Trump did surprisingly well in Hispanic-majority counties in South Texas

Texas Trump supporters.
(Image credit: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

President Trump is projected to win Texas' 38 electoral votes, and analysts are taking a close look at the southern part of the state, where he performed better than expected in counties with large Hispanic populations.

Journalist Megan K. Stack tweeted that her "biggest surprise of the night" was Trump receiving 47 percent of the vote in Starr County. This is a "rural, poor, and almost entirely Latino" county, which was a "dependable Democratic stronghold." In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Starr County, with 79 percent of the vote compared to Trump's 19 percent.

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In South Florida, Trump appears to have been buoyed by Cuban American voters, and Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to native Texan and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, noted that there's "not a lot of Cubans in South Texas. Latinos aren't monolithic, but these numbers signal a much broader problem for Democrats than national origin."

Farther west in Arizona, Biden is ahead in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. The population there is about one-third Hispanic, and The Atlantic's Derek Thompson tweeted that if Biden does win there, it's "an important indicator that A, there is no singular 'Latino vote,' B, we should get some fascinating gender/education/generation/geographical origin breakdowns of the 2020 Latino vote."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.