You cannot drive through Uvalde without encountering monuments to the tragedy that has become synonymous with its name. In the town square, 21 crosses wreathed in flowers, photos, and remembrances encircle a fountain—one for every life lost in the massacre at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022. Across the city, the victims’ faces, painted several stories tall on the side of buildings, smile down on citizens like guardian angels. Flags bearing the slogan “Uvalde Strong” stand in many yards. In the weeks following the election, they far outnumbered political signs.
But Uvalde, like all of us, is more complicated than the worst thing that has happened to it. Before the shooting, Uvalde County—of which the city, population 15,436, is the seat—was mostly rural, blue-collar, and Hispanic; after the shooting it remains so. It should come as no surprise, then, that it joined the red wave that saw eight traditionally Democratic South Texas counties turn Republican. Uvalde County—which includes far-flung communities such as Knippa, Sabinal, Utopia, and Uvalde Estates—voted Republican before 2016. Now it has done so by a far greater margin. In 2016 Donald Trump took the county by eleven percentage points. In 2020 he won by twenty. This year, that margin shot up to 32.
Uvalde chose Trump for the same reasons that drove support for the Republican candidate along the “blue wall” of South Texas. Rent and property taxes have skyrocketed here. Inflation has driven up the cost of groceries. The chairman of the local Democratic Party told me the party had made the mistake of targeting voters in urban areas, overlooking the rural working class. Many in the area hold conservative views on LGBTQ issues and abortion. Several locals told me, in essence, that Kamala Harris seemed to have no discernable platform apart from being the anti-Trump. The most common reason voters cited to me for voting red was the crisis at the border, about fifty miles away.
Uvalde is ordinary, in other words, in the ways many other small towns within an hour’s drive to Mexico are ordinary. It just so happens that Uvalde’s wound, the way in which it is unordinary, has made it the center of a national spectacle and political fury. In 2022, days after the massacre, gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke interrupted a press conference to lambast his opponent, Governor Greg Abbott, over the state’s permissive gun laws, telling him, “This is on you.” O’Rourke, joined by families of the shooting victims, campaigned for legislation that would prohibit Texans under the age of 21 to purchase a semiautomatic rifle. The proposal went nowhere. That year, O’Rourke lost the governor’s race and Uvalde County voters favored Abbott by 22 percentage points.
Nonetheless, Democrats went back to the same dry well. Earlier this year, state Senator Roland Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, ran in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate against Colin Allred, vying for the chance to challenge Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. Gutierrez’s platform included an assault weapons ban. He well outran Allred, who was more moderate on gun control, in Uvalde County, but still lost badly to him statewide. Cruz, who voted against a bipartisan bill that passed after the massacre and restricted firearms access for those convicted of committing domestic violence, got about a thousand fewer votes than Trump but still carried the county over Allred. Many Democrats thought they could win in Texas by running on expanded gun control; the idea has surely now been put to rest.
The abundance of its white-tail deer has long made Uvalde County a nationally recognized destination for hunters. When I arrived the week after the election, deer season was in full swing; having begun in late September, it will continue into January. Mule deer heads lined the walls of the office of Don McLaughlin, at the headquarters of steel company DKM Enterprises, of which he is president. At 63, he now prefers to sit in a blind and watch the creatures rather than shoot them. “I don’t kill a deer for fun,” he told me. “If I kill a deer, it’s because I want the meat.”
McLaughlin served as Uvalde’s mayor during the Robb shooting. The massacre made him somewhat famous as the city launched into the international spotlight. He called O’Rourke a “sick son of a bitch” when the candidate interrupted Abbott’s press conference. He has been critical of the law enforcement response—and officers on the scene who took 77 minutes to confront the shooter–but he also has accused the Department of Public Safety of treating the local police force as a scapegoat. When we spoke, he’d just been elected to a state House seat, replacing fifteen-term Democrat Tracy King, and had carried his home county by 42 percentage points. McLaughlin’s victory had nothing to do with party affiliation, he told me: the voters of Uvalde cast their ballots for individuals.
