A drilling rig operates outside in Reeves County, Texas, which has seen a major oil and gas boom in the past 15 years.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
For about as long as anyone can remember, the people of Reeves County were poor, most of them Hispanic. And they voted Democratic.
The West Texas county was once a thriving agricultural centre whose cantaloupes gained national renown, but its economy grew moribund. After 1978, no one built a new house here for nearly three decades.
All the while, the only election that mattered took place in March: the Democratic primary, where the winner could rest assured of victory in November. But all of that changed in 2020, when the county voted 61 per cent in favour of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a 16-point swing from four years earlier, when the county voted for Hillary Clinton.
The shift in Reeves County is part of a broader political realignment that is calling into question long-held assumptions about U.S. voters and the way electoral maps are drawn. Nationally, a majority of Latino voters supported Joe Biden in 2020, but the number who supported Mr. Trump grew by 10 percentage points compared with 2016.
The change was especially important in several swing states. In Ohio, Mr. Trump saw an 11-percentage-point gain among Latinos; in Arizona, 6 points; in Georgia, 14. Mr. Trump has made appeals to Latino voters a regular part of his stump speeches, and polls suggest that he continues to enjoy strong support among them in a tight race with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Reeves County, with its small population in a Republican-dominated state, is unlikely to tip the balance in the November vote.
It nonetheless exemplifies many of the reasons Latino voters have begun to question party loyalties.
Change began to arrive in earnest to Reeves County 15 years ago, when new drilling technology began to unlock local oil and gas reserves. Transient workers arrived by the tens of thousands, outnumbering the local population. Landowners turned fields into lots for worker RVs. A Starbucks opened.
When Smokey Briggs moved to Pecos, the county seat, in 1999 to work at the local newspaper, “this place was about to dry up and blow away. It was economically dead,” he said.
Smokey Briggs, publisher of the The Monahans News and Pecos Enterprise, in Reeves County on Sept. 18. Mr. Briggs moved to Reeves County in 1999.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
The drilling boom has turned that on its head. In 2009, Reeves County wells pumped a million barrels of oil. Last year, they pumped seven million in December alone. It is now the second most prolific county in Texas for natural-gas production.
Truck drivers began earning six figures. Barbers struck it rich, charging $100 for a cut. Between 2010 and 2022, average household income nearly doubled.
The area “has experienced what you would call middle-class prosperity. They’ve made good money. So all of a sudden they have an interest in holding on to it. And they’re much more prone to vote conservatively,” said Mr. Briggs, who is now publisher of the Pecos Enterprise and The Monahans News. He tucks a pistol into his belt when he heads out of the office in his 1984 Suburban.
In 2020, Reeves County was one of only three in Texas that flipped in Mr. Trump’s direction.
Local Republicans believe their party is now here to stay.
“This is a red county,” said Derek Zubeldia, a local businessman who embodies the changes that have swept Reeves County. His first job was packing onions at the age of 14. Now, he runs a mid-sized trucking company. He has met Mr. Trump and recently spent time with his son, Donald Jr., in Texas.
Two years ago, Mr. Zubeldia ran for the state senate on the Republican ticket. He lost, but carried Reeves County with 69 per cent of the vote.
Derek Zubeldia, a Republican, runs a trucking company in Pecos, Texas.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
He is convinced the people who surround him hold the key to this year’s presidential election.
“The Hispanic community is going to play a big role in saving this nation, in reminding America of what it used to be,” he said.
Democrats have reason to believe otherwise. While polls showed greater numbers of Hispanic voters preparing to abandon the party under Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris has regained some of that ground since replacing him as presidential candidate. In a mid-September memo, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, one of the party’s key funding arms, credited Ms. Harris with achieving a “Latino reset.”
But the memo also underscored the high stakes for the party. In nine of the DCCC’s most promising target voting districts across the country – those it believes it can take back from Republicans – voting-age Latinos make up more than 15 per cent of the population.
In Reeves County, Democrats say they struggle to understand the scale of change in their own community. Alva Alvarez, the county attorney, recalled Mr. Trump calling Mexican migrants criminals who commit rape.
It amounted to calling her own uncles “rapists and murderers,” said Ms. Alvarez, a committed Democrat. And yet, those uncles voted for Mr. Trump. “It’s very, very hard to wrap my head around,” she said.
Alva Alvarez, a Democrat, is the Reeves County attorney.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Democrats, she said, “have failed in many ways,” including in their oversight of the southern U.S. border. The millions of migrants who have crossed illegally over the past four years have angered those whose own families entered through legal means.
But Ms. Alvarez says part of the reason for the county’s changing politics lies in the ways Mr. Trump has appealed to religious conservatives whose views on sexuality and gender contrast with those of the Democratic party.
Rural Texas residents, too, value access to firearms, regardless of ethnicity.
Although 84 per cent of those who live in Reeves County identify as Hispanic or Latino, many families trace their arrival in the area to three or four generations ago.
“They’re not very different from a white rural voter in their sensibilities,” said Jaime Mercado, a Houston-based Democratic strategist. “So why would we be surprised that rural voters are sliding into the Republican Party?”
Still, he is encouraged by some of the changes from Ms. Harris, who has campaigned on promises of an “opportunity economy.”
“The natural instinct for Latinos is, ‘just give me the chance and let me be successful. I’ll fall and I’ll rise on my own,’” he said.
It’s not clear that will be enough to counter the appeal of Republicans, and their support for tax cuts and development of fossil fuels, both newly important to Reeves County.
Recreational vehicles parked on a field in Reeves County, where transient oil and gas workers outnumber local residents.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
So much money is pouring in that the county is rebuilding all of its schools. It paid cash for a US$140-million new hospital.
“The majority of it was from the oil and gas tax base,” said Venetta Seals, an executive at the hospital who served as the mayor of Pecos from 2010 to 2019, before being elected to city council in 2021.
“To get elected, you had to run as a Democrat,” she said.
Now, voters have changed so much that “you might have to really think – am I running Republican or Democrat?” she said.
“I’m not sure what I would do, truthfully.”