The Republican mayor of McAllen, Texas, says he wasn’t surprised last week when Democrats saw robust primary turnout in his heavily Latino border region of the state.
“The excitement there was with the Hispanic community and the Republican Party is kind of waning,” Mayor Javier Villalobos lamented.
Some of Villalobos’s family members who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 — fueling Republicans’ gains with Latino voters around the country — are telling him they think they made a mistake, the mayor said. Many people who initially cheered Trump for securing the border now think his immigration crackdown has gone too far.
Villalobos worries that Republicans’ hopes of picking up five House seats with a redrawn Texas map are fading — particularly because four of those districts are majority-Latino.
“There’s a good chance that we may lose one or two of those … maybe even more, based on the way that things are going right now,” he said.
Turnout last week in Texas was the latest fuel for GOP worries that the Latino voters who helped power Trump’s 2024 victory are slipping away ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Heavily Hispanic areas have swung back toward Democrats in key off-year races as polls show the public souring on Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration, among other issues.
Trump was elected on promises to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But the scope of his administration’s crackdown has still surprised some supporters who expected him to focus more narrowly on violent criminals. His deportation push has ensnared undocumented immigrants living in the United States for years, including children, and his deployment of federal agents in Democratic-led cities drew intense backlash — especially after the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida), who has championed immigration reform legislation, said in an interview that Texas is part of a string of warning signs. She pointed to November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where the most heavily Latino counties swung most sharply toward Democrats.
Republicans, she said, are “understanding that because of those excesses of what happened the first year with immigration … the Republican Party has lost this great coalition that we put together in ’24.”
“Republicans must course-correct now before it’s too late,” she urged last week on social media.
Republicans say they always expected it would be challenging to re-create the coalition that elected Trump. The party in power historically loses ground in the midterms, and Republicans have excelled in recent years with voters who are less likely to turn out in lower-profile, offseason races. They warn that Democrats should not read too much into primary turnout and special election results, and say they are working hard to maintain support with Latino voters.
“Democrats can burn piles of cash into a primary and temporarily juice their turnout, but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground that Latino voters are moving toward the Republican Party,” said Christian Martinez, a spokesman for House Republicans’ campaign arm.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said Trump got historic support from Latino voters and “is working diligently to deliver on his agenda to enforce federal immigration law, fix Biden’s affordability crisis, bring investment back to the United States, and more.”
There are caveats to Democrats’ high turnout in Texas’s primaries last week. In heavily Hispanic Starr County, for instance, many voters in the Democratic primary did not pick a Senate candidate, suggesting a disconnect with the broader party.
Still, Democrats’ turnout edge was striking in a red state where both parties held expensive and competitive primaries on Tuesday. Among the 21 Texas counties that are at least 75 percent Hispanic, 20 cast more votes in the Democratic primary for Senate than in the Republican race.
Democratic turnout was also higher in key House races in heavily Latino districts that Trump won handily in 2024. Among 10 Texas districts where the voting-age population is majority-Hispanic, several broke for Trump in 2024 by 10 or more points and last week saw more Democrats than Republicans vote in their House primaries.
Trump set off an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering push in Texas last summer in an effort to maintain GOP control of the House. Trump has openly expressed concern that Democrats — who responded with a redrawn map in California and have an effort underway in Virginia — could investigate him and his administration if they win back control of the chamber.
Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map they hope will net five additional GOP seats. But Democrats could hold some of the seats if Republicans fall significantly short of Trump’s 2024 performance.
In the redrawn 34th District, where Trump won by 10 points, about 56,000 people cast primary votes for Democratic House candidates on Tuesday, while about 34,000 cast primary votes for Republican candidates.
“November’s still a long way away. … We have to be careful and thoughtful,” said Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who is seeking reelection to the district. “But it looks to be a potential blue wave if the election was today.”
Gonzalez said voters are upset about the cost of living, the cost of health care and the aggressiveness of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Local builders who have been supportive of Trump have been sounding the alarm about their loss of labor. The executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter, traveled to Washington last month to warnlawmakers that “South Texas will never be red again.”
Dave Carney, a GOP strategist and adviser to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), said Republicans still “feel great” about South Texas. They plan to make major investments in races there and have recruited candidates to run for local offices that previously went uncontested, he said.
Like many Republicans, he also suggested the backlash to Trump’s immigration policies would ease after recent administration changes. Trump in January sidelined a controversial border official amid an uproar over federal agents’ killings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis and last week replaced Kristi L. Noem as head of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s unclear whether the new leadership will result in significant changes to Trump’s immigration policy.
“I think we’re going to see many of the headlines, and the crisis being fanned by the left, dissipate to a great extent,” Carney said.
But Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist focused on Latino voters, said he’s been struck by the consistency of the trend lines among different Latino communities around the country — from Dominican Americans in New Jersey to Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.
His takeaway: Latino voters are “de-aligned and detached from both parties,” meaning they can swing back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. Right now, Madrid said, Republicans have “completely overplayed their hand.”
Scott Clement and Teo Armus contributed to this report.
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