McLaughlin—seated across from me at a large wooden table, in front of a framed drawing of Donald Trump—attributed the county’s rightward shift to a deep frustration among his constituency with the Biden administration, which many blame for the immigration crisis. Since the start of Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s mass deployment of resources and personnel to border communities, Uvalde County has seen a dramatic uptick in high-speed chases with law enforcement pursuing suspects of border-related crimes, sometimes ending in crashes and “bailouts,” when a suspect flees the vehicle on foot. (Earlier this year, local newspaper the Uvalde Leader-News reported that there were 68 human smuggling–related car chases by the city’s police department in 2023, an increase of 89 percent since 2021, the first year of Operation Lone Star). “We had so many high-speed chases and bailouts in our community that people wouldn’t let their kids play out in the front yard unless an adult was out there,” McLaughlin said. “And most of them had a gun or something around.”
A Texas House Committee report found that when teachers and administrators at Robb Elementary received a lockdown alert after the gunman crashed his car near the building, the response lacked urgency because they assumed the crash was just the result of another high-speed pursuit. At the time of the shooting in May 2022, the school had received nearly fifty such alerts since February. “That day just turned out not to be a bailout, which is a tragedy, but everybody got complacent,” McLaughlin said. When he was mayor, he said, citizens often came to him with concerns about the border—“these are the things that people got tired of.”
To better understand Uvalde’s issues and how voters think of them, I traveled there and talked with residents at Walmart and other grocery stores, at local places of worship, and on front porches. Inside the Potter’s House Church of Uvalde—a modest structure where Pentecostal worshippers congregated on folding red chairs—Pastor Doug Swimmer welcomed me into his book-cluttered office as he prepared to lead the Sunday evening service. Swimmer, who is half Navajo and half Sioux, moved to Uvalde from New Mexico fifteen years ago and considers it home. He had watched in awe as border counties near Uvalde flipped red. “I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. But he wasn’t surprised by Uvalde’s vote, as someone who had a pastor’s-eye view of what mattered to his flock. They longed for change, he said. An influx of migrants from across the border had put the community on edge. He watched, in the weeks leading up to the election, as Trump-Vance signs took over the city’s lawns.
Swimmer had been deeply involved as a pastor on the day of the school shooting and in the aftermath. He prayed with the victims’ families in the hospital. He went to every student’s funeral. He recalled the mesh fabric that was pulled over the children’s faces and hands in the open caskets. But, he told me, judging by election outcomes the school shooting did not have much political valence. He noted that when the mother of one of the murdered children, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, ran for mayor last year, she drew only one-third of the vote. The electorate was sending a clear message. “It’s almost like they want someone outside of all of that to be able to govern the people with no partiality,” Swimmer said. After the shooting, when the families’ advocacy for raise-the-age legislation was rebuffed by the Legislature, folks largely moved on, he continued. “I think it just got sidelined. There’s still shootings happening, but nothing’s changed about that law.”
I asked Swimmer why he thought voters had moved past gun control as a central issue. In response, he asked if I’d noticed “the kids on all the buildings.” I had—I was struck by their omnipresence. “That’s a constant reminder,” he said. “To be inundated all the time with it, walking out and seeing these kids. It just brings you back to that day, and it’s hard.” Nobody would ever forget the children, he said—their names will be on the new school being built to replace Robb Elementary. But when would life be permitted to resume? When would the crosses in the town square come down? Even in the face of tragedy, he observed, life does go on. Indeed, I stayed for the Sunday evening service at Potter’s House, where one by one, attendees raced to welcome me, to shake my hand and say, “God bless you.” One man with tattooed hands, dressed head-to-toe in black, sat across the aisle from me with a handgun on his hip.
I was reminded of something McLaughlin had said to me—that Uvalde was at a “crossroads” two years after the shooting. “It’s a tragedy. It will always be a part of our history, but we don’t have to let that define Uvalde.”
