Republican Power Grab in Texas Depends on Iffy Latino Gains
Texas Republicans have made public their proposed new map of U.S. House districts in the state in response to Donald Trump’s demand that the GOP swipe some seats in a special legislative session originally devoted to flood relief. As expected, the map is designed to increase the current 25-13 Republican margin to 30-8, which in turn would greatly enhance the currently slim odds of Trump’s party hanging onto its House majority and the governing trifecta that made the recent megabill possible.
The five new districts Republicans aim to flip all went for Trump in 2024 by varying degrees, as Punchbowl News explains, exhibiting both Trump’s margins and the Cook Political Report’s widely used Partisan Voting Index (a comparison of districts to national averages based on multiple recent elections) for each:
– One new seat will have a PVI of R+7. Trump won it by nearly 16 points.
– One new seat will have a PVI of R+3. Trump won it by 10 points.
– One new seat will have a PVI of R+8. Trump won it by nearly 18 points.
– Two new seats will have a PVI of R+4. Trump won them both by 10 points.
As these numbers show, Trump outperformed his party significantly in 2024, and a lot of that was attributable to his success among Latino voters in the Lone Star State. To a considerable extent, the impact of the new Texas map depends on whether Republicans can both consolidate that onetime Latino support and transfer it to congressional candidates when Trump is not on the ballot. That could be tricky, and could even backfire, as Politico reports:
Across counties that were at least 75 percent Hispanic, Trump ran 8.6 points ahead of Sen. Ted Cruz, indicating Latino voters were more likely to cast their ballots for both Cruz’s Democratic rival, Colin Allred, and Trump.
If Latino voters show similar openness to downballot Democrats candidates without Trump on the ballot next year, it could spell trouble for Republicans. The redrawn 28th and 34th districts, which are 90 percent and 77 percent Latino respectively, backed Trump by more than 10 points last year. But Allred came within 0.2 points in the 28th and 2 points in the 34th. (In his 2022 gubernatorial bid, Beto O’Rourke would have won the 28th and lost the 34th by 1 point.)
The new 35th district, which includes part of Bexar County along with solidly-Republican areas east of San Antonio, is 53 percent Latino and supported Trump by 10 points and Cruz by just under 4 points.
Two of the redrawn districts are in the Rio Grande Valley and are represented by Latino Democratic incumbents Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, who both won reelection in 2024 despite Trump carrying their districts. Republicans are expected to run their own Latino candidates in both these districts, but Trump’s support may not be entirely transferable down ballot.
So even if Trump remains as popular as he was in 2024 among Latino voters, Republicans may not do as well in a midterm election. And worse yet, there is significant evidence Trump’s own popularity among Latinos is taking a hit right now:
“Trump had the shortest honeymoon ever with these voters,” said Republican strategist Mike Madrid, who published a book last year on Latino voters. “It lasted a couple of months, but the day he started talking about tariffs and started rattling financial markets and everything that Latinos were voting for him on, which was overwhelming affordability and economic issues, they moved away from him just as rapidly as they moved away from Joe Biden for the exact same reasons.”
The most recent national poll with demographic breakdowns, from Economist-YouGov, shows Trump’s job-approval rating among Latinos deeply underwater at 31 percent positive and 66 percent negative, with 51 percent “strongly disapproving.” Even if he’s doing better than that among Texas Latinos, which is likely, a general drop in support could be problematic given how much depends on consolidating 2024 gains.
Texas Democrats are debating tactical maneuvers to defeat this rare mid-decade redistricting and could deny Republicans a quorum at the risk of incurring fines and getting blamed for stalled flood relief. There will also undoubtedly be legal challenges to what is overtly a partisan gerrymander (which the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly green-lit), but could also represent an illegal racial gerrymander (the impact of the new map on Black voters will attract special scrutiny). It’s also increasingly likely that Democrats in states where they have their own governing trifectas will retaliate — particularly in California — despite state constitutional obstacles to mid-decade redistricting.
But in all these states, partisan mapmakers are making assumptions about midterm voting patterns that may or may not turn out to be accurate and could backfire. Given the near-universal history of midterm House losses by the party controlling the White House, you can understand the GOP’s need for rigging maps and why such dirty tricks might not work.