In draft congressional map, Texas Republicans bet big that gains with Latino voters will persist

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

WASHINGTON — In the 2024 election, Hispanic voters fled their traditional Democratic Party roots, casting their ballots for Republican Donald Trump at historic rates in areas long seen as Democratic strongholds, like South Texas.

With their plan to flip five blue seats under a new congressional map introduced in the Legislature last week, Texas Republicans are betting Latino voters will stick with them in 2026.

In three of the districts Republicans hope to capture — the 9th Congressional District in east Houston, the 35th District southeast of San Antonio and Rep. Henry Cuellar’s 28th District in South Texas — the GOP map-drawers crafted new boundaries that make each seat more favorable for Republicans while also adding more Hispanic voters to the district.

These three districts would be majority Hispanic, as would the seat held by Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, whose South Texas seat Republicans are also gunning for.

If the districts were in place during the 2024 election, Trump would have carried each by at least 10 percentage points, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

Such margins depended, in large part, on Hispanic-majority counties whose voters have been moving rightward since 2016. And in 2024, when the vast majority of U.S. counties shifted right, predominantly Hispanic counties saw even more pronounced movement.

Trump carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley after failing to crack 30% in the region during his first presidential bid, and he won 14 of the 18 Texas counties within 20 miles of the border.

But Trump’s coattails extended only so far down the ballot, with Democrats winning numerous local races in the same counties that recorded eye-popping shifts at the top of the ticket. Cuellar and Gonzalez secured reelection even as Trump carried their districts, and even with Cuellar also facing down an indictment for alleged money laundering and bribery.

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, appearing just below Trump on November ballots, ran well behind his party’s nominee in a number of South Texas locales, especially those with larger Latino populations. If the new lines proposed for Cuellar’s district had been in place, the 28th District would have gone for Trump by 10 points, while Cruz would have eked out a narrow 0.1% win.

Without Trump at the top of the ticket in 2026 and three of the five target districts increasing their share of Hispanic voters, the GOP map-drawers are making what could amount to a risky bet that enough Latino voters will turn out again to support GOP candidates across the ballot.

Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has worked in Texas politics for decades and hosts a podcast about Latino voters, believes Trump has a unique appeal to Hispanic voters that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to other Republican candidates.

Especially potent was Trump’s assertion that the economic system was rigged against Americans and he would be the one to fix it, Rocha said.

That sort of messaging transcends partisan affiliation, Rocha said, arguing that Trump in 2024 and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 each overperformed in the Rio Grande Valley and with Latino voters “because their messages aligned around a rigged system, around failed trade policies and reinvigorating economic populism.”

“The newest swingy electorate in Texas”

Trump’s freewheeling lack of political correctness also led some Hispanic voters to associate him with “machismo,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the former Texas Democratic Party chair and Cameron County judge, said. “In some parts of our community, they could relate to that.”

Campaign operatives from both parties pinpointed two issues that drove Latino voters to the right last November: immigration and the economy.

During the campaign, those operatives told the Tribune, President Joe Biden and Democrats struggled to convince voters they were doing enough to secure the southern border, while inflation hit the electorate’s pocketbooks and proved an especially damaging issue for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters.

“Four years of open borders and 12 million illegal immigrants coming into this country did real damage across Texas, but in the Hispanic community in particular,” Cruz told The Texas Tribune last week. “I think that was a big part of the reason why both President Trump and I won Hispanics statewide, and why the two of us flipped the Rio Grande Valley.”

But Rocha doesn’t think this means Trump and other Republicans are sure to hold onto those gains with Latino voters, who he labeled “the newest swingy electorate in Texas.”

Trump’s approval rating is underwater among Hispanic voters. A July national poll by Equis Research found that one-third of Hispanic voters who backed Biden in 2020 then Trump in 2024 are planning to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate. Another one-third of these voters are undecided.

Democrats are gearing up to court Latino voters in next year’s midterms by homing in on the economy, already deploying messaging that highlights Trump’s tariff strategy — which many economists have said will worsen inflation — to paint Republicans as unconcerned with the day-to-day lives of Americans.

“Throughout this cycle Democrats will be laser focused on making sure Latino voters know the harm that has come from the Republican trifecta and highlighting how Republicans broke their promise to lower costs and instead gave billionaires a tax cut at their communities’ expense,” said Madison Andrus, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Republicans largely believe they can outflank Democrats by simply reminding voters of the record-high inflation under Biden’s presidency.

Prices for some common goods have fallen since Trump returned to the White House, a fact that GOP operative Wayne Hamilton sees as a bulwark against a Democratic resurgence among Latinos. “Long term, that's good for South Texas,” said Hamilton, who leads a group, Project Red TX, that focuses on recruiting and supporting Republican candidates in South Texas. “That’s good for the border. That’s good for America.”

Jobs are also likely to be central to any messaging to Latino voters.

In South Texas, many Hispanic voters work in the fracking industry — a sector some Democrats want to phase out in favor of clean energy alternatives. That plan, Hinojosa said, is viewed by Latinos as an existential threat to their jobs and way of life, despite the employment opportunities also generated by renewable energy.

“What’s important to Hispanics in South Texas is quality jobs that provide good wages and working conditions and benefits,” Hinojosa said. Rocha agreed, arguing that Democrats should run ads centered on the “sanctity of work.”

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are looking to do the same. To win Hispanic voters, Cruz said Republicans need to “remain the party of jobs,” calling it his “No. 1 priority in the Senate.”

The National Republican Campaign Committee is also recruiting Latino candidates to run in districts that could tilt in their favor if new Texas maps are approved. Gonzalez has drawn a challenge from Eric Flores, a Republican Army veteran and lawyer from Mission, while Cuellar may face Democrat-turned-Republican Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who is mulling a race.

“Hispanic communities in South Texas are sick and tired of out of touch Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez turning their backs on them time and again,” NRCC spokesperson Zach Bannon said in a statement.

Mayra Flores, a Republican who briefly represented the 34th District after winning a 2022 special election for part of 2022, has already announced a bid against Cuellar.

---

The lineup for The Texas Tribune Festival continues to grow! Be there when all-star leaders, innovators and newsmakers take the stage in downtown Austin, Nov. 13–15. The newest additions include comedian, actor and writer John Mulaney; Dallas mayor Eric Johnson; U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota; New York Media Editor-at-Large Kara Swisher; and U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso. Get your tickets today!

TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.