Two Texas cities represent the divide between those who vote and those who could, but often don't

LEWISVILLE, Texas -- Deep in the heart of Texas' sprawl, the city of Lewisville embodies the Lone Star State.

Bisected by Interstate 35 and ribboned with six- and eight-lane thoroughfares lined with chain stores, Mexican restaurants and pawn shops, Lewisville, 23 miles north of Dallas, is the prototypical slice of the nation's second most populous state. Its typical resident is about 36 years old, the same as in Texas. Similar to statewide, 6 out of 10 residents are not white, and about two-thirds of its voters cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election.

Next door is the city of Flower Mound, a swath of swanky subdivisions with names such as Teal Wood Oaks and Chaucer Estates. Flower Mound looks more like the electorate that has kept Texas dominated by Republicans for decades. It is wealthier than Lewisville, more than two-thirds of its residents are white, and 78% of them voted in 2020.

That discrepancy, between the diverse, potential electorate of Lewisville and the actual, heavily white electorate of Flower Mound, has been the subtext for the past two decades of U.S. politics.

For a long time, the presumption has been that closing that gap between Lewisville and Flower Mound — getting more people to vote and having the electorate better represent the country's actual population — would help Democrats and hurt Republicans. That's because a larger electorate would mean more minorities voting, and those groups historically lean Democratic.

That presumption helped spark the Great Replacement conspiracy theory among some conservatives, imagining a plot to import immigrants to substitute for more conservative white voters. It's been part of the fuel behind Republican-led efforts to make it tougher to vote, especially in Texas, which has some of the strictest election laws in the country. But this presidential election has flipped the script.

Republicans have built their field campaign for Donald Trump around reaching what they believe is a vast population of infrequent, conservative-leaning voters. His campaign is counting on support from younger, Latino and African American voters who are less likely to go to the polls.

Democrat Kamala Harris is relying on Black and Latino voters, but also on increasing her support among college-educated voters, a growing group that's both highly likely to vote and helped put Democrat Joe Biden in the White House in 2020.

The contrast is clear in the neighboring cities in north Texas.

In Flower Mound, Republicans who used to dominate voting in the suburb fear it's trending Democratic. In more diverse Lewisville, those who rarely vote or cannot are warming to Trump.

“I think Trump would make a difference,” said Brandon Taylor, 35, who cannot vote because of criminal convictions but is trying to persuade his girlfriend, Whitney Black, to cast a ballot for the former president. “We need that extra vote,” he told Black as the two, now homeless, sat on a bench outside Lewisville's public library.

Meanwhile, Martha Mackenzie, a retired Naval officer in Flower Mound, is a former Republican who left the party over Trump.

“I just can't get behind a lot of the BS behind Trump,” McKenzie said, scoffing particularly at Trump's insistence that the 2020 election he lost to Biden was stolen from him.

There are, of course, plenty of Harris supporters in Lewisville and numerous Trump voters in Flower Mound. The contrast between the towns goes beyond partisan politics and more to an age-old adage voiced by Sally Ortega Putney on a recent night in a Flower Mound office park.

Putney, 59, and a handful of other volunteers were calling voters on behalf of the Democratic Party. She recalled spending hours outside Lewisville Latino markets trying, unsuccessfully, to find new voters.

“We got our hearts broken trying all sorts of different outreach. The lower class, they don't have the time, they're too busy trying to feed their kids,” Putney said between calls that she and two other volunteers were making to voters.

She gestured around the room: “It's the middle class that ends up running everything, because we have the time to do it.”

For decades in Texas, Republicans have run things. The party has controlled the Legislature for more than 20 years and won every statewide race since 1994. As Texas has steadily grown more diverse, Republican margins have narrowed, but the GOP has taken steps to protect its hold on power.

Texas Republicans have drawn some of the most notorious gerrymanders in the country, reshuffling the lines of state legislative and congressional districts to protect GOP politicians and push the Democratic voters who could oust them into a few oddly shaped districts. That ensures Democrats remain the minority in the Legislature.

The Legislature in 2021 tightened election laws in response to Trump's false fraud claims. Lawmakers banned election offices from holding 24-hour voting after that had become popular in a major Democratic-leaning county and they prohibited anyone from sending mail ballot applications to eligible voters.

