Analysis: Republicans gained ground in Bexar County in 2020 among Hispanic voters

Palfrey Avenue on San Antonio’s South Side is a quiet street lined with small one-story homes and older cars. Voters here elected President Joe Biden by a 10-point margin in 2020, but it’s also hard to miss the proliferation of “Back the Blue” signs that dot the tidy yards. Republicans see an opening in this predominantly Latino neighborhood, starting in the upcoming 2022 midterms. Near the end of summer, a caravan of Republican candidates block-walked the neighborhood. It included Cassy Garcia, running for Texas Congressional District 28, which touches Bexar County, as well as Trish DeBerry, running an underdog campaign for Bexar County executive. DeBerry, pointing to one of the “Back the Blue” signs, said the campaign trail this electoral cycle looks different from what it was more than a decade ago when she ran for mayor. “There have always been conservative pockets on the South Side,” DeBerry said. “Now it’s more than just pockets.”

But what has gone almost entirely unreported is the same shift happening — so far to a lesser degree — in Bexar County. In 2020 in Bexar County, Trump saw gains in his voting share of nearly every precinct where more than 70% of residents are Hispanic, according to a San Antonio Report analysis. In precincts where Hispanic residents account for 70% or more of the population, Trump carried 28.5% of the vote, up from 24.5% four years earlier. Biden still won almost all of those districts, with nearly 70% of the vote, but this rise in vote share among the Hispanic population for Republicans is an outlier in modern politics. To a lesser extent, Trump also saw gains among the overwhelming majority of precincts where less than a fifth of adults have bachelor’s degrees, a metric that describes a precinct’s educational attainment levels. The same was true for poorer precincts, where the median household income was below the county median of $55,000. In 2020, Biden made his gains primarily on the North Side of San Antonio, among precincts that were the least Hispanic, the highest in income and the most college-educated. Democrats won Bexar County by a larger margin in 2020 than in 2016.