.KPaoletta reports on how the border went MAGA — and how control of Congress may depend on the Democrats’ ability to adjust to reality
Photo-Illustration: Intellligencer/GettyThe Democrats have a really, really big Latino problem.” It was the morning after Mexico-born Republican Mayra Flores won the June special election for a congressional seat in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and longtime conservative strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project Mike Madrid was incensed by the seeming inattention of Democrats to one of the nation’s fastest-growing demographics.
Much of the contemporary political culture of the borderlands is rooted in the profound transformation of the region that began in the 1990s with the passage of NAFTA, which paved the way for hundreds of billions of goods to move freely between the United States and Mexico, and accelerated after the 9/11 attacks, which ushered in an unprecedented tightening of the border for everyday people.
Despite the shock of Flores’s victory, national Democrats were quick to dismiss the result as an aberration.
Although Flores and Ciscomani have been equally explicit in invoking their humble upbringings in their campaigns, Ciscomani’s spin on the theme is tailored less to suggest “he’s one of us” than “he’s an immigrant who made good” — a reasonable distinction, given that Arizona’s sixth district is only 17 percent Hispanic compared to the 85 percent Hispanic TX-34.
Both here and in more rural corners of the district, Engel says her background in environmental law has made it possible to bridge the gap between the big city and the borderlands. “Just last Friday we were at the farm bureau dinner here in Cochise County,” Engel said when I met with her in Sierra Vista. There, a pepper farmer expressed his anxiety about the dropping water table on his property, a microcosm of the regional aridification being driven by the climate crisis.
This election cycle, those issues are again at the fore of the race for New Mexico’s second district, where the Republican incumbent, the former realtor Yvette Herrell, is engaged in a daunting fight for reelection.
However enticing law-and-order appeals may seem, it’s unclear how much ground Republicans can gain if they, like their counterparts elsewhere, remain trapped in an echo chamber of election denial. In June, officials in New Mexico’s Otero County — including Couy Griffin, the co-founder of a group called Cowboys for Trump — made national headlines when they refused to certify the results of a local primary election because it was conducted on Dominion voting machines.
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