The headlines regarding Texas’s proposed congressional redistricting say statehouse Republicans drew a map designed to flip five Democratic-held federal House seats their way. But the Texas GOP’s political math is based on a big assumption: the rightward swing among Texas Latinos in 2024 won’t swing back to the left in 2026 and beyond.
According to The Texas Tribune, “Four of the five districts that Republicans have drawn intending to flip would be majority Hispanic.” Historically, a majority Hispanic district would be a sure bet to vote Democratic. But in 2024, Donald Trump romped in the heavily Latino South Texas, flipping seven counties south of San Antonio. Exit polls pegged Trump’s support among Latinos statewide at 55 percent.
However, a gerrymander moves reliably partisan voters into the districts you want to flip, and moving swing voters is a gamble.
Before 2024, Texas exit polls told a very different story. In the 2022 gubernatorial racethe Republican incumbent Greg Abbott won only 40 percent of the Latino vote, and 42 percent in his 2018 campaign. In 2020, Trump earned just 41 percentbetter than 2016’s 34 percent. You could argue that Trump’s improvement over the three presidential elections is evidence of a trend, but that’s what Democrats thought when their Texan presidential share jumped from 41 percent in 2012 to 43 percent in 2016 to 46.5 percent in 2020. Then it fell back to 42.5 percent in 2024.
Furthermore, we have evidence that Republican support among Latinos, in Texas and elsewhere, has collapsed under the weight of Trump’s mass deportations and higher tariffs.
In recent national polling, CBS/YouGov found that Trump’s approval among Latinos is 32 percent, Emerson College 38 percent, Fox News 42 percent, and The Economist/YouGov at 31 percent. In a June poll of Texas voters by the University of Texas and the Texas Politics Project38 percent of Latinos approved of Trump’s performance. In the national CBS/YouGov poll, 63 percent of Hispanics said Trump is “focusing too much” on deportations, and 69 percent said the same of tariffs.
Earlier this month, The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe reported from the Rio Grande Valley, where Trump performed so strongly last year. She found backlash brewing, partly because “Trump’s tariff policies have put economic strain on a region that’s heavily dependent on trade with Mexico,” and partly because of immigration raids:
In attempting to meet a quota of thousands of deportations a day, the Trump Administration has targeted cities run by Democrats, most notably Los Angeles. But Texas has not been spared, despite Governor Greg Abbott’s crucial role in helping to get Trump elected. McAllen is a city with roughly the same percentage of noncitizens as Los Angeles. Raids have been reported at night clubs, restaurants, and immigration hearings in the area. When I visited a popular flea-market complex, it was unusually subdued; it had been raided recently, a plant vendor told me. Since then, he estimated, traffic had decreased by ninety per cent. The wide-reaching impact of the raids is making some Republicans concerned that, as [McAllen Mayor Javier] Villalobos told me, ‘we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.’”
Evidence of a political backlash is not limited to the Latino electorate. Trump’s national numbers are down across the board, as are the numbers for elevated tariffs, excessive and cruel deportations, and his signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act, known mainly for its looming Medicaid cuts. And Texans have been souring on their state government’s Republican leadership, with the job approval of Governor Greg Abbott—running in 2026 for an unprecedented fourth term—underwater in University of Texas polling for the first time in three years.
And while the radical nature of Trump’s policies is unusual, midterm backlashes are not. Since World War II, the average loss of House seats for the president’s party in a midterm election is 25. Midterms are when swing voters really swing (and base turnout for the president’s party can tank). For Republicans to try to dampen the typical pendulum swing is understandable, but relying on swing voters to hold the line is madness. All the analyses of the partisan makeup of the proposed districts that I’ve seen are based on the 2024 results. But canny gerrymanderers should be looking at voting patterns in multiple elections before shuttling voters around.
According to The Texas TribuneTexas Republicans didn’t even want to take this gamble. They were pressured into it by Trump:
Before he called lawmakers back to Austin to redraw Texas’ congressional maps, Gov. Greg Abbott was initially resistant to the plan pushed by President Donald Trump’s political team to pick up new GOP seats through a rare mid-decade redistricting, according to two people who have spoken to Abbott and the White House about the behind-the-scenes discussions.
The majority of Texas’ GOP congressional delegation was also wary of the idea, with many members concerned that Republican map-drawers could miscalculate and spread their voters too thin—thus putting their jobs in jeopardy—while trying to flip Democratic seats, six people involved in internal delegation discussions told The Texas Tribune.
Moreover, Republicans are taking a risk with a Texas redraw, even though running the Texas table likely won’t be enough to prevent loss of the House. Democrats in 2026 will only need a net gain of three seats to win back the chamber. Again, the average gain for the opposition party is 25. In the 2018 midterm, during Trump’s first term, Democrats scooped up 40 House seats. In 2022, Joe Biden’s Democrats lost nine, just barely losing House control, and that was the sixth-best performance by a president’s party in the 20 midterms since World War II. Republicans picking up five House seats in Texas could save them in a best-case scenario, but far more likely, they would come up short.
A party taking the long view would accept that losing the House is the probable price to pay for implementing a far-reaching policy agenda and not engage in a risky gerrymander. But Trump has never been a long-view kind of guy. And he has even less reason to take the long view since he will never be on a ballot again.
However, Trump would like to deny Democrats subpoena powers. Senate conviction in an impeachment trial or post-presidency criminal prosecution is effectively off the table, but congressional investigations are still no fun. So, he had every reason to pressure Texas Republicans to do his personal bidding.
Much of what Trump has done in the last six months—destabilizing global supply chains, disrupting the domestic work force, slashing Medicaid, rejecting disaster aid requests, hobbling the civil service—has not been done with the long-term viability of the GOP in mind. Yet nearly every Republican officeholder hasn’t dared to say that what Trump wants isn’t what the Republican Party or the country needs. They’re even less likely to break with Trump on key votes. Texas Republican legislators weren’t going to be the ones to go first. But they all likely understand their redistricting plan is not a muscular flex, but an act of obedience.
