But of course, we can’t know how many Republicans vote in Democratic primaries, and how much the disparity between South Texas and the rest of the state owes to that phenomenon. Even as there are many signs that the area is moving right, there are also some progressive counter-trends: Jessica Cisneros, an AOC- and Bernie Sanders–backed progressive, mounted a viable primary challenge to the conservative Hispanic Democrat Henry Cuellar — now likely the most conservative member of his party in the House, following the loss of fellow pro-life Democrat Dan Lipinski to a primary challenge in 2020 — in South Texas’ 28th congressional district. Cuellar and Cisneros both failed to pass the 50 percent threshold to win outright, and are headed for a runoff on May 24.

All of that is just to say that Republicans shouldn’t be hubristic about the favorable recent poll numbers, encouraging as those numbers may be. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal poll, for example, also showed 27 percent of black voters saying they’d back a Republican candidate. As it just so happens, an October 2020 Rasmussen poll found something similar: According to that poll, 27 to 31 percent of black voters said they were likely to vote for Trump. But on election day, “Biden received 92% of the Black vote, statistically indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s 91% in 2016,” writes the Brookings Institute. “His support among Black women was never in doubt, but President Trump’s alleged appeal to Black men turned out to be illusory. (His share of the Black male vote fell from 14% in 2016 to 12% in 2020 while Biden raised the Democrats’ share from 81% to 87%.)”