Former President Donald Trump swept the state of Texas Tuesday night as he cruises toward the Republican nomination.
With roughly half of votes reported, Trump led Haley with more than 75 percent of the vote on Tuesday night, leading outlets to call the state — which, with its 161 delegates, is the second-largest delegate state — for the former president. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley continued on her losing streak, receiving slightly more than 19 percent of the vote at the time of reporting.
President Joe Biden is projected to take the states’ 244 delegates in the Democrat primary, but at publication time had received less than half the number of votes Trump received (486,597 votes compared to Trump’s 1,003,333, with between 56 and 58 percent of votes reported in both primaries, according to NBC News).
Texas Republicans also considered propositions that expressed support for creating a “Border Protection Unit,” preventing “the employment of illegal aliens,” ending “all subsidies and public services” for illegals aliens, petitioning Congress “not to grant any form of amnesty” to illegal border-crossers, and requiring “proof of citizenship before an individual can be registered to vote.” With roughly 11 percent of the vote tallied on the proposition votes, all five of the border-related propositions were garnering between 84 and 96 percent support.
Trump beat President Joe Biden in the Lone Star State with more than 52 percent of the vote in 2020.
Trump’s victory comes days after he and Biden made dueling trips to the southern border. Biden visited Brownsville, marking only his second trip to the border as president. Trump visited Eagle Pass, which has seen some of the highest levels of illegal crossings.
The week leading up to the visits, Brownsville saw less than three dozen illegal crossings in a three day span while Eagle Pass saw more than 1,000, according to News Nation.
Biden feigned ignorance about Trump’s visit, saying he had already been “planning” to go and was unaware his “good friend” was going.
Trump has honed in on the unprecedented border crisis made possible by the Biden administration’s deliberately disastrous border policies and rhetoric. Biden scrapped a series of Trump-era border policies upon taking office and tapped his incompetent Vice President Kamala Harris to tackle the crisis.
Unsurprisingly, illegal border crossings ballooned and Biden has unsuccessfully attempted to shift the blame back onto Trump — and on House Republicans for shooting down a bill that would have given Biden media cover but still permitted thousands of illegal immigrants to cross the border daily. The border crisis has been voters’ “top concern” of late, according to polling. More Americans say they trust Trump to handle the border situation better, while a large majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the self-inflicted crisis.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
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