HARLINGEN, TEX. — The arena’s spotlights reflected off Eric Flores’s silver watchband as he walked to the lectern to address the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September. “Good afternoon, patriots,” Flores told the cheering crowd. “I’m proud to be your Republican nominee for Texas’s 34th Congressional District — a district that starts at the Rio Grande River and runs all the way to the Corpus Christi Bay.”
Flores didn’t mention it, but the 34th hadn’t always made it the full 200 miles from the border to Corpus Christi. The year before, under direct instruction from the White House, Republicans stretched the district like a rubber band, pulling it up over Republican voters who lived far north of the heavily Latino borderlands. To win this freshly drawn district, Republicans knighted Flores, a former assistant U.S. attorney, as the new conservative face of Latino South Texas. President Donald Trump endorsed Flores months before the primary and praised the candidate onstage at an event in Corpus in February, assuring the crowd that Flores was “winning.”
Just 11 days after the midterm convention, a tense-looking Flores took the podium in a much different venue: a sleepy public library in Harlingen, near the border. By the time he addressed the retirees and local candidates who had gathered here for the North Cameron County Republican Club meeting, the heavily redistricted seat no longer looked like an easy win for conservatives. Speakers admitted to being tired and anxious. “Republicans … we’re minorities here,” one local conservative said in a speech before Flores was invited up to the mic.
Last summer, the White House instructed Texas legislators to redraw their congressional maps to create five new Republican seats in Congress, a process that involved substantially redrawing four seats in South Texas. Yet from the beginning, South Texas conservatives worried that national Republicans had gotten overconfident about their advantage in the borderlands, where counties are majority Latino and disproportionately low-income. Now, decisions made in D.C. threaten to backfire, imperiling the promising political careers of Flores and of multiple rising conservative Latino stars.
On paper, Flores’s newly drawn district looked like an easy Republican victory, a seat Trump would have won by a 10-point margin. But while Trump won most South Texas counties in 2024, downballot Republicans did not perform nearly as well.
A data analysis by The Washington Post found that voters in South Texas were among the most likely to split their tickets in 2024. While Trump won the four newly redrawn districts in South Texas by a combined 12-point margin, Republican congressional candidates had an edge of eight points. That makes Democrats much more competitive. This year, all four seats are competitive, or even leaning Democratic, according to the Cook Political Report’s race ratings.
In September in the Harlingen library it was clear to many in the room, including Flores, that he was no longer the presumptive front-runner in his race. Pacing in front of the lectern, Flores gestured to his red polo and blue chinos, explaining that he’d ditched the suits he’d worn when he launched his campaign. “You see me like this, ’cause now we’re in combat,” he said.
Along the border, local politicians have been quick to point out that the new maps weren’t drawn by South Texans; indeed, they weren’t drawn by Texans at all. The Republican National Committee hired a Virginia-based redistricting expert, Adam Kincaid, to create the maps. Fielding demands from the White House, Kincaid used the 2024 presidential results, as well as recent gubernatorial and Senate races, to create districts where Trump would have had at least a 10-point edge over Kamala Harris in 2024. In total, Kincaid created five of these new Trump districts, four of which are in South Texas.
Kincaid defended this process, arguing that, in the complex world of political map-drawing, the state-of-the-art method is to avoid using congressional data. “You don’t use House elections to draw congressional seats,” he said. “Because every cycle is different. Some you have [candidates running] unopposed, some are opposed. You have differences in candidate quality. So when you’re drawing a statewide congressional map, you use statewide election results to anchor them.”
But in South Texas, the differences between statewide results and local congressional results are some of the most pronounced in the entire country. Across the borderlands in 2024, thousands of voters picked Trump, then voted Democrat down the rest of their ballots. In many counties that Trump carried, local Democrats still won by substantial margins.
The politics of South Texas are in flux. Before 2018, Latino voters along the border spent generations supporting Democratic candidates by margins that ran as large as 70 percentage points; that began to change in 2020, when voters here began shifting right at a historic pace. For years, even some liberals in South Texas had thought that Democrats took Latinos for granted, expecting them to fall in line each election. In 2024, Trump pulled off an incredible upset, sweeping most of the Texas border counties. Now, however, some South Texans think Republicans have made the same mistake the Democrats did: After just a few cycles, they began taking Latino voters for granted, assuming that their votes for Trump in 2024 meant they had become permanent GOP voters.
