Hispanic voters across the country. Trump won about 45% of Hispanic voters nationally, according to exit polls, up from 32% in 2020.
El Paso was the only populous county on the Texas-Mexico border to support the Democratic ticket – an outcome that would have been unimaginable for Democrats a decade ago.
“It could be that we’re seeing what happened in the (Rio Grande) Valley last election cycle, that there are Latinos who are connecting on immigration, in particular, as an issue and are seeing the Republican position, more sympathetic to the idea of closing out new immigrants, and also reaffirming or kind of acknowledging the Latinos that are here did it the quote, unquote, the right way,” said Richard Pineda, chair of the communications department at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Trump struggled all along the Texas-Mexico border – particularly in more populated areas like El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo – in 2016. But in 2020, he sharply increased his support in border areas other than El Paso. In 2024, he won a majority of the vote in the 13 border counties east of El Paso.
Trump’s vote share in El Paso this year – 41.7% – is similar to his vote share in other Texas border counties four years ago.
The number of El Paso County voters this year – about 253,000 – was less than half of registered voters. El Paso exceeded 50% turnout of registered voters in 2016 and 2020, but had fallen below that mark each election from 1996 to 2012.
Why did Hispanics surge to the GOP?
El Paso County Republicans said Democratic leaders were contemptuous of conservative voters.
Escobar has spent the past several months knocking on voters’ doors in El Paso and in the battleground states, where she targeted Hispanic voters for the Harris campaign. She said a huge challenge has been the amount of misinformation about crime, the economy and immigration that shaped voter attitudes.
She said voters told her crime was up nationally, the economy was in a recession and a large number of undocumented immigrants were dangerous criminals – all claims not supported by data.
She said she was stunned when talking to a young man in Atlanta, who told her he was supporting Trump. His mother, an undocumented immigrant, stood nearby.
“I asked him, ‘You do realize Donald Trump wants to deport your mom?’ And then he said, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s who Donald Trump is talking about. He’s talking about those criminals that came from the prisons and the asylums,’” Escobar said.
During the campaign, Trump pledged the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, focusing on criminals but also aiming to send millions back to their home countries.
Although she said a flood of misinformation made it difficult for Democrats to connect with voters, she said the party – nationally and in El Paso – needs to identify mistakes they’ve made that cost them voters.
“I have already begun the postmortem in my head about everything. I never think that a losing candidate or a losing party has zero to do with the loss,” Escobar said.
In her third race against Escobar, Republican Irene Armendariz-Jackson won 40% of the vote after receiving 36.5% in 2022 and 35.3% in 2020. It was the first time in 30 years that a Republican candidate topped 40% in the 16th Congressional District.
Escobar said she expects national Republicans, who have invested heavily in Rio Grande Valley congressional districts in the last two elections, to target her in 2026.
“I will likely have a far better Republican opponent next time,” she said.
GOP improves in other local races
Republicans have struggled to win in El Paso for more than a century, even after the party became dominant in Texas in the 1990s. The last time a Republican won a countywide election in El Paso was in 1982, when Ward Koehler won a district judgeship against a Democratic opponent who was best known for representing adult entertainment businesses.
The last Republican to win more than 40% of the vote in a countywide race was Pat O’Rourke, who got 42% in a 1998 race for county judge against Democrat Dolores Briones. O’Rourke was a former county judge and former Democrat. His son, Beto, later represented El Paso in Congress as a Democrat.
On Tuesday, District Attorney Bill Hicks – who was appointed by fellow Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after Democrat Yvonne Rosales resigned in 2022 – won 43% of the vote in falling to Democrat James Montoya. And GOP sheriff candidate Minerva Torres Shelton received 41% of the vote in losing to Democrat Oscar Ugarte.
Republicans made gains in a handful of local elections they contested despite receiving little financial support from state and national parties.
UTEP’s Pineda said county Republicans, who’ve had fractured leadership over the years, will have to unify to continue making inroads in a traditionally Democratic county.
“I think the lesson to be learned here is they have to be more cohesive across their candidates. And I think if they worked better together and had some unified leadership that they may actually be able to build on some of these gains,” he said.
El Paso Republicans historically haven’t fielded candidates for most partisan local races, conceding the elections to Democrats. This year, no El Paso Republican ran for a county or district judgeship or state Legislature.
The only partisan offices with an El Paso Republican candidate in 2024 were Congress, district attorney, sheriff, one county commissioner seat and one constable race. Republicans in other border counties have increased the number of candidates in local races as they’ve won increasing shares of the vote.
Escobar criticized El Paso Democratic officials for not supporting the party in elections. She didn’t mention anyone by name.
“I am going to be appealing to our state (legislative) delegation, the judges, all of our locally elected Democrats, to begin investing in the Democratic Party, meaning giving money to the local party, but also assisting us with voter registration, voter engagement, and with get-out-the-vote at election time. So we need a lot more hands on deck, basically, is what I’m saying. And there are too many folks who have felt too comfortably about it,” she said.
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