This pivotal county is still standing by Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

72% : Starr County residents went from delivering an 86-13 landslide victory to Barack Obama in 2012 -- the highest vote share of any county in Texas -- to giving Trump a very comfortable 58-42 win in 2024.
59% : Trump also reaffirmed that he intends to raise his most recent tariff on all Chinese goods to 20 percent, from 10 percent currently. --
56% : The first lady sat down on Monday with members of Congress, advocates and teenage victims to push the House to advance the "TAKE IT DOWN Act," which would criminalize "non-consensual intimate content" -- otherwise known as "revenge porn" -- including compromising images generated by AI. -- Spending bill text expected over weekend: GOP congressional leaders are aiming to release text of a government funding stopgap this weekend, according to lawmakers and other Republicans involved in the ongoing talks.
47% : Or contact tonight's author at [email protected] or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie. -- Trump says Canada, Mexico tariffs take effect Tuesday:
46% : And what it's indicating at the moment is that national Democrats have a long way to go in winning back the voters they're losing to Trump.
44% : The Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Mexico, shifted unmistakably toward Trump in 2020 -- and Joe Biden only managed a 5-point victory in 97 percent Hispanic Starr County.
44% : Aside from Starr County, Trump turned most of the border red.
42% : The historically blue border county flipped to Trump in 2024, but that description does a disservice to the stunning nature of what happened.
33% : The left-leaning voters Siders spoke with were hopeful the effects of the government cutbacks might eventually increase opposition to Trump, but they weren't convinced the message is breaking through.
32% : There is "no room left for Mexico or for Canada" to make a deal to avoid the tariffs, Trump told reporters at the White House.
30% : But that changed after he began spreading what Kyiv said was pro-Russian propaganda. -- Melania Trump lobbies Congress to combat 'revenge porn': On the eve of her husband's address to a joint session of Congress, Melania Trump made her second-term debut on Capitol Hill, using her first public comments on policy since October 2019 to take on deep fake "revenge porn."
29% : Though few said they voted for Trump because of his plans to shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy, many welcomed the slashing cuts anyway.
26% : It's because the Texas land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has offered Trump 1,400 acres of land just outside Rio Grande City, the county seat, to build a deportation facility.
22% : For comparative purposes, that's roughly the same margin that Trump lost by in Brooklyn that year.
11% : As recently as 2016, Hillary Clinton destroyed Trump there, 79 percent to 19 percent.

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