Dem
47
GOP
53
A week ago, we noted that at town halls, voters in some districts are unloading on Republican members of Congress in no uncertain terms. That remains true, but there are also Trump voters who don't have remorse about their votes. Politico asked a political reporter, David Siders, to travel around the country to talk to voters. One of the places he visited was Starr County, TX, on the Mexican border, which is 98% Latino, the most of any county in the country. It hadn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since it went for Benjamin Harrison in 1892. That's the longest Democratic streak of any county in the country. Barack Obama got 85% and 86% of the vote on his two runs and Hillary Clinton got 79% in 2016. In 2024, Donald Trump carried the county with 58% of the vote. Politico naturally wanted to know what the hell was going on there, so it sent Siders down there to talk to the voters.
He got a shock. They welcomed the way Elon Musk was disemboweling the federal government. Most said that the system wasn't working, so it needed to be shaken up. One said: "DOGE is eliminating the B.S." Siders didn't press him, but our guess is that the voter doesn't have a clue who is being cut or what the consequences are. He probably also doesn't know that Texas has 130,000 civilian federal employees. He might know that a quarter of the county's population is living in poverty (under $15,000 for a single person and under $31,000 for a family of four) and thinks firing government employees will somehow fix that. Another voter said: "I don't qualify for Medicaid, so fine with me. Now they are going to feel how I feel." Many Trump supporters had not expected such an aggressive effort to dismantle the government, but they are embracing it now, partly for fiscal conservatism and partly for the ruthlessness. There was little to no remorse. They are very much hoping for the $5,000 DOGE checks Co-President Elon Musk promised them.
Trump's support, then and now, was due to rising prices and Biden's immigration policies—not the size of the federal bureaucracy. The only one of Trump's policies everyone objected to was his plan to house immigrants on the way out at Guantánamo Bay. But that is not because they have any sympathy for the immigrants. It is because Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered Trump 1,400 acres of land in Starr County to build a holding pen for the immigrants. That would have created jobs for construction workers at first and for guards later. Trump declined the offer. That's what angered them. (V)