Trump’s first stop to sell his new message: Deep-red Texas

President Donald Trump will get his first opportunity to “test drive” his midterm message “later this week, when he travels to Texas, where the Latino voters whose shift toward Trump in his successful 2024 reelection campaign highlighted how he had reshaped the Republican coalition,” according to the Associated Press.

Recent polls show that the Latino vote surge that helped push Trump back to the White House in 2024 has declined from that level.

Trump on Wednesday “will spend much of his time participating in meetings at the White House, including policy sessions and a sit-down with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.” President Joe Biden, the AP noted, “went to swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the day after his speech in the last two years of his term.”

“In 2024, Trump won 48 percent of self-described Hispanic or Latino voters, the highest mark for a Republican presidential candidate in at least a half-century, driven largely by economic anxiety,” Politico reported. “But polling shows Trump’s approval among Latino voters cratering as their satisfaction with the economy and immigration enforcement plummet.”

Texas is about 40 percent Hispanic.

“Senior White House officials have promised that Trump will travel the country regularly until the midterms,” the AP adds. “He so far has hit critical battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina on his economy tour, but he also traveled to reliably conservative Iowa and the congressional district of former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. He has boosted candidates — in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he bantered with Republican Michael Whatley and promoted his Senate run — while sometimes veering far away from the economic points the trips are meant to emphasize.”

Late last year, The New York Times raised the question of whether Republicans had overplayed their hand by pushing to redistrict in Texas.

“Republicans redid their voting map so they could flip five seats to help keep control of the U.S. House,” the Times reported. “But achieving that goal is far from guaranteed.”