HARLINGEN, Texas (AP) — Only about a dozen people were in a side room of a barbeque joint in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley when Mayra Flores arrived. The former Republican congresswoman was given just one minute to say why she should be sent back to Washington, so she rushed through her stump speech in three minutes, speaking over the loud hum of an icemaker.
It was a humble scene for someone who electrified her party in 2022, when she won a special election to become the first Republican in more than 150 years to represent the Rio Grande Valley in Congress. Although Flores lost two subsequent races, her victory proved that Republicans could win over working-class Hispanic communities that had once been politically written off, and it foreshadowed President Donald Trump’s own surge in the region in 2024.
“Don’t let anyone take that from us,” Flores said.
But as Flores competes in the March 3 primary, her Republican Party appears to have moved on. She’s struggling to raise money and Trump has endorsed rival candidate Eric Flores, a lawyer and political newcomer who isn’t related despite the same last name.
The Flores v. Flores competition has become a tense and personal confrontation between two young Hispanic conservatives who exemplify their community’s rightward shift. Whoever wins will be among the most closely watched Republicans in the state, responsible for defeating Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat who has long been a top target. Texas’ recent redistricting was designed in part to make Gonzalez easier to defeat.
A Republican victory in November would solidify the party’s hold on a political battleground and suggest that it’s adapting to the country’s shifting demographics. A loss could show that its recent victories in the Rio Grande Valley were nothing more than a fluke.
Rio Grande Valley
will be at center of House midterms
The path to the U.S. House majority runs through here, the southern tip of Texas, where Texas, Mexico, the Rio Grande River and the Gulf of Mexico converge. Trump is scheduled to visit the area on Friday, with a stop in Corpus Christi.
One town dissolves imperceptibly into the next across the Rio Grande Valley, a concrete jungle that sprawls for 100 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border. The region of 1.5 million people is nearly 90% Hispanic, predominately working class and growing fast.
For generations, people here were reliable Democratic voters, but that has recently shifted. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump improved his margin by double digits even as he narrowly lost the region and the presidency. Then came Mayra Flores’ victory two years later, and in 2024, Trump won every county in the region.
After her special election win, Flores went on to lose twice to Gonzalez, who has consistently outperformed his party’s presidential candidates. Flores attributes her losses to 2022 redistricting that made the district more Democratic, a problem that Republicans sought to rectify with another round of redistricting last year.
Last fall, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, acting on pressure from Trump, redrew district boundaries in the GOP’s favor, aiming to pick up as many as five Democratic House seats statewide to help the GOP keep House control. Three are anchored here in the Rio Grande Valley.
These are the first elections to be held using the new map.
Texas Republicans made a bet that the decade-long shift of working-class voters toward the GOP was not an aberration, though that’s far from a foregone conclusion.
“This area has a lot of conservative and Republican values–family, church,” said Jonathan Campos, a Republican and a rancher near Brownsville, who is running for a seat on the county commission. “They just don’t realize it.”
Trump is now endorsing rival
Trump upended the race with his surprise endorsement in December of Eric Flores, a former federal prosecutor and Army officer who is attracting more money and energy than Mayra Flores.
“Eric knows the Wisdom and Courage it takes to Ensure LAW AND ORDER,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
After the Trump endorsement, entrepreneur Scott Mandel — who had raised more than $1 million for his campaign — dropped out and endorsed Eric Flores.
Eric Flores, 34, points to his experience in a Texas National Guard unit that patrolled the border and as a federal prosecutor in McAllen.
“I’m going to take that same tenacity that I served in uniform on the border, the same tenancy fighting the cartels and the human smugglers in the federal courtroom – that’s what I want to take to D.C.,” he said.
Mayra Flores had her chance, he said, calling her an “opportunist” who is profiting off of her repeated losses in the district.
“Yeah, she had a short stint in Congress, but how about the remaining portion of her life?” he said. “Fact is, she’s been a career candidate for almost six years, paying herself with campaign funds.”
That sentiment resonates with many of his supporters.
“I know she’s got experience because she did it before,” said Doug Wells, 60, a grocery store clerk. “But overall, I think he’s got more life experience.”
‘I did it when it was hard’
Mayra Flores, 40, dismissed Trump’s endorsement of her rival as a decision made by his advisers.
She said Eric Flores only recently became a Republican, noting his father, Kino Flores, was a Democratic state lawmaker convicted of ethics crimes. And she has attacked his prosecutorial experience as a stint working for the same “Biden DOJ” that prosecuted Trump.
Though Joe Biden was the president, Eric Flores was a career lawyer in Texas not involved in the Trump prosecution or policy decisions made in Washington.
Among Mayra Flores’ supporters are Margaret Cervantes of Harlingen, a 69-year-old retiree.
“For one, she’s strong,” Cervantes said after a meeting in Harlingen on a recent Tuesday, adding that she hasn’t heard Flores talk nasty about opponents.
The next morning, a two-hour drive away in Corpus Christi, Flores met one-on-one at a coffee shop with Jack Cooper, a project manager and Army veteran who told her he’ll urge his network to vote for her.
In small rooms like these, Mayra Flores is fighting against the narrative that her time has come and gone.
“I’ve been doing this since 2021” when few believed it was possible for a Republican to win, she said, adding that her victory opened the door for her current rival.
“I did it when it was hard,” she said. “I ran so men like him could walk.”
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