Houston, Texas

December 16, 2021

The filing deadline has passed.  As we at Texas Latino Conservatives PAC look at the names of those who have filed to serve the people of Texas we are happy to see so many names of people we have not seen before. 

We are additionally gratified to see so many Hispanic surnames filing in the Republican primary.

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by V. Lance Tarrance

Comments on a new report released July 15, 2021 by the Pew Research Center

A very large study of Hispanics was recently conducted (March 2021) which showed that Hispanics in the United States have been hit very hard by the Covid-19 pandemic this past year, particularly with their biggest hardships being losing jobs and work projects. However, U.S. Hispanics are very optimistic, in that 65% now believe, "the worst is now behind us". This study involved over 3000 self-identified Hispanics, who self administered their responses on a web survey.

Where U.S. Hispanics were hurt the most this past year was in paying their rent or their mortgages. Hispanics suffered a number of financial challenges, but losing their job was the worst hardship. Scaled by type of U.S. Hispanics today, 26% of naturalized Hispanics had job loss hardships, U.S. born Hispanics suffered even more (35%), while undocumented Hispanics in the U.S. were almost decimated with 50% saying that they suffered job losses, which created the most financial hardship.

However, looking forward to 2022 elections, the key finding in this very large scale study was that U.S. Hispanics are optimistic about their future, which has important ramifications.

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“A MASSIVE STEP TOWARD PRESERVING OUR ELECTIONS AND PROTECTING OUR VOTE"

Supreme Court Votes 6-3 Upholding Arizona’s Voting Rights Act In a Move that Should Positively Affect Texas SB 1111

HOUSTON — Texas Latino Conservatives (TLC) Chairman, Orlando Sanchez commended the United States Supreme Court today for voting in a 6-3 decision to uphold Arizona’s GOP Voting Rights Act. The decision could have a massive impact in several states, including Texas’ SB 1111, where State Legislatures are attempting to pass legislation to preserve the integrity of our elections.

Sanchez said, “this Supreme Court decision is a victory for every American and every Texas citizen who believes the integrity of our elections is the fundamental bedrock of any true Democracy.” Sanchez added, “this decision also sends a clear message to the Texas Legislature that SB 1111 is on solid legal ground and banning the use of a private PO Box as the primary address for voter registration should be unlawful.”

Download the Press Release

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 June 26, 2021

Austin – The four top conservative Hispanic groups in Texas support recently passed legislation to more clearly define how voters can register to vote in Texas.  The Republican National Hispanic Assembly, Hispanics Republicans of Texas, Texas Latino Conservatives and Bienvenido all welcomed the passage of SB 1111, a very simple and common-sense bill that bans the use of a private PO Box as the primary address for voter registration.  The groups see the filed lawsuit by LULAC and Voto Latino challenging the new law as a “red herring” aimed at confusing the public and weakening election integrity.

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Opinion by Henry Olsen,  Columnist, June 8, 2021

Nonpartisan mayoral races don’t usually have large political implications. But Saturday’s win by a Republican in McAllen, Tex., is different, as it confirms that Latino voters are up for grabs.

McAllen has long been a Democratic stronghold. The city, which is 85 percent Hispanic or Latino, has elected Democratic mayors since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in partisan races. In 2016, McAllen voters supported Hillary Clinton by a 40-point margin over Donald Trump. Trump cut that margin by more than half in 2020, and now the approximately 143,000-person city has gone red.

Republicans are naturally crowing over the win while Democrats are playing it down. But both parties know that Latino voters shifted significantly to the right last year, a development that rightly worries Democrats. They depend on winning Hispanics outside of Florida by large margins. Trump would have won Arizona and Georgia had President Biden’s margins among Latinos dropped from about 25 points to 20 points. Democrats are goners throughout the Southwest if Republicans can ever seriously compete for Hispanic voters.

This poses challenges for each party. For Democrats, it first means recognizing that Latinos aren’t a monolithic ethnic voting bloc that they can count on to view Republicans as racist oppressors. A recent analysis conducted by the Democratic groups Third Way and Latino Victory found that Democrats fell into this trap in 2020, viewing Latino voters as a demographic they did not need to persuade. The analysis specifically singled out the party’s failure to note that Hispanic men in the Rio Grande Valley and oil and gas workers in New Mexico might view issues differently than urban Hispanics elsewhere in the country.

That’s sound advice, but it will be extremely difficult for Democrats to act upon given the importance of White progressives in their coalition. White progressives are motivated to fight climate change, and that means reducing the production and consumption of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Many Latinos in the Southwest work in those fields and will lose their jobs if production is curtailed. There’s simply no way to square that tension; favoring a strong policy on climate change means phasing out fossil fuels.

