EDINBURG, Texas — Clad in pressed jeans and cowboy hats, dozens of riders on horseback and drivers in pickups kicked up dust along a dirt road in Edinburg, near the southern tip of Texas. They were there for a cabalgata, a traditional horse procession, with a political message: Send Tejano singer Bobby Pulido to Congress. Some were lifelong Democrats.
Others had voted for President Trump two years ago. But on this Saturday, they all rode for Pulido, a Democrat trying to flip a House seat Trump carried by 18 percentage points in 2024. Among them was David Lopez, 54, astride his brown horse, Black Jack.
He voted for Trump because he saw him as a good businessman. But now, Lopez says the president’s tariffs have hurt his truck and trailer repair shop in nearby McAllen, and business is down about 20% from last year. Trump is no longer doing a good job,” Lopez said.
Two years after helping return Trump to the White House with a Republican-controlled Congress, Latino voters are souring on the party in power, fueled by frustration over rising costs and the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. In 2024, Trump won the support of 48% of Latino voters, expanding Republican gains with a group that has long leaned Democratic. Now, that support is cratering.
The president’s approval rating among Latino registered voters has fallen to 24% from 38% at the start of his second term, polls show. Among Latinos who voted for Trump, 65% say they plan to back Republicans on Nov. 3, while more than a third said they were ready to vote for a Democrat or were undecided, according to a Pew Research Center poll released this month. More broadly, Latino voters favor Democrats in House races 51% to 24%, and those who sat out the 2024 election are leaning toward Democrats.
Those shifts could help decide control of the House, in part because Republicans in Texas and Florida redrew their congressional maps betting that their 2024 gains among Latino voters would last through the midterms. Nowhere is that test sharper than in the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley, where voters say that Trump has failed to deliver on his economic promises and that his administration has gone too far on immigration enforcement, an issue they wanted addressed, but humanely. In more than two dozen interviews in the Latino-majority region, voters say they are driven less by party loyalty and more by frustrations that they have been taken for granted, and want to elect politicians who take their votes seriously.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