Polls and forecasts indicate that voters may be swinging away from Republicans again; the question is how far. If voters vote like they did in 2018, Republicans will get clobbered in all four new districts by double-digit margins. Even if residents here vote as they did in 2020, when the rightward shift began, Democratic House candidates will still have an edge: They would win at least two of the four districts outright; one would be a true tossup.
In his stump speech in the library, Flores acknowledged that the campaign had worn him down. “People say, ‘Eric, we’re praying for you, you look tired.’ I am tired. I am,” he told the room. “But I’m gonna ride this vehicle until the wheels completely come off.”
One of the Republicans who recruited Flores last year was Rep. Monica De La Cruz, from the neighboring 15th District. In 2020, De La Cruz, an insurance agent, came stunningly close to beating the Democratic incumbent in a district that had voted blue by double-digit margins just two years earlier. In 2021, during the normal decadal redistricting cycle, Texas Republicans aggressively redrew the maps to give De La Cruz an advantage, and in 2022, she became the first Republican to represent the 15th District in more than a century.
After redistricting, De La Cruz helped tap strong candidates to run for the new seats; besides Flores, she also recruited her brother Carlos De La Cruz, an Air Force veteran, to run in the new 35th District. That district, which went for Trump by a 10-point margin, was supposed to be one of the safer Republican seats created during redistricting. But over the past year, the Cook Political Report has rated it as more and more competitive; now it’s a battleground that leans Republican.
Both siblings could lose in November. Last year, Republicans carved apart Monica De La Cruz’s district, pulling her voters east and west to weaken Democratic incumbents there. Now, that redistricting could cost the GOP one of its own incumbents. De La Cruz has admitted to her supporters that the redrawn maps have hurt her chances of holding her seat.
In office, De La Cruz has put her congressional staff to work on constituent services, helping families with immigration cases and federal grants. That work has impressed even local Democrats. “I think she’s done a good job as congressperson. She’s easy to work with,” said Democratic state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa. “She has really spent a lot of time in smaller communities, responding to their needs.”
In 2024, that outreach helped De La Cruz win reelection with over 57 percent of the vote. Now, Hinojosa expects De La Cruz to lose her race next month. Her real challenge, he said, “is that we did redistricting last session … she’s got a new constituency, which I think makes it more challenging for her.”
While the new maps maintained De La Cruz’s partisan advantage — her district remained almost 18 points pro-Trump — they destroyed her incumbent advantage. More than 60 percent of her constituents are new.
In June, Punchbowl News published audio of De La Cruz talking to her supporters and admitting that one of her own internal polls showed her opponent, the Tejano singer Bobby Pulido, within one point of beating her. “I said, ‘Oh sweet Lord Jesus, right, that is not good,” De La Cruz says in the audio. “But here’s why. It’s not that people don’t like me, it’s that people don’t know me yet.”
When asked in an interview with The Post why she thought the polls were so close, De La Cruz again pointed to the vast changes redistricting had made to her constituency. “When you look at this race, this race is unique because it is an 80 percent geographical difference. That means more hands to shake,” she said.
However, De La Cruz avoided saying whether she thought redistricting was a mistake. “You know, I’m not in charge of the redistricting maps — the Texas House is,” she said.
Last year, Republicans pulled out most of Hidalgo County — the heart of De La Cruz’s district — and put it into the district to the west, in an attempt to use her Republican voters to take down the Democratic stalwart Rep. Henry Cuellar, who has been in office since 2005. Locally, some Republicans have grumbled that this was ill-advised. Until 2021, Hidalgo was part of Cuellar’s district, and he had consistently won there with huge margins.
That means many professional election prognosticators expect Cuellar to defeat his opponent, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina. In a different election, Tijerina could have been a five-star recruit to the Republican congressional delegation: After originally winning office as a Democrat in 2015 (in Texas, a county judge functions as the county executive), Tijerina became alienated from the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden when tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants crossed into Webb County, trespassing on ranches and languishing on the streets of local towns. In December 2024, Tijerina went on “Fox & Friends” to announce that he was switching parties. “The party left me, and the people of South Texas, behind,” he told the show’s hosts.
Last week, national Republicans appeared to abandon Tijerina. The Congressional Leadership Fund, House Republicans’ primary super PAC, pulled out $3 million it had put aside to reserve ads in the 28th District; that money will instead be spent to prop up De La Cruz and Flores.
