Alamo, Eat Your
Heart Out
Tuesday night cost Texas Republicans a Senate seat, the governor's office, and the 15th District.
THE LINE HOLDS — FOR NOW. San Antonio de Béxar, reimagined. The fight was over who was inside the walls. Illustration
The amuse-bouche
On the morning of March 6, 1836, after the Alamo fell, General Manuel Fernández Castrillón brought a handful of surviving defenders before General Antonio López de Santa Anna. Castrillón had taken them alive. Ramón Martínez Caro, Santa Anna's secretary during the campaign, wrote in an 1837 pamphlet that there were five, and that Castrillón "was severely reprimanded for not having killed them on the spot." The soldiers then stepped out of the ranks and killed the prisoners.
Lieutenant José Enrique de la Peña, who took part in the assault, put the number at seven. He wrote that David Crockett was one of them and that Santa Anna ordered the executions. Whether Crockett was in that group is still argued. That men were taken alive and then killed on Santa Anna's word is in the accounts of his own officers.
Three weeks later, at Goliad, the same thing happened at scale. Colonel James Fannin's command surrendered to General José de Urrea after the fight at Coleto Creek. The Texians understood they would be held as prisoners of war. Santa Anna ordered them shot under the Mexican Congress's decree of December 30, 1835, which treated armed foreigners in Texas as pirates. On Palm Sunday, March 27, more than three hundred were marched out of the presidio and executed.
At the Alamo, men surrendered to the officer in front of them, on his promise. The order that governed came from someone else. At Goliad, men surrendered on terms. The terms were not the policy.
The terms were not the policy.
The main course
Rio Grande Valley numbers were decisive early, while the national networks were still filling time with graphics. Hidalgo County, which had given Donald Trump a narrow majority in 2024, returned a Democratic Senate candidate with more than seventy percent of the vote. Cameron and Webb followed in the same range.
Nothing about the shift was gradual. It was a reversal of tens of points, in a single cycle, across a string of border counties that Republican strategists had treated two years earlier as proof of a durable expansion.
Texas supplied the clearest test of that claim. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate seat. The Associated Press called it at about 10:04 p.m. By Wednesday morning, with nearly all polling places reporting, Talarico held about 55 percent of the vote, according to the Texas Secretary of State. He is the first Democrat Texas has sent to the Senate since 1988.
Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott for governor. She will be the first Democratic governor since Ann Richards left office in 1995. She will also be the first Latina governor of Texas.
In the 15th District, Bobby Pulido beat Monica De La Cruz, who in 2022 had become the first Republican elected in that district since it was created in 1903. With 89 percent of the vote counted, Pulido led 61.6 to 38.4. Trump had carried the district's new lines by about 18 points.
Those new lines matter. The legislature redrew the map last summer on the premise that 2024 Latino support would hold. Three districts drawn on that premise were lost. The mapmakers treated one cycle's result as a new baseline. The midterm electorate treated it as contingent.
What the 2024 vote was
Conditions in 2024 made the shift contingent. Border crossings were high and visible. A presidential candidate could campaign on the promise of order without yet administering the policy that would follow.
Latino voters in South Texas and elsewhere responded in measurable numbers. Pew Research Center's survey of validated voters put Trump at 48 percent of Latino voters nationally, a 12-point gain over 2020. The numbers ran higher among men and in certain counties. The gains were real. They were also tied to those conditions.
Promise, then practice
Once the administration moved from promise to practice, the tie loosened.
Interior enforcement reached workplaces, long-term residents, and mixed-status households. It stopped being a spectacle at the line and became something that happened inside the same communities that had voted for it.
Pre-election polling already showed the distinction. For a substantial share of 2024 Trump voters, support for stopping new illegal entries did not extend to the removals that followed. Tuesday confirmed the distinction in the only form that counts. Counties that had flipped or narrowed for the Republican ticket returned Democratic margins of forty points or more.
Grant the premise that these voters wanted a secure border. Many did, and still do.
And?
They voted for Pulido by more than 20 points anyway. Agreement on one question did not carry over to the next one.
