Trump’s Surge With Latino Voters Is Upending The Congressional Battleground Map

Donald Trump's surge among Latino voters is upending the American political map.

Republicans and Democrats alike had largely assumed the battlefield was set, with a small number of competitive congressional districts drawn just a few years ago. But Trump’s improvement with Hispanic communities — one of the most dramatic shifts emerging from the 2024 election — is blowing all of that up, leaving Republicans plotting how to capitalize on Trump's success and Democrats scrambling to keep a once-loyal demographic in the fold.

Nowhere is this upheaval more evident than in emerging House battlegrounds. Among the heavily Hispanic areas that rapidly shifted to the right in their presidential votes this year: A district that Republicans drew to combine two Democratic seats together in Texas' Rio Grande Valley. A district in northern New Jersey that Joe Biden carried by 19 points in 2020. A Central Valley district that twice rejected Trump by double-digit margins.

"There's definitely a realignment going on in American politics, and these voters are increasingly winnable," said Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the largest House GOP super PAC. "We would be foolish not to compete for them."

The early data suggests he’s right. A swath of districts with significant Latino populations swung hard to the right in 2024. And while the precise extent of that shift is unclear because votes are still being tallied, one thing has become apparent to both parties: Seats that used to moderately favor Democrats now look far more competitive, and seats that were once safely blue are now coming onto the map.

Democrats are warning that they need to overhaul their strategy in those districts. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who holds the South Texas district drawn to be safely Democratic, lamented the party's "very progressive messaging" that turned off voters in his "relatively conservative community." One crucial example: "We overplayed the abortion card and when you’re doing that in an 80 percent Catholic community it's not very effective."

"I hope we're learning our lessons and we're able to adjust and pivot and win next cycle," he said. "Do we want to be in the majority? If we do, we need to change our game plan because what we did didn’t work."

The last redistricting created a tight number of competitive seats — but a good chunk of the data used for those maps is already out of date thanks to Trump's growing popularity with communities of color.

Republicans will have a wider path to grow their House majority — if they can figure out how to take advantage of Trump’s inroads in these Latino-heavy areas in Nevada, New Mexico, South Texas, Central California and Florida.

“Trump’s victory shattered pre-existing notions about party coalitions and reshapes how we look at the House map for 2026,” said Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), the head of House Republicans’ campaign arm.

The good news for Democrats: Trump's rightward lurch in 2024 wasn't enough to topple their incumbents in those places. Though it likely helped some GOP members hang on, Republicans know that Trump's success doesn't always trickle down the ballot.

"If Republicans deliver on some of the things that we promised, then I think it could be long term," said GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents a sprawling West Texas border district that has shifted to the right in recent years. "But this isn't all of a sudden now they're Republicans for life, no matter what we do."

The 2024 swings in Latino areas were shocking to Democrats because of their severity and geographic breadth. But warning signs had begun flashing in 2020.

In South Florida, two Miami-area districts that Democrats flipped in the 2018 midterms swung back hard to the GOP as Cuban communities flocked toward Trump. Four years later, those districts shifted even farther toward Republicans, as did the district of neighboring Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz and the Orlando-based seat of Democratic Rep. Darren Soto — enough so that both will likely land on future GOP target lists.

In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, three adjoining districts, including Gonzalez's, saw a similar swing in 2020. Neither party believed them to be competitive until Biden barely won them.

Texas Republicans redrew those seats in 2021, packing Gonzalez’s current district with Democratic voters to give them a better shot at flipping the other two. Both of them went for Trump in 2024 — but so did Gonzalez’s, which swung right by more than 15 points. He won reelection by less than 3 points.

Republicans were gleeful at the rapid transformation and another Texas surprise: Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar’s once-deep blue El Paso seat also leapt to the right.

“It swung 20 points,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “The trend we're seeing in the Rio Grande Valley may be extending all the way up to El Paso.” That seat could become competitive for the GOP by the end of the decade, he predicted.

Giant swings also appeared in Hispanic communities in bluer states that had maps drawn by commissions or Democratic legislatures. In some of those places, Democratic mapmakers opted to spread their voters out to make several Democratic-leaning seats rather than one or two reliable ones — a strategy that can leave them susceptible in wave election years.

“We said at the time, they were stretching themselves pretty thin,” Kincaid said. “In the first real test of those maps, Donald Trump broke all of them. He broke California, he broke New Mexico, he broke Nevada.”

Yet Democratic incumbents in those states held on even as their districts turned redder at the presidential level. Early results suggest Trump won the districts of Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) and Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) in 2024. Biden carried both in 2020.

“We have a lot of crossover voters, Trump-Vasquez voters,” Vasquez said. “I voted in the best interest of my district the two years that I was here, and sometimes those were tough votes to take and sometimes I voted against my party.”

Latino Democrats said in interviews that their party needs to rethink messaging and recruitment in Latino-heavy districts. The first step will be studying campaigns that worked, such as those run by Vasquez, Gonzalez or Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who won an open Senate seat in Arizona.

“There is a playbook here that the Democrats have consistently and traditionally used to win over Hispanics that I think just was diluted this cycle,” said Dan Sena, a former executive director of the House Democratic campaign arm who is himself Hispanic. “Trump has the ability to dilute it.”

Trump’s strong performance this year means Democrats are likely to have far more members in Trump-won districts than Republicans will in districts won by Kamala Harris. Some of the potential members in House Democrats’ program for vulnerable incumbents will not have seen a competitive race in years.

In California’s Central Valley, Trump gained ground in the seats held by Democratic Reps. Josh Harder and Jim Costa, giving them closer-than-expected reelections.

And GOP operatives believe that Trump carried the neighboring district of Rep. David Valadao, a Republican who voted to impeach him in 2021 — though votes are still being counted. Valadao’s voters had backed Democratic presidential candidates by at least 10 points for the last three elections.

Yet for Republicans to ride Trump’s newfound strength, they will need his voters to turn out when he will not be on the ballot. GOP candidates may struggle to win over voters in these districts if their allegiance is to Trump alone. And some Democrats are banking on that.

“It was really all about Trump — not necessarily the red wave, but the Trump wave,” said Rep.-elect Nellie Pou, who won in a heavily-Hispanic district in northern New Jersey that Trump appears to have carried in 2024 after Biden won it by 19 points in 2020.

And even she was stumped as to whether Trump’s pull with Latino voters will persist.

“I honestly don't know the answer to that,” she said. “I think it was just something very different. I'm not sure I can explain what that was.”