Texas Republicans redrew the state's congressional map last year on the assumption that Latino voters who broke for President Donald Trump in 2024 would stay with the party. With less than two weeks until Election Day, the polls suggest that assumption is cracking. Four of the five districts Republicans targeted in the mid-decade redraw were majority Hispanic.
Governor Greg Abbott defended the plan at the time by telling Fox News that the new seats "happen to be Hispanic Republican districts." Now, a Republican-held seat in the Rio Grande Valley is leaning toward a Democrat, two Democratic seats the GOP redrew to flip are holding, and Trump's Latino gains statewide have largely evaporated. Strategists in both parties who spoke with Newsweek tied the reversal to immigration raids and the price of groceries and gas. Few gave Democrats much credit for it.
For the party, the harder question comes after November, when it will have to hold on to voters who are only lending it their support for now. "People, I think, broadly are failing to understand that the Latino vote is the largest swing vote in America," Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist and author of The Latino Century, told Newsweek. "Most people were thinking it was part of this permanent realignment.
A lot of people who understand the Latino vote were saying, it's not that at all." Hispanic voters in Texas backed Joe Biden by 25 points in 2020 and Trump by 1 point in 2024, according to the Fox News Voter Analysis. A Fox News poll conducted October 15 to 19 found them favoring Democrat James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate race by 30 points, 64 percent to 34 percent, even as the overall race sits tied at 49 percent.
The UT/Texas Politics Project poll released this month has Talarico ahead among Latino likely voters 54 percent to 41 percent. Earlier, a Cook Political Report/TelevisaUnivision survey of Texas Hispanic likely voters, conducted in late August and early September, put Trump's approval with the group at 33 percent and found Democrats leading 53 percent to 39 percent on the generic ballot in the Rio Grande Valley. The clearest test is the 15th District, which Trump carried by 18 points.
A Texas Southern University poll conducted October 13 to 16 for the San Antonio Express-News, El País and the Puente News Collaborative found Democrat Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music star, leading Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz 51 percent to 44 percent. Among Latino likely voters, Pulido led 57 percent to 40 percent. In the 28th and 34th districts, which Republicans redrew to be roughly 10 points more favorable to Trump, an August TSU poll had Democratic Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez ahead, 45 percent to 34 percent and 45 percent to 42 percent.
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