Texas Republicans’ latest push to cement their dominance could work against them if Trump keeps turning off Texas voters, reports The Washington Monthly.
Republicans are proposing a heavily gerrymandered congressional map this week that gives them control of 30 out of 38 House seats, despite 42 percent of the state voting for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024. But gerrymandering a Republican-friendly map means cracking up blocks of potential democratic voters into GOP-majority districts. And that means inviting blue voters into your red space.
“A gerrymander moves reliably partisan voters into the districts you want to flip, and moving swing voters is a gamble,” writes Washington Monthly Editor Bill Scher.
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According to The Texas Tribune, “four of the five districts that Republicans have drawn intending to flip would be majority Hispanic.” Trump did flip seven heavy-Latino counties south of San Antonio in 2024, and exit polls suggest Trump’s support among Latinos statewide to be at 55 percent that year. But new evidence suggests Republican support among Latinos in Texas and elsewhere “has collapsed under the weight of Trump’s mass deportations and higher tariffs,” Scher reports.
In recent national polling, CBS/YouGov found that Trump’s approval among Latinos to be 32 percent. An Emerson College poll put his support at 38 percent and The Economist/YouGov at 31 percent. Scher said even a recent Fox News poll had his Latino support at only 42 percent. And a national CBS/YouGov poll revealed 63 percent of Hispanics say Trump is “focusing too much” on deportations, and 69 percent said the same of tariffs.
Scher cites The New Yorker reporting a backlash brewing in the Rio Grande Valley, where Trump performed strongly last year. Trump’s tariff policies appeared to have put an economic strain on the region, which is heavily dependent on trade with Mexico. The sight of increased immigration raids also appears to be putting Latino citizens on edge, reports the New Yorker.
“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,” Scher said.
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Midterm backlash has been the reality in U.S. elections since World War II, warned Scher, with the president's party losing an average of 25 seats in midterm elections.
“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,” Scher said.
Read the full Washington Monthly report at this link.