Cuellar told The Post that he had watched the redistricting push closely last year; he knew that the Republicans were coming for his seat. But when he saw the new maps, he said, he was shocked at how good they looked for him. Even under the new boundaries, he would have won by eight points in 2024, according to The Post’s analysis. In 2024, Cuellar ran 18 points ahead of Harris in his new district. In some counties Cuellar still represents, the gap was more like 40 points — almost half of voters backed both him and Trump. In one border county, Zapata, Trump won by 22 points, 61-39 percent. Cuellar won the county 67-33 — an even larger margin than Trump’s.
Cuellar said that, in the summer of 2025, he approached House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) on the floor of the U.S. Capitol. Cuellar held up his phone with data on his new district. “I said: ‘Mr. Speaker, look at my numbers — they actually made my district more Democratic. Do I thank you, or do I thank the White House?’” Cuellar said.
Cuellar, who was indicted on corruption charges under Biden but was then pardoned by Trump, is a master of retail politics. On a recent morning in his hometown, Laredo, at the local state university, Cuellar was speaker of honor at a grant ceremony where he handed an oversize federal check to the leaders of a sexual assault nurse examiner training program. After the congressman took pictures and mingled for 20 minutes, new attendees filed in, everyone sat down, and Cuellar returned to the microphone to inaugurate another ceremony, this time announcing that he had gotten a commendation read into the Congressional Record thanking a local bilingual educator for her work with her community. The teacher’s adult children took photos as she shook Cuellar’s hand.
This style of politics has rewarded Cuellar with an electorate far more loyal to him as a candidate than they are to his national party. Four of the five counties with the highest rates of ticket splitting in the country are in his district; thousands of his voters supported Trump but then voted for Cuellar.
Republicans like Flores have begun to speak up about the fact that their races are much harder for Republicans than some in their party expected in the wake of redistricting. As the meeting in the library ended and attendees ambled toward the parking lot, Flores told The Post that redistricting hadn’t made his district a GOP district — it had made it a “competitive” district. “People ask, ‘Oh, don’t you think we’re just giving you this big boost?’ Maybe, if this district was Trump plus 20,” he said. Outside the library windows, the shadows slowly lengthened, as if the day itself had gotten exhausted by the 100-degree heat of the Texas autumn.
Flores said his message to his supporters is that he’s running from behind. That’s one of his motivational strategies, he said: “Whether it’s prosecuting cases or training soldiers, my deal is: We’re behind.”
He could still win, but, along the border, some postmortem recriminations have already begun. One of Flores’s primary opponents, Mayra Flores — who briefly represented the 34th after winning a special election in 2022 — said Republican candidates like Eric Flores or De La Cruz should not blame Trump or redistricting if they fail to win their races. “If you can’t win a Trump-plus-18 district, that is on you,” said Mayra, who has no family relation to Eric. “Do not blame President Trump. If anything, President Trump played a huge role in Hispanics voting Republican.”
The map-drawer, Kincaid, likewise argued that redistricting shouldn’t be a scapegoat. “If Texas had not redrawn, do you think we’d be having conversations about any of these five seats?” Kincaid said. “We wouldn’t be talking about them as toss-ups, we would be talking about all five of those districts as safe Democrat holds.”
The day after Flores’s speech at the library, his opponent, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, sat down to lunch 200 miles north at one of his favorite restaurants in Corpus Christi, the port city that Republicans had pushed partly into Texas’s 34th. Corpus is Whiter and less Hispanic than the southern half of Gonzalez’s district, and the city voted more Republican in recent elections than cities on the border did. Based on the math alone, putting it into the 34th looked like a good way to challenge Gonzalez. But Corpus is also the sort of place Gonzalez knows how to navigate. The congressman was in a great mood as he ordered himself lunch (and a box of takeout for his wife) without looking at the restaurant’s menu.
“If they hadn’t driven me into Corpus, I probably wouldn’t have run again,” Gonzalez said, picking at a red pepper on his shish kebab after his meal arrived. “But this is my hometown.” Republicans have given him the chance to represent the city where he was born and raised.
Wiping his hand on his napkin, Gonzalez pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled up the gambling website Kalshi. “I have so much PTSD from tough races that I can’t even believe when they tell me, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be a blue wave and y’all are gonna kill it.’ I’m like, I don’t know man,” he said.
But Gonzalez has begun to believe that the race is in his favor. “Kalshi gives me a 78 percent chance of winning,” he said, holding up his phone to show the graph on the betting site. (The site now puts his odds of winning at 83 percent.)
He thinks that’s an overestimation. “I’d say I have a 60 to 65 percent chance of winning. Now, it’s going to be by a hair, right? It is a tough race,” Gonzalez said. The congressman grinned. “But I’d rather be me than my opponent.”
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