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Alexander Burns New York Times June 6, 2021

Democrats defeated President Donald Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.

A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far-left.

The 73-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.

The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the precarious margins they now hold.

In part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joe Biden’s support with voters of color who loathed Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.

Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.

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Jennifer Medina, New York Times, May 2, 2021

McALLEN, Texas — The front door of the Hidalgo County Republican Party’s office is covered with photographs of high-profile politicians in the party: Gov. Greg Abbott, Senator John Cornyn and former President Donald J. Trump. Nearly all of them are white men.

Step inside, and you’ll see a bulletin board with pictures of local Republican leaders: Adrienne Pena-Garza, Hilda Garza DeShazo, Mayra Flores. Nearly all of them are Hispanic women.

Hispanic Republicans, especially women, have become something of political rock stars in South Texas after voters in the Rio Grande Valley shocked leaders in both parties in November by swinging sharply toward the G.O.P. Here in McAllen, one of the region’s largest cities, Mr. Trump received nearly double the number of votes he did four years earlier; in the Rio Grande Valley over all, President Biden won by just 15 percentage points, a steep slide from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016.

That conservative surge — and the liberal decline — has buoyed the Republican Party’s hopes about its ability to draw Hispanic voters into what has long been an overwhelmingly white political coalition and to challenge Democrats in heavily Latino regions across the country. Now party officials, including Mr. Abbott, the governor, have flocked to the Rio Grande Valley in a kind of pilgrimage, eager to meet the people who helped Republicans rapidly gain ground in a longtime Democratic stronghold.

One of those people, Ms. Pena-Garza, the chair of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, grew up the daughter of a Democratic state legislator. As was common for most Hispanic families in the area, she said, voting for Democrats was a given. But after her father switched parties in 2010, Ms. Pena-Garza soon followed, arguing that Democrats had veered too far to the left, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control.

“Politics down here did scare me because you didn’t go against the grain,” she said. “If someone’s going to tell you: ‘Oh, you’re brown, you have to be Democrat,’ or ‘Oh, you’re female, you have to be a Democrat’ — well, who are you to tell me who I should vote for and who I shouldn’t?”

Ms. Pena-Garza said she was called a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside — and a self-hating Latino, labels that have begun to recede only in recent years as she meets more Hispanic Republicans who, like her, embrace policies that they view as helping small business owners and supporting their religious beliefs.

Now, she says, the political choice is a point of pride.

“You can’t shame me or bully me into voting for a party just because that’s the way it’s always been,” she said.

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From the Texas Tribune:

BY JAMES BARRAGÁN JUNE 11, 2021

George P. Bush’s first trip outside Austin after he announced his campaign for attorney general wouldn’t surprise anyone watching Texas politics these days: Like many other ambitious Republicans, he visited South Texas.

The state’s current land commissioner, who is seeking to unseat incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton, spoke with members of the Border Patrol union along the Rio Grande, met with high school students in San Juan and helped clean beaches on South Padre Island.

It was part of a flurry of GOP activity in the heavily Hispanic region this month. Nearly a year ago, Republicans’ relative success in the areas along the Texas-Mexico border helped them fend off the strongest challenge to their political dominance by Texas Democrats in decades. Now the GOP wants to take the fight to the Democrats in next year’s midterm elections and attack one of the state’s most reliably blue regions.

The work has already begun.

In addition to last week’s trip by Bush, Associated Republicans of Texas, a GOP political group, announced this week that it would target six Democratic state House seats in South Texas, citing growing support for Republicans in the area. On Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott held a border summit featuring local leaders from both parties. At the event, he announced that plans were in the works "for the state of Texas to begin building the border wall," but he didn't give details.

And in a development Saturday that gained national attention, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County GOP was elected mayor of McAllen, long a Democratic stronghold. According to the county party, Javier Villalobos was the first registered Republican elected mayor of the city this century.

“There’s something going on down there,” said Aaron De Leon, political director for Associated Republicans of Texas. “We see a great opportunity in South Texas and we want to take the offensive and take it to the Democrats in what has historically been their territory.”

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June 10, 2021
by Lance Tarrance, Jr.

There were a number of key municipal city elections in Texas that stunned political observers because Republicans were elected with Hispanic support. These city elections in Texas are traditionally nonpartisan, but the shift in Hispanic support of conservative Republicans attracted national media news. These small and medium size city outcomes are now being linked to the Hispanic election shifts that started in last November’s Presidential election.

Democrats are now raising concern that they are losing valuable ground with the Hispanic vote in Texas.

To quote one Democratic Congressman in the Rio Grande Valley: “Democrats have a big problem in Texas”.

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