The signs of a political shift in the reliably blue counties that line Texas’s southern border with Mexico had been coming. Local GOP offices were emerging in places like Starr County that had not voted for a Republican for president in a century.
In Starr County, where Bazán lives, voters just backed a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in a century. The predominantly Hispanic and working-class rural county, where the median household income of $36,000 is one of the lowest in the nation, gave Trump a 16 percentage-point victory margin over Vice President Kamala Harris.