HOW THE BORDER WENT MAGA:

Democrats underrate the regional appeal of conservatism at their own peril. From 2015 to 2021, Will Hurd was the congressman for the sprawling border district now represented by Tony Gonzales. “In 2020, the number of Latinos voting for Republicans was not a surprise,” he asserts. Citing the high proportion of people across the borderlands who work in law enforcement and the concentration of oil and natural gas production in the Permian Basin that bridges West Texas and eastern New Mexico, Hurd believes it was the progressive embrace of criminal-justice reform and green energy that motivated many in the region to vote for Trump. “What was happening in 2020 was these initiatives within the Democratic party were impacting the livelihoods of people that lived along the border, that was the significant difference.” . . . As Laura Gómez, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, put it when I reached her at her home in Albuquerque, “From the Trump years on, the nation has gone through tremendous changes. Politically, ideologically. Why wouldn’t we expect that Latinos have also been changing?”

Via a friend, who comments: “Author also visibly puzzles over how some Mexican immigrants make a distinction between those who did so legally vs. illegally after remarking upon how bizarre it is that Trump’s support went up [after he] supposedly called immigrants rapists. It’s like the author sees it but can’t make sense of it due to such deep bias.”