The story of the political transformation of Cameron County, a majority-Hispanic border community at the southernmost tip of Texas, began with the arrival of a billionaire.
His name wasn’t Donald J. Trump. It was Elon Musk.
More than a decade ago, Mr. Musk brought his private space company, SpaceX, to Cameron County, where the blasts from his rocket testing and launching site on Boca Chica Beach rattle homes for miles. His mark is now everywhere. And his face, too.
Downtown, in the county seat of Brownsville, the old culture — part Mexican, part American, part Tejano — clashes with the new: Images of space, astronauts and Mr. Musk adorn buildings that date to the early 1900s, blocks from the southern border. Along the Gulf Coast marshes on the road to his Starbase launch site, a giant bust of Mr. Musk keeps watch over Cameron County’s nearly 430,000 residents and the occasional wayward hog, the world’s richest man honored like a king in one of the poorest counties in America.
Such a tribute would be a mere curiosity were it not for what happened here on Nov. 5.
Mr. Trump did something no Republican has done in 20 years: He flipped Cameron County. Mr. Trump won the county with 53 percent of the vote, the first time a Republican presidential candidate claimed victory here since George W. Bush, the former Texas governor and then the president, in 2004. It was one of a string of largely blue-collar Hispanic Democratic strongholds across South Texas where Mr. Trump made major inroads.
Mr. Trump didn’t have to campaign very hard in Cameron County. Mr. Musk did the hard work for him, by slowly and subtly changing the culture, the landscape, the economy and, finally, the politics of Cameron County over the span of years.
Interviews with more than two dozen voters, local leaders and elected officials from both parties and regional experts show that Mr. Trump’s top surrogate brought jobs, tourism and a hard-line “America First” opposition to illegal immigration to Cameron County, all of which played a role in turning it from blue to red. Mr. Musk opened a door Mr. Trump walked through on Election Day.
