Dale Lynn Carruthers had always been a Democrat.
Growing up in the small, predominantly Hispanic city of Sanderson near the border in West Texas, everyone she knew belonged to the party, which had long been dominant in the region. So when she ran for a seat on the Terrell County Commissioners Court for the first time in 2018, there was no question that she’d do so as a Democrat.
But after she became county judge in 2021, things started to change. President Joe Biden took office and promised to overturn many of Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies. At the same time, residents living in Terrell County, which has a population of less than 1,000, started reporting a significant increase in the number of migrants coming through the rough terrain.
Ranchers complained that large groups of migrants were entering through their border-adjacent land, cutting high fences, which risked setting their animals loose, damaging the water lines that supply their vast ranches in a semi-arid climate and making it harder for them to tend to their livestock.
On her family’s 17,000-acre ranch, Carruthers saw the same problems. Visitors who came to hunt wild game started stumbling upon the bodies of migrants who apparently died of heat while making the journey. One day, her husband was outside feeding the animals when he saw state police arresting a group of 49 migrants. They worried about the safety of their family.
But Democrats nationally weren’t talking about the border issues her community was experiencing firsthand. They were critical of efforts led by Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott to build a border wall and increase the presence of law enforcement. Democrats, Carruthers said, weren’t listening. So she switched parties.
And so did many others. The county’s clerk and treasurer also became Republicans, as have most of the elected officials in county government.
“Seeing the lack of support from the federal government has really impacted the community and they’re looking and leaning towards the Republican Party,” Carruthers said.
In 2014, the percentage of registered voters casting ballots in the Republican primary in Terrell County was 12%. By 2022, that percentage had more than doubled — with 31% of the county’s registered voters casting ballots in the GOP primary compared to 10% in the Democratic primary. It was the first time in at least eight years that Republicans voting in the Terrell County primary outnumbered Democrats.
The shift in allegiance is being replicated across the Texas-Mexico border and is encouraging for Republicans who are campaigning on border security and making a big push to win over Hispanic voters. It is also concerning for Democrats who have long held sway in these border and South Texas communities.
In 15 counties along the Texas-Mexico border, participation in Republican primaries has grown steadily since 2014. That year, 23,243 voters participated in a Republican primary, accounting for about 2% of voters. This year, 54,085 voters cast ballots in the GOP primary, making up 4% of voters.
While Democrats voting in primaries still far outnumber Republicans in those counties, the trendline is moving in the opposite direction. In 2014, more than 122,000 people turned out for a Democratic primary in border counties, accounting for 11% of voters. But after nearly 214,000 voters cast ballots in the 2020 Democratic primary, that number fell to 131,189 this year, making up less than 10% of voters in the region.
Juanita Martinez, the Democratic Party chair in Maverick County, which is 95% Hispanic, acknowledged the Republican Party has grown rapidly in her area in recent years and is mounting vociferous challenges to established Democrats in her South Texas community. Only one candidate running for a county office had run as a Republican in Maverick since 2016. But this year, the GOP has mustered eight candidates for local office.
Still, Martinez believes that most of the area’s voters are still with Democrats, and the local party is gearing up to defend their political offices against the GOP’s push.
“Everybody knows the Republicans have been targeting the border,” Martinez told a recent meeting of volunteers preparing for a Beto O’Rourke event in the county seat of Eagle Pass. “We’re mostly a Democratic community, so we have to work it, work it, work it. No way in hell can we ever let even one Republican get into office. That’s our main objective: Keep Maverick County blue.”
A Republican rise
A few years ago, a Republican candidate courting votes in South Texas or along the border was a rare sight. But bolstered by Trump’s better-than-expected performance in heavily Hispanic regions of South Texas in 2016 and 2020, the GOP began to target those voters. Border security and immigration made up a big part of the Republican messaging, but so were other social issues like opposition to abortion and support for gun rights.
