A top Republican strategist is seeing flashing red lights for the GOP in Texas.
Karl Rove, a veteran operative and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, said President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity among Hispanics presents a “big” problem for the Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections.
Nearly 50 percent of Latinos voted for Trump in the 2024 polls, according to Pew Research. A year after that election, however, a staggering 70 percent of Latinos disapproved of his job performance, largely over his handling of immigration and the economy. A poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov earlier this month also found a measly 36 percent approval rating for Trump among Hispanics.
“This is a variable group whose movement into the Republican column in 2024 helped elect Donald Trump to a second term and helped Republicans hold the Senate and the House,” Rove told Fox News’ Gerry Baker this weekend on The Journal Editorial Report.
“It’s a problem and we’re going to see it here in Texas. You can just see the support for Republicans in Texas diminishing, despite the fact that initially there was enormous support for the action in securing the border,” he added.
Rove pointed out that Trump won the Texas district that runs from Corpus Christi to Brownsville by just one point in 2024.
“So if his support is softening among Hispanics, that makes it unlikely that we’re going to be able to knock off an incumbent Democrat,” he said.
Rove also warned that the Texas district represented by Democrat Henry Cuellar will be tough for Republicans to flip.
Trump pardoned Cuellar and his wife in December. The Texas lawmaker was facing a dozen charges, including bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy. But the president quickly turned on Cuellar when he announced that he would seek a twelfth term without strong opposition.
“Not only did the president give Henry Cuellar, who was under indictment, a pardon, but he then expected him to switch parties, and he ain’t switching parties,” Rove said. “That’s going to be a difficult district for us to carry, despite the fact that Donald Trump carried it last time around, by I think, four or five points.”
Trump is facing sour numbers elsewhere.
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted Jan. 8 to 12, just after an ICE agent fatally shot 37-year-old mother Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, found that 57 percent of registered voters disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws. Fifty-three percent also said they believed that Good’s killing was not justified.
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