What South Texas Latinos asked for
NBC News's exit poll put national numbers on the shift. In 2024, Latino voters went 51 percent for Harris and 46 for Trump. On Tuesday, 62 percent backed Democratic House candidates and 35 percent backed Republicans. Latino men, who gave Trump a majority in 2024, gave Democrats a majority on Tuesday.
In 2024, South Texas voted for enforcement. In 2026, enforcement arrived in the form it was always going to take: workplaces, long-term residents, mixed-status households. The same counties then voted against it by forty points.
Voting for a policy and then punishing the party for carrying it out is not a change in conditions. They asked for enforcement, got it, and voted against the people who delivered it.
Wretched outcome. South Texas Latinos chose it.
Shame on them. They are not us.
For two decades Karl Rove told the party, on Sunday shows and in print, that Latino voters belonged to the conservative coalition. South Texas was supposed to be the proof: border communities, close to the problem, voting their interests. If the coalition was going to hold anywhere, it would hold there.
It did not. Everywhere else, the party made the same assumption on less evidence.
Rove gave the assurances. Rove was wrong.
South Texas Latinos were sold to the party as conservatives. On Tuesday, South Texas Latinos voted like Democrats.
The longer premise
Election Day tested the argument Rove made for twenty years: Latinos, as a category, shared enough cultural and economic priorities with the Republican base that a broad invitation would produce a lasting addition to the coalition.
Rove built George W. Bush's campaigns, first in Texas and then nationally, on that premise. The 2004 national exit poll gave Bush 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. The pollsters later revised it to 40. The Texas exit poll was revised from 59 percent to 49. Rove kept citing 44.
After 2008, Rove told Newsweek that "an anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal." After 2012, he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the party had to "do better with Hispanics." The premise did not change from one loss to the next.
In 2024, results seemed, briefly, to support Rove's premise. In 2026, results showed its limits.
Overlap was strongest on one narrow question, border order, when disorder was acute. It was weaker on the routine administration of enforcement. It was weaker still on the many issues where majorities of Latino voters hold positions different from the Republican base.
Subgroups with different histories behaved differently. Cuban Americans and some South American communities shaped by direct experience of leftist regimes did not move the way South Texas moved. The larger category did not consolidate.
A category is not a constituency.
The longer record
This is not the first time enforcement followed a crisis. After the crash of October 1929, as unemployment climbed, the Hoover administration made removing illegal aliens part of its answer to a real problem. Labor Secretary William Doak promoted raids, including the 1931 sweep of La Placita in Los Angeles. County relief agencies from Los Angeles to Detroit paid for trains south. Between 1929 and the mid-1930s, an estimated 400,000 to one million people of Mexican descent left the United States. Some were deported, and many more were pressured into "repatriating." By commonly cited estimates, most were U.S. citizens.
South Texas Latinos asked for enforcement. When enforcement came, South Texas Latinos changed their minds. Rove's premise never accounted for South Texas Latinos changing their minds.
South Texas Latinos are not the first to do this. In 1969, Cesar Chavez led a march to the Mexican border to protest growers' use of illegal immigrants as strikebreakers. In 1974, the United Farm Workers ran what it called its "Illegals Campaign," reporting illegal workers to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and ran the "wet line," a patrol along the Arizona border led by his cousin Manuel Chavez. The union supported enforcement while enforcement served the union. By the 1980s, the union backed amnesty. They were never our brothers.
The tent
A party that intends to stay competitive has two choices.
It can keep treating every temporary movement as evidence of a new and expandable majority. It can keep enlarging the invitations and measuring success by which new groups show up under favorable conditions.
Or it can put away the tent and start checking identification at its door.
Checking identification is a metaphor for ordinary work: finding out which voters actually share the party's priorities and keep them over time, and building on those voters. The rest are not a coalition. Stop counting them as one.
On citizenship, residency, and the right to take part in choosing the government, the same requirement is not a metaphor at all.
Texas made its choice. The Republican party should stop counting on South Texas Latinos to come back.
One aside. Podcasters on the right keep grabbing the lowest-hanging fruit there is: war bad. Saying war is bad takes no work and wins no elections. Podcasters on the right are one group I would happily deport and not even miss them for a second.
Take it on the chin, fam. God bless America. ■
