Democratic candidates are leading their Republican opponents in three Texas congressional districts that President Donald Trump carried by double digits in 2024, according to new polling from Texas Southern University's Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs. The survey found Tejano singer Bobby Pulido, the Democratic nominee in Texas' 15th Congressional District, leading Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz 50 percent to 45 percent. Trump won the district by 18 points in 2024.
In the same district, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico led Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 50 percent to 42 percent. Republican Senator Ted Cruz carried the district by 9 points that year. The poll also surveyed Texas' 28th and 34th Congressional Districts.
In the 28th, Talarico led Paxton 51 percent to 41 percent, in a district Cruz won by less than a point in 2024. In the 34th, Talarico led Paxton 53 percent to 42 percent, after Cruz carried it by 2 points. Republican strategist Mike Madrid, who has spent years tracking Hispanic voting behavior, said the numbers reflect something the political establishment has been slow to grasp.
"People, I think, broadly are failing to understand that the Latino vote is the largest swing vote in America," Madrid told Newsweek in an interview. Newsweek has reached out to the Pulido, De La Cruz, Talarico and Paxton campaigns for comment. Texas' 15th Congressional District runs from Hidalgo County on the border to Guadalupe County near San Antonio and is roughly 81 percent Hispanic, according to Census Bureau data cited by the Texas Tribune.
Trump carried it by 18 points in 2024, and De La Cruz won reelection there the same year by 14, four years after becoming the district's first Republican representative. The Texas Southern University poll now shows both Pulido and Talarico ahead there, a reversal large enough that Madrid called it the third survey in a week to put Pulido up by 5 to 7 points. "While people saw this shift to the right in 2024, most people were thinking it was part of this permanent realignment," Madrid said.
"A lot of people who understand the Latino vote were saying it's not that at all, that it was reflecting the frustration and anger with the economy at the time, and that frustration and anger has gotten worse." Madrid traveled to South Texas this month to see the race up close. "I fully was prepared and have been saying I don't think the Democrats are learning their lesson," he said, before crediting Talarico's approach for changing his view after interviewing him. "He's speaking to Latinos, but he's not speaking to Latinos necessarily as an ethnic group.
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