Latino voters shifted substantially toward Donald Trump in 2024, providing unexpectedly large support that helped him win and unsettled Democrats. Redistricting fights in Texas and California now place Latino voters in pivotal positions, with Texas Republicans redrawing congressional districts to potentially gain up to five seats in 2026 and California Democrats crafting maps that target Republican members for the November vote. Both parties are relying on Latino voters as decisive swing blocs, but Latino political preferences have historically shifted in response to policy and events, making such assumptions risky. Historical examples include backlash after Proposition 187 and Latino support for Barack Obama, as well as growing Latino support for Trump across his campaigns.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times) Latinos unleashed a political earthquake after voting for Donald Trump, who has long painted the country's largest minority as an existential threat, in unexpectedly large numbers in the fall. This swing to MAGA helped Trump win, kicked Democrats into the political wilderness, launched a thousand thought pieces and showed politicians that they ignore Latinos at their own risk.
In the Lone Star State, the GOP-dominated Legislature last week approved the redrawing of congressional districts at the behest of Trump, upending the traditional process, to help Republicans gain up to five seats in the 2026 midterms. Their California counterparts landed on the opposite side of the gerrymandering coin - their maps, which will go before voters in November, target Republican congressional members.
Texas Republicans and California Democrats are both banking on Latinos to be the swing votes that make their gambits successful. That's understandable but dangerous. If ever a voting bloc fulfills the cliche that to assume something makes an ass out of you and me, it's Latinos. Despite President Reagan's famous statement that Latinos were Republicans who didn't know it yet, they rejected the GOP in California and beyond for a generation after the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994.
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