House Republicans are very aware that the same Latino voters who propelled the GOP to the majority in 2024 could desert them this fall.
Swing districts with large Latino populations in Texas, Florida, Arizona and California will determine control of the House. Republicans made serious inroads last cycle with these voters, especially among Hispanic men. GOP candidates were buoyed by cost-of-living concerns and the appeal of President Donald Trump on the ballot.
But the Latino voting bloc swings widely between the two parties, and the 2024 election feels like a lifetime ago. Trump is implementing mass deportations targeting many Hispanic communities, prices remain stubbornly high and the job market is showing weakness. Now, some in the GOP are growing nervous that these same voters could revert back to Democrats — or just stay home.
Recent elections have given Democrats hope, too. In November, Democratic candidates won the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, two states with significant Latino populations.
“Our Hispanic voters didn’t show up,” NRCC Chair Richard Hudson acknowledged in an interview during the House GOP retreat last week.
Speaker Mike Johnson was even more blunt: “We got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic, Latino voters because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous.”
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) has been loudly sounding the alarm that Trump’s deportation regime is unpopular among her majority-Latino Miami-area seat.
Plus, Democrats flipped the Miami mayor’s seat for the first time since 1997. More recently, robust turnout from Latinos in the Texas Senate Democratic primary and a special election upset excited Democrats.
Those Texas results even led House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to brag that Republicans went too far and ended up drawing a “dummymander” in the Lone Star State.
Republicans take notice. At a House GOP Conference meeting on Tuesday, Hudson presented polling with a concerning message — Hispanic voters weren’t aware of the One Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans’ most important legislative achievement.
This comes as post-election polls show a nosedive in support for Trump among Hispanic voters. A CNN poll last month found that Trump had lost 19 points on his approval rating with Hispanic voters over a year. A new Economist/YouGov poll found Hispanic voters would back a Democratic candidate over a GOP one by a 43% to 27% margin.
Yet Hudson suggested that Hispanic voters may stay home rather than vote for a Democrat.
“I think it’s more likely they don’t vote at all than they swing back to the failed policies that they have rejected for decades,” Hudson said of Hispanic voters.
In his presentation on Tuesday, Hudson also argued that data shows that Hispanics still trust the party more on the economy than Democrats. And Republicans like Johnson claim that under new DHS leadership, Trump’s immigration agenda is on “course correction mode.”
On the ground. Here’s something to consider – the battleground for control of the House is getting smaller as mid-decade redistricting goes on.
To win a sizable majority, Democrats will have to flip seats that Trump won by large margins. That’s tough to do even in the most favorable of years. Democrats only won a handful of those seats in 2018.
That’s where Latino voters come in. A Trump +10 seat in a Hispanic-majority district could trend rapidly back to Democrats because Latinos vacillate between the parties.
And if Hispanic voters are swinging back toward Democrats, there’s a few things to keep in mind.
1) Republicans will lose offensive opportunities, and it’ll become harder to oust Frontliners in purple seats with large blocs of Latinos. This is critical for Reps. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.) and Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.).
2) Democrats will find it easier to oust GOP incumbents like Reps. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), David Valadao (R-Calif.) and Gabe Evans (R-Colo.).
3) Texas is at the center of the fight for Latino voters. Voters in the Rio Grande Valley swung heavily to the right at the presidential level from 2016 to 2024, turning Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and Henry Cuellar’s (D-Texas) seats into top GOP targets. But Republicans need that trend to continue to take out these two Democrats.
Democrats believe that trend is reversing. They’re testing that theory with Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music superstar running against Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas).
Trump won that district by 18 points. But Pulido told us that Trump’s immigration policies have upended the local economy and voters have soured on De La Cruz.
Here’s Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) summing up the Democratic optimism in his home state:
“There are five majority-Latino counties in Texas where more Democrats came and voted in our primaries than voted in those counties in the general election. The Latino voters are swinging back in Texas in a big way.”
4) Republicans are banking on an upcoming redraw of Florida’s congressional map to help bolster their razor-thin House majority. Yet that means assuming Cuban voters in South Florida are sticking with the GOP as the embattled communist regime teeters on the verge of economic collapse. With the situation so fluid, that’s no sure thing.
SAVE Act update. Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-Mo.) amendment package for the SAVE America Act is here. It addresses Trump’s demands for changes to the underlying bill, including an attempt to defuse GOP divisions over the president’s demand to significantly restrict mail-in ballots. The Senate floor debate over the legislation will resume at noon today.
