The Patriot Post® · Mayra Flores and the Coming Red Wave

The Democrats can certainly crow about Barack Obama as the first half-black American president and Kamala Harris as the first Bay Area progressive vice president of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners.

But Republicans can now lay claim to the first congresswoman born in Mexico.

That distinction belongs to Mayra Flores, who yesterday won a special election in Texas’s 34th Congressional District by a 51-43 margin, thereby flipping a seat held by Democrat Congressman Filemon Vela, who vacated it in March for what we suspect was a more lucrative job — a job with the nation’s largest lobbying firm, Akin Gump. As Fox News reports:

Flores will finish out the remainder of Vela’s term, which expires in January, and Republicans were eager to win the seat and gain new ground in the Lone Star state to represent the district that spans east of San Antonio with parts along the coast to Brownsville. As currently drawn, the 34th Congressional District will essentially be dissolved later this year after a newly redrawn map favoring current 15th Congressional District Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, the Democratic nominee for November’s general election to represent the 34th District, was constructed.

Thus, the Republican Party was content to leave this seat for the Democrats, and all but walked away from the 34th District in order to strengthen the party’s hold on seats elsewhere in the state. But the district’s voters weren’t having any of it. Instead, in a likely foreshadowing of November’s midterms, they fastened their teeth to the GOP’s pant leg and held on like a terrier. In fact, the 34th District has been trending to the right over the last three presidential elections. Barack Obama received over 60% of the vote in 2012. Hillary Clinton cut that margin to 22 percent in 2016, but Joe Biden won the district by just 4%.

This should frighten the sauce out of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and their fellow Democrats. Why? GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel summed it up succinctly: “HUGE GOP FLIP in TX-34, an 84% Hispanic district that Democrats won by 13.6% just two years ago.”

Indeed, Flores’s stunning win marked the first time the region has been represented by a Republican since 1870. What we’re seeing, then, are the makings of a massive political realignment — a realignment that could leave the Democrats’ identity-politics approach in tatters.

A June 8 poll from left-leaning Quinnipiac reflects this remarkable shift among Hispanics from left to right. “If the election were today,” the poll asked, “would you want to see the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win control of the United States House of Representatives?”

The answer among Hispanics? Republicans over Democrats by three percentage points, 41-38. While the margin is relatively tiny, that’s an earthquake of a realignment for a group that, according to Pew Research, favored Democrats over Republicans 69-29 based on 2018 midterm exit polling data.

So much for the Democrats’ oft-touted “Demography is Destiny” future. As it turns out, Hispanic Americans aren’t as sold on statist government as the Left had hoped. It’s likely, too, that this voting bloc understands better than the rest of us what’s at stake on our now-porous southern border. After all, many of them, and many of their ancestors, fled precisely the kinds of ruinous policies that they now see being pushed by today’s Democrats.

No thanks, these voters seem to be saying. Why would we want to replicate the awful conditions from which we just fled?

Flores, whose family moved to the U.S. when she was six, seems to embody this sentiment. “First and foremost,” she said, “I thank God for the blessing of the opportunity to serve the people of Texas’ 34th Congressional District. I am also grateful to my family for their unwavering love and support throughout this campaign, and to the voters of South Texas for entrusting me to represent them in Washington. I look forward to standing strong for our conservative values of faith, family, and freedom and to earning the opportunity to serve our community further in the months to come.”

Bienvenido In Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to mobilizing patriotic Latino leaders, said that the election sent the country a “powerful message” — a message that they’re “fed up with reckless liberal policies and want change.”

“Mayra won,” the group said, “because she ran a campaign rooted in our community’s values: God, Family, and Country. … Meanwhile, Joe Biden and the Democrats have made life more expensive for Hispanics, our neighborhoods less safe, and a mockery of our culture.”

Welcome to the party, mis Amigos.