Why is South Texas trending more Republican?

[Blue3]

Question incoming...

This was the 2020 presidential election results, by county:



And this was the swing... in other words, those shaded red voted in higher numbers for Trump in 2020 than in 2016:



We all know something weird has been going on in Florida... and we know the Mormon 3rd party candidate in 2016 took away Trump votes, and why Utah and the surrounding area probably trended back to the the Republicans in 2020... but what's going on by the Texas border? Isn't Texas supposed to be trending blue? It seems like most of those counties still voter Democrat in the final tally, but for them to swing so hard towards Trump in 2020 compared to in 2016... what's going on there?

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

I'm 100% sure this has been answered somewhere else on here within the last 2.5 years. (Edit: found the post I was looking for) TL;DR- increased turnout and more effective culture war wedge issue + urban-rural + educational attainment polarization.

I also thing there was a bit of the more social conservative Latinos voters voted when they normally wouldn’t due to the higher vote turn out all around. Thought that’s likely a smaller factor.

I don't think it's a small factor at all. The RGV swings can be explained almost entirely by extremely low-propensity voters waking up and turning out massively for Trump.

What people seem to be forgetting here is that 2020 wasn't a one-off. Despite 2016 being plagued by the border and immigration, the RGV swung and trended towards Trump that year. And despite Abbott winning statewide by a lesser margin than in 14' it swung in 18' towards him.

Even rural counties like Jim Wells, Duval, Starr, etc.. swung towards Cruz that year despite winning by  2 and a half point, other trended towards him as the state swung left. All that and Trump was nowhere near the ballot.

You didn't see that correlation between 2002-2004.

It should be noted that GOP candidates didn't improve on Trump 2020 in the 2022 midterms like they did in South Florida.

[TML]

Shortly after Election Day 2020, an article appeared in Politico where the author explained that Republican gains in South Texas were mostly the result of increased turnout among Tejanos rather than Latinos - while both groups are considered Hispanic, Tejanos (which are people whose families have already been in the US for many generations) usually identify as White while Latinos (which are recent arrivals from Latin America) usually identify as people of color, so some hot-button issues that matter with Latinos (e.g. immigration, xenophobia) don't matter nearly as much with Tejanos. Most Tejanos are Catholic and are thus socially conservative on issues like abortion, guns, and law enforcement, so when the Trump campaign reached out to these voters on the aforementioned issues, it resonated with them and so when voter turnout increased as a result of this, it figures that most of these new voters voted Republican.

[Spectator]

To add on to that, I think the Democrats' overreactions on COVID measures played a significant role, especially within hispanic communities.