Carlos Lopez, chairman of the Uvalde County Democratic Party, felt the human propensity to move on often worked to politicians’ advantage. He noted that voters have short memories and news cycles move fast. “We forget about the deaths of children, for Christ’s sake. That’s the ugliness of American politics.” I met Lopez, a Marine veteran with “Semper Fi” tattooed on his left forearm, at the only Starbucks in town, to discuss the election results. He told me that the political battles that came out of the Robb massacre divided the community. The parents who became activists were disruptors of the status quo. Criticism of the weak performance of law enforcement proved divisive in a place where so many have relatives in the agencies. At least at the ballot box, voters have backed law enforcement. City Constable Emmanuel Zamora and Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, both of whom were criticized in the U.S. Department of Justice’s blistering report on law enforcement’s failed response to the shooting, both won in the Republican primary and ran unopposed in the general. Zamora was one of several local candidates who switched their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican ahead of the primaries.
Republicans, as Lopez saw it, had won the gun debate by falsely painting Democrats as trying to seize firearms. O’Rourke’s embracing mandatory buybacks of assault rifles during his 2020 run for president continues to hurt his partymates. Lopez had run in the Democratic primary in Texas House District 80—the seat McLaughlin has now won. His platform included advocacy for raise-the-age legislation (McLaughlin said he was open to such legislation but believed mental health and “social issues” such as violent video games must be addressed first). During his campaign, Lopez traveled to neighboring Frio County, less than an hour’s drive from Uvalde, to seek the endorsement of the county’s farm bureau. After he finished his speech, an older man posed a question: “I’m reading through your website here. It says you’re going to do everything you can to protect children’s safety. Does that mean you want to take my gun away from me?”
Much of the national media described Oasis Outback, where the Robb Elementary shooter bought his AR-15, as a “gun store.” That does not convey an accurate sense of the place, which contains racks upon racks of hunting clothes that flow seamlessly into a restaurant with a full salad bar. If you wade through the sea of camo to the far back left corner—opposite the eatery—there is, in fact, a gun store tucked away in a small rectangular room. If you walk out the front doors, through a courtyard area with rocking chairs and grills, and hang a left, you’ll find the feed store.
Just outside the courtyard, under the shade of a tree, I struck up a conversation with local youth minister Diego Ruiz as he waited for his wife, who was participating in a nearby bake sale, to emerge. Wearing a backward baseball cap, Ruiz looked younger than his 29 years as he corralled his small daughter. He spoke passionately about the need to live out Christian virtues—“protect the poor, the widow, the mom who needs help”—and told me that, though he’d been on the fence, he’d voted for Trump because the Republican Party professed to share his biblical values and tracked closer to his socially conservative views on issues such as abortion.
When the shooting happened, Ruiz had taught U.S. history at Morales Junior High School, a little more than two miles away from Robb Elementary. The kids stopped playing kickball to go back inside for what he and other teachers assumed was another routine lockdown because of a high-speed chase. Afterward, he started keeping a bat in his classroom; he became open to the idea of teachers wielding guns. Ruiz watched as the city became the focal point of political campaigns and gun control activism nationwide. He surmised that this had an impact on the way some voted. “Uvalde kept being used as a weapon,” said Ruiz. “I think that riled people up in a way to show up. I do think that had a huge effect.”
On the other side of the courtyard, seated in one of the rocking chairs, 24-year-old Sean Rodriguez, a gun owner, told me he supported enhanced background checks as a requirement for firearm ownership but was not surprised gun control had failed to animate voters for the Democratic Party. “It’s Texas,” he said matter-of-factly. “Especially with all the ranches we have in the surrounding counties, people weren’t just going to give up their rights to purchase a firearm.” He told me that when he voted, faith and the economy stood as the most important issues. He favored Joe Biden in 2020. This year, he cast a ballot for Trump.
