OPINION:
There’s broad agreement among the people who follow elections that the GOP will win back control of one or both houses of Congress in the next election. How many seats and from where are matters still subject to debate.
Initially, those who saw a GOP victory coming believed it would emerge from the suburban seats that should have gone to former President Donald Trump in 2020 but went instead to President Biden and sent a Democrat to Congress. Now, as the economic news grows grimmer by the day, the number of seats in play grows.
That’s bad news for the national Democrats who had hoped to make the next election a referendum on Mr. Trump just like the last one. And, if they had any idea how to run the country, they might have been able to use the televised hearings on Jan. 6, 2021, unrest at the U.S. Capitol to make a convincing case. Instead, they’ve mismanaged and spent their way into record inflation and rising interests that have people regretting their 2020 vote against “mean tweets” in favor of what they thought would be something better.
The evidence, as they used to say, is out there. The recent GOP pickup of a south Texas congressional seat that hasn’t sent a Republican to Washington in at least a century, doesn’t mean there’s a red wave coming. It does mean the Democrats have to get their ducks in a row if they want to remain competitive going into the 2024 presidential cycle.
Republican Mayra Flores won the seat 51% to 43% in the June 14 special election. That’s a tremendous swing toward the GOP. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton carried it while running for president by 20 points. Mr. Biden carried it by 4 in 2020 but, after its post-redistricting lines go into effect, it will become a Biden +15 seat.
By most accounts, Mrs. Flores’ victory is a fluke. At least the Democrats think so. “Look, I think the Republicans spent millions of dollars to win a seat that’s going away. We’re going to win this seat when it matters,” U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told the media after the race was over. What he misses is that winning a seat always matters.
Other Democrats are up in arms because something is up in south Texas and other parts of the nation where the Mexican-American vote is determinant. U.S. Rep. Vincente Gonzales, who currently represents a different part of Texas in Congress but who will be running for reelection against Mrs. Flores in the newly reconfigured 34th in November, said if the party did not draw a lesson from its most recent defeat the party could lose a lot more seats. “They have just forgotten about the Brown people on the border. And that’s basically what it is. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat it anymore. They are taking Latinos in south Texas for granted.”
The GOP needs to learn the same lesson. The Democrats have given them an opening they can use to build a new majority, one based on ideas leading to economic empowerment, increased personal security, and improved access to quality education whether public, private or parochial. They’d do well to be in the district — and those that surround it — night and day, holding town halls, listening to voters and finding out just why they chose to cross the line if that’s in fact what they did.
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