Texas Republicans are banking on the GOP’s gains among Hispanic and Latino voters in recent elections, seeking to create four Republican-leaning, majority-Hispanic districts in the state in their mid-decade redistricting proposal.
State Republicans on Wednesday unveiled plans for a new congressional map that, if enacted, would likely flip five Democratic seats in the 2026 midterm elections — four of them being majority-Hispanic congressional districts. President Donald Trump has been urging Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms in an attempt to widen the GOP’s narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
“Republicans have been steadily increasing their support with Hispanic voters in Texas, so they no doubt are confident that redistricting could help them gain seats,” Hans A. von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “President Trump’s share of their vote in Texas rose from 34% in 2016 to 41% in 2020 to 55% in 2024. He went from getting a minority of the Hispanic vote to [getting] a majority of the vote in just eight years.”
Trump’s 2024 performance among Hispanic voters in Texas, according to exit polls, was several percentage points better than his performance among Hispanic and Latino voters nationwide. Additionally, Trump’s vote share among Texas Hispanics was only one point lower than his vote share among all 2024 voters in the Lone Star State.
In the 2024 election, 48% of Hispanics nationwide voted for Trump — the highest ever recorded percentage for a Republican presidential nominee — up from 36% in the 2020 presidential election, according to a Pew Research report released in June. Trump notched 56.3% of the overall 2024 vote in Texas to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 42.4%. (RELATED: CNN’s Harry Enten Says Texas Redistricting Could Make ‘Huge Difference’ For GOP In Midterms)
AUSTIN, TEXAS – SEPTEMBER 05: The exterior of the Texas State Capitol is seen on September 05, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
“Everything we know about Latino voters tells us that they are highly persuadable and have in the last few election cycles made decisions based on who they believe will address their economic concerns and priorities,” Melissa Morales, president of Somos Votantes, a Democratic-aligned group that focuses on Latino voters, told Politico on Thursday.
Republicans currently hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats, with Trump notably carrying 27 of those districts in the 2024 presidential election, the Texas Tribune reported on Wednesday.
Two Democrats — both of them Hispanic moderates representing border districts — won their 2024 reelection bids in seats Trump carried that cycle. Democratic Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar won reelection by six points despite Trump carrying his district by seven and Democratic Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez won by under three points despite Trump winning his district by five.
“Republican gains with Hispanic voters in Texas are not just a single-cycle phenomenon,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections, told the DCNF. “Back in 2020, Trump made significant gains, for instance, in heavily Latino South Texas even while losing overall to [former President] Joe Biden. Four years later, those gains continued. I think there is definitely the possibility of a swing back to Democrats to some extent in the context of the 2026 midterm — the non-presidential party often does well in such elections — but in the longer term there probably are reasonable signs of optimism for Republicans with these voters.”
“In terms of the new map draft, I don’t really think Republicans even need further gains with Latinos to realize their maximal gain — it has 30 seats that voted for Trump by 10 points or more, so it’s designed to elect 5 more Republicans than the current map,” Kondik added. “Now, the 2024 presidential result in these districts is probably more of a high water mark than a durable, every-election phenomenon, and Democrats do better, for instance, in the South Texas seats than Harris did in the presidential race. But I don’t think there’s much risk that Republicans spread themselves too thin on this map — maybe they don’t win all 30 seats in 2026, but I also don’t see them doing worse than the 25 seats they already hold.”
National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Spokesman Christian Martinez said Thursday in a statement provided to the DCNF that “Hispanic communities are sick and tired of radical Democrats turning their backs on them time and again.”
“They are forcefully rejecting the far-left agenda that resulted in years of open borders, skyrocketing prices, and woke insanity like men in girls’ sports,” Martinez added. “Republicans are the party of common sense, and Hispanic voters know it.”
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