President Donald Trump is heading to Texas for the second time in less than a week — and the third time in less than a month — amid Republican worries about losing support from the blue-collar workers and Latinos who helped build their winning coalition in 2024.
Trump will headline a rally Wednesday evening at Freeman Coliseum on San Antonio’s East Side alongside Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and Carlos De La Cruz, the Republican running in the newly drawn 35th Congressional District. Hispanic voters are expected to be critical to Republicans’ efforts to hold congressional seats in the region. Polls show the party losing ground with those voters and facing unexpectedly tight contests across Texas, including in Paxton’s Senate race and several House districts.
Republicans are spending heavily to defend a state Trump won comfortably two years ago. But voters who turned to him out of frustration with the cost of living are still waiting for relief, and some are growing disillusioned with their choices.
Jeremie Trevino, a 33-year-old Hispanic and Filipino veteran and podcaster who twice voted for Trump, said he wasn’t sure how — or even if — he would vote in the Senate race.
“I’m going to take one from Joe Rogan and say I’m politically homeless on that,” Trevino, a San Antonio native, said in an interview. “I definitely align with Ken Paxton on his Second Amendment view, because that’s big for me. However, a politician is a politician at the end of the day,” describing the decision as a choice between “the lesser of two evils.”
Trevino said he plans to vote for Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar over Republican Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina in the 28th Congressional District, citing Cuellar’s responsiveness to his constituents. “I lean to the right, but that doesn’t mean they should get a free vote,” Trevino said.
That uncertainty reflects a broader unease that voters, business owners and political strategists across South Texas say is straining the coalition that helped power Trump’s victory two years ago.
“When elephants fight, it’s the grass that hurts. And small business and the middle class, we’re the grass,” said Louis Barrios, a small-business owner in the San Antonio area. Barrios, who declined to detail his past votes, said he was heading into the midterms thinking about high food costs, especially the surging price of meat. “Everything gets delivered to us in those refrigerated trucks — they have increased fuel costs,” Barrios said. “So everything has been going up as a result of that.”
The economic pressure is especially acute in Texas, where diesel prices have soared over the past year and there are more registered light-duty diesel vehicles than in any other state. The average price of diesel stood at $5.72 a gallon on Wednesday, up from about $3.22 a year ago, according to AAA. The increase has affected drivers of diesel-powered pickups as well as ranchers, farmers and businesses that depend on trucks to move goods across the sprawling state.
The increase has hit working-class Hispanic voters especially hard, said political strategist Steve Cortes, who served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council in 2016 and advised his 2020 campaign. “They’re feeling that sting, and they’re very angry. They’re also very anti-war, and of course, the war and the prices are intrinsically linked.”
“It’s almost the cliché of the midterm, but it’s so true,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist based in Austin. “It’s gas prices and diesel.”
The frustration is enough to prompt some GOP voters to reconsider.
One Republican small-business owner in South Texas, who said he was considering voting Democratic down the ticket, explained that the political environment has become so toxic that he won’t discuss politics anymore.
“There’s no middle ground,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of drawing Republican ire.
Such disillusionment does not necessarily represent a permanent shift toward Democrats. Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University, said Trump’s gains among Latino voters in 2024 reflected an ephemeral set of circumstances, including dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy and the border, and voters’ memories of stronger economic conditions during Trump’s first term.
“In 2026, Biden isn’t in the White House. Kamala Harris isn’t on the ballot, and Trump hasn’t kept the promise on economic prosperity,” Jones said.
Republicans cautioned against interpreting the polls as evidence that Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters have disappeared. They said that the party doesn’t need to replicate Trump’s 2024 margins to stay competitive and that low-propensity voters among the working class who support Trump remain challenging for pollsters to capture.
A new NBC News-Telemundo poll shows 27 percent of Hispanic voters have a positive view of the Republican Party, compared with 30 percent in 2022, when Republicans took control of the House.
The survey also found a growing identification with the president’s populist Make America Great Again movement, with 24 percent of Hispanic voters offering a positive assessment, up from 18 percent in 2023.
“The Latino vote is moving from being a racial and ethnic voting bloc to an economic pocketbook voter,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant who recently spent five weeks in South Texas and who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “They will say ICE raids, they’ve gone too far. But remember, these are the same voters that were saying we need we need more border security and more crackdowns two years ago. What’s driving the anxiety and the anger and the angst is the economy.”
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