Though most attention will undoubtedly go to the Russian Presidential election in 2018, where pretty much everyone already agrees beforehand that Vladimir Putin will simply extend his term, for Americans, there is another Presidential election to watch, and one that is much closer to home: Mexico.
With President Trump touting his wall and the DACA dreamers hanging in the balance, voters on both sides of the border are watching and waiting to see what happens in Mexico. The race, which many believe will turn out to be a 3-way race between very different candidates (José Antonio Meade of the ruling PRI party, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the hard-left frontrunner and conservative candidate Ricardo Anaya Cortés), could be decided by mostly by the Mexican diaspora, the great number of Mexicans working abroad in fact. And which city in Texas holds the most of those? Dallas.
Yes, Dallas has the largest number of Mexican voters in Texas, surpassed nationwide only by Los Angeles, but many more than say Chicago, Houston and New York City.
More than 500,000 Mexicans currently living in the US have applied to vote in the upcoming presidential elections on July 1st.
Mr Francisco de la Torre, the Mexican consul general in Dallas commented: “We are seeing the culmination of a growing trend that started years ago,”
“That is that more and more Mexicans in North Texas are people who follow binational lives and have big stakes on both sides of the border. We won’t know what the scope of this will be in the long term, but for now, their commitment in participating in the upcoming elections is clear.”
The Mexican elections will be monitored very closely by the US. The White House’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has warned beforehand of possible Russian interference in Mexico's upcoming election.
Lastly, election years in Mexico are normally also a time for the cartels to put down their mark and expand their territories. As the 3-way race is far from decided, cartel violence is expected to be very high in 2018. Last year, multiple Mexican politicians were killed, including five mayors.
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Worst of it all is the Mexicans will swing to a hard left at those elections probably, making it even harder to get an agreement on NAFTA with Trump