Since then Texas Republicans have continued to push back against a perceived menace of improper additional voters.

Attorney General Ken Paxton sued two of the state's largest and most Democratic-leaning counties to stop their voter registration drives, and his office raided the homes of leaders of Latino civil rights groups in what it said was an investigation of possible election fraud.

“There's no question that the design of a lot of Texas' election laws, both old and new, is rooted in the idea of demographic change and that new voters won't support the people in power,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, who grew up in Dallas and still watches the state carefully.

Texas has had recent experience with a surge of new voters, and it didn't turn out as badly for Republicans as the party feared.

In 2018, Democrat Beto O'Rourke challenged Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The little-known congressman became a national phenomenon for his populist message and get-out-the-vote pushes. He lost 51% to 48%.

Jim Henson, a political scientist at the University of Texas, said the new voters who turned out in 2018 were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — only slightly more Democratic than the normally conservative-leaning Texas electorate.

“There are untapped voters for both parties,” he said.

Lacey Riley is one Republican who thinks Texas' voting laws are just “safeguarding the election,” not making it tougher for new voters.

“I think everyone should vote,” said Riley, chair of the Denton County Republican Party.

A Flower Mound resident, Riley said she's excited to see the GOP reaching new voters, including ones in Lewisville.

"The Republican Party has changed,” she said. “It's not a bunch of rich white people.”

Riley acknowledges that Flower Mound, which has a population of 80,000, is changing. She was stunned to watch a friend running for local school board get heckled in public for being conservative — something unthinkable in times past.

The city was founded in 1961 to prevent its patch of prairie from being swallowed by other fast-growing suburbs. For decades, it has prized slow growth and single-family housing, which has led to intense political fights over development.

In contrast, Lewisville dates to the 19th century and has a small downtown with a few historic buildings.

When the area began to grow, the city let various property owners do what they wanted with their land, leading to its hodge-podge of different types of development. While the city of 135,000 contains subdivisions that wouldn't look out of place in Flower Mound, about half its residential properties are apartment buildings that attract a younger, less wealthy and more diverse population.

Delia Parker Mims, the Denton County Democratic Party chair, lives in Lewisville. The level of political engagement is just lower in the town than in Flower Mound — so low that Mims failed to find enough people to form a local Democratic club and had to create a Lewisville-Flower Mound one to assemble a critical mass of members.

Mims. however, blames local Republicans who run the county for keeping turnout in Lewisville down by forcing voters to go to the polls at assigned precincts that often change location from election to election, rather than at central vote centers where anyone can vote.

Lewisville's comparative marginalization does not only come from its eligible voters not voting, though. One-fifth of its residents are foreign-born, and many are not citizens. That means they are shut out of the political process.

That is unnerving for some like Jose Colmenares, 56, a former Venezuelan university administrator who fled to Texas last year. He notes that one of the candidates in the presidential race, Harris, seems friendlier to migrants than Trump, who complains of an “invasion” of people from South America and promises mass deportations.

“All of us would support this candidate if we could,” Colmenares said of Harris as he stood outside one of the city's Latino markets.

Alex Salguero came to Lewisville from Guatemala in 1994 and started working as a mechanic. He eventually opened his own body shop in a custom-built building on a downtown corner. He is aghast at the way Trump talks about immigrants — “it hurts our heart” — and said many Latinos in town feel that way, but were dispirited by the complexities of the U.S. election system.

He cited 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won 3 million more votes than Trump nationally but lost because Trump beat her in the Electoral College.

“That's when you go back and say, ‘Why did I vote?’” said Salguero, who remains a regular Democratic voter.

Ivan Barrera, 32, works in Salguero's shop and shares his boss' concern about the former president's rhetoric on immigration. Still, he is leaning toward Trump because Barrera normally votes Republican.

“I don't want nothing given to me,” Barrera said, "because I know nothing was given to my parents growing up."

Barrera's trying to persuade his parents, Mexican immigrants who live outside Lewisville, to support Trump.

There's a catch. His parents have been citizens for decades, but they still are not registered to vote.

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