At the top of the ticket, Abbott, who has long pursued Hispanic voters in the area, has homed in on South Texas as a priority of his campaign efforts. In April, speaking before the Texas Latino Conservatives luncheon while in San Antonio, Abbott boldly declared that he would win the Hispanic vote over Democrat Beto O’Rourke.
In 2020, Republican Monica De La Cruz came within 3 percentage points of unseating Democratic congressman Vicente Gonzalez in Congressional District 15, a heavily Hispanic border district that includes McAllen. This year, De La Cruz is running for the same seat after Gonzalez was drawn out of the district and moved over to neighboring District 34. There, he will compete against another conservative Latina, Mayra Flores, who is the incumbent congresswoman after winning a special election this year to replace Democrat Filemon Vela, who had resigned before the end of his term.
Republicans are also running Cassy Garcia, a former staffer for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, in Laredo-based District 28 against longtime Democrat incumbent Henry Cuellar.
The Republican push has also trickled down to the local level. In places like Maverick County, the local GOP was almost nonexistent a few years ago. Martinez said poll workers used to joke on Election Day about whether all the Republicans in their precincts had voted yet.
“They would name them on one hand,” Martinez said. “Usually, in a county like ours, if you were running and you won the [Democratic] primary, that was it, you won. Because there were no Republicans.”
But Democrats aren’t laughing this year. Fueled by financial support from Republican groups like Project Red Texas, which is focused on electing Republicans to local government, the Maverick County GOP’s candidates are well funded, putting up election signs at some of the most prominent intersections in Eagle Pass. At some intersections, posters for GOP candidates stand alone without any sign from their Democratic counterparts with less than two months until Election Day.
Republicans are also competing for local elections in nearby counties like Val Verde and Dimmit, and in Starr County in the Rio Grande Valley.
Starr County has shown other troubling signs for Democrats. Last year, state Rep. Ryan Guillen, who had served in the statehouse for 19 years as a conservative Democrat, switched to the GOP. Guillen cited the Democratic Party’s refusal to engage on border security and its impact on oil and gas jobs in his district as reasons for his change.
In Eagle Pass, a city of about 30,000, trucks sport bumper stickers that read “I am the elephant in the room” with pictures of the GOP’s mascot and “Let’s Go Brandon,” a political slogan that’s used by Republicans to substitute for a profane insult to Biden. One house along a main thoroughfare in town boasts a large “Vote Trump, End abortion” sign even though the former president hasn’t declared he’s running for reelection.
Even those shows of support are signs of the GOP’s growth, said Alfredo “Freddy” Arellano III, a local party activist. In 2018, when former state Sen. Pete Flores was running in a special election that he would eventually win, voters would not put campaign signs in their yards for fear of being ostracized for being Republicans. But since 2020, when Arellano served as the chair of the local GOP and organized caravans of trucks called “Trump trains” to show support for the former president, interest in the party has gone up.
“We went from nobody wanting a sign for Sen. Flores to giving away over 500 for President Trump [in 2020],” Arellano said. “And, right now, with Abbott they sent 300 and they’re almost all gone.”
Many of the new Republicans in Maverick County are former Democrats who say the increase in migrants crossing through their region was a major factor in their decision to switch parties. In July, Eagle Pass’ region of the border, which stretches north to the city of Del Rio, reported about 50,000 apprehensions of migrants — 20,000 more than the number of people in the entire city of Eagle Pass.
Ana Gabriela Derbez, a candidate for justice of the peace, wears a red “Defend the Border” cap as she discusses how the region has seen a massive increase in migrant crossings over the last two years. She’s a former Democrat who voted twice for Barack Obama. But in recent years, she said she reconsidered her political leanings as Republicans have drawn her in with their views on guns, abortion and immigration.
Voters she talks to gripe about the use of taxpayer dollars to hold and process migrants caught by immigration officials and to transport them to other parts of the country, while local residents in the impoverished area struggle economically. The median household income in the county is $41,385, and 1 in 5 of its residents live in poverty.