Time to shift gears a little bit and start to break down Bexar County CD-23 into slightly greater detail....
Let's start with looking at the most Republican part of the County, the Northeastern Part of the District....
It consists predominately of precincts located within the City of San Antonio, as well as some Unincorporated areas, that are effectively suburban in nature.
I agree, you pulled out pretty much the crucial part of TX-23 here. This is the most wealthy, white, traditionally Republican, high turnout part of San Antonio, and it has absolutely no legitimate business being in a Hispanic VRA seat (which is why it was included in the district, to stop Hispanics from being able to elect their candidate of choice). The other part of why it is included is that, particularly in the northern part, it has more white/wealthy/Republican/high turnout
population growth, which is key to keeping TX-23 Republican leaning over time and offsetting the effect of Hispanic population growth. That is key to an effective gerrymander/vote rigging scheme in areas with significant population growth and demographic change - picking out the right areas of empty land to include in the district, because you know in advance who will move into those empty areas of land.
This area is also particularly critical in midterms because it is high turnout, and suffers less from midterm (I am not looking at any numbers, but I am pretty sure that if you checked, the % of the total vote cast by those precincts in TX-23 would be higher in midterms than in Presidential years).
The big problem is Hurd has done a fairly good job of differentiating himself from Trump. Indeed, he may have been partly specifically targeting this area and these voters when deciding to be somewhat critical of Trump. So I am not too optimistic that there will be a very large Dem swing here, and if there is not, that is the key for Hurd to hold on.
And of course, it makes absolutely no substantive sense for this to be the case that the crucial voters in a Hispanic VRA seat should be high income/high turnout whites, but that's why it's a
fake Hispanic VRA seat rather than a real one.
