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."
Polls Show Texas Latinos Swinging Back
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. In September, Cook moved the 15th District to Toss-Up and shifted two of the newly drawn seats, the 35th and the 9th, a notch toward Democrats.
Madrid, who traveled to South Texas this fall, said voters there pointed to concrete grievances. He cited the administration's support for Argentine beef imports in a region built on ranching.
"This is cattle ranching country," he said. "He's literally poking the stick in the eye of fifth-generation Hispanic cattle ranchers. It's not like an academic discussion or a debate. He's directly attacking their businesses."
Deportations matter too, Madrid said, in part because they are "destroying the workforce in agriculture and in construction."
South Texas Voters Turn on the GOP
Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and director of the Lone Star Project, said Latinos along the border feel singled out by an administration they helped elect.
"They feel like they've been targeted and persecuted," Angle told Newsweek. "A lot of Hispanics on the border do believe in border enforcement and do believe in law and order."
"Democrats need to be careful," Angle said. "That doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's suddenly going to wear a D on their forehead and consider themselves a Democrat. But they are going to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt this time."
Abbott and the rest of the state's Republican leadership, Angle argued, never crossed the president on their behalf. "They figured out that they don't have friends in Washington and they don't have friends in Austin."
Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, doesn't dispute it. Hispanic voters "have moved away from the president quite a lot in the last two years," he told Newsweek, describing "a huge swing against the GOP" in the Rio Grande Valley. Enforcement in the interior of the country is part of it. "Some of that aggressiveness has caused some political problems for Republicans and for the president," he said.
Money is the other worry. In the TSU poll, 52 percent of likely voters in the 15th District said they were worse off economically than a year ago, and 57 percent disapproved of Trump's handling of the economy. Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, who co-directed that poll, told the Express-News that Republicans would be faring much better in South Texas if the economy were booming.
Many of the Hispanics Madrid met on his trip called themselves conservatives, supporters of gun rights among them. Their reasoning, as he relayed it, goes like this: when neither party talks seriously about the economy, they fall back on whichever one shares their cultural values.
"The Democratic Party has gotten unrelatable to a lot of these voters. There's no question about it," Madrid said. "But if they were to solve and speak to the economic concerns, they could very easily get them back."
What Democrats Would Need to Do to Keep Them
Angle laid out three steps. The first is to stop treating any vote as permanent.
"People don't necessarily decide they're Republicans one day, Democrats the other," he said. "Everybody's on a continuum. And to assume that just because somebody voted with your party that time, that they're gonna stick with your party is a big mistake."
The second is ideological room. "Our party has to be willing to be a big tent party and include people who consider themselves moderate and conservative, too," Angle said, adding that some of the most conservative Democrats in Texas are Hispanic Democrats along the border.
Third, he said, Democrats have to "demonstrate that Democrats in Texas will fight for South Texas and will fight for Latino Texans," something he argued Abbott, Paxton and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick failed to do when the raids came.
...
The statewide candidates have mostly stayed on prices. "They're not getting lured into destructive culture wars," Angle said of Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for governor. "They're staying hyper-focused on people."
He also pointed to the party's record in the places it already governs. Harris and Dallas counties were once Republican strongholds, he said, and Democrats there have "done a good job and they've been rewarded by more and more support."
Madrid admitted he went to South Texas expecting Democrats to repeat old mistakes. Talarico changed his mind. The candidate talks to Latinos about wages, prices and corruption, Madrid said, and treats them as working-class voters.
"We're moving past the racial identity politics that defined last generation's Democrats," Madrid said of Talarico and Pulido. "We're not seeing the world in Black and white and brown. We're seeing it in blue collars and green cash."
Pulido has barely run on the party label. He calls the Biden-era "catch and release" policy terrible and wants immigration reform for border families and the businesses that rely on migrant labor. At his farewell concert in Edinburg on October 17, he told about 9,000 fans, "I'm not going to Washington to serve a political party. I'm going to serve you."
The Risk of a Swing Back
Madrid warned that the volatility cuts both ways. The economic frustration that pushed Latinos toward Trump in 2024 has no party loyalty. "They're just blaming whoever's in power at that time," he said.
If Democrats win the House or flip a statewide seat in Texas, they inherit that pressure. Steinhauser believes Republicans can recover if they return to the economy.
"The Republican Party has got to go back to focusing on pocketbook issues," he said. "We have to have a clear policy agenda that works for regular Americans." On Hispanic voters specifically, he said "a lot of political damage has been done," but the GOP "can get it back if they pursue a better policy agenda on the issues that Hispanic voters care about."
How far Republicans can get depends on immigration enforcement. "The Republican Party has kind of a decision to make in terms of what it wants to continue to do there and how aggressive it wants to be," Steinhauser said. "It may continue down the same road. And if so, it may not be able to get some of these Hispanic voters to come back to the GOP."
There are also signs the Democratic advantage is softer than it looks. A ReconMR poll conducted October 5 to 8 found Talarico's lead in San Antonio and South Texas had shrunk to 18 points, from 33 points in September. Hinojosa has said she needs about 64 percent of the Latino vote, Beto O'Rourke's 2018 share, to win; she trails Abbott by 5 points in the Fox News poll. Turnout is another unknown. About half of registered voters in the 15th District did not vote in 2024, according to the Express-News.
Angle said Democrats are not counting on anything: "Texas is still a state that favors Republicans," he said.
"It doesn't just fall to us. We have to take it away from the Republicans."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Emma Lee-Sang