With just 11 days until the midterm election, Texas Democrats have a chance to win two key congressional seats in districts that President Donald Trump won by 10 points in 2024, a Washington Post-Schar School poll finds.
Exasperated by the high cost of living and a deportation agenda that a majority says has gone “too far,” voters in one of the South Texas districts surveyed appear closely divided; in the other, they lean toward the Democrat.
Democrats had invested very little in the 35th Congressional District, which covers the suburbs and exurbs south and east of San Antonio, because the party assumed it had no chance of winning after the Republican-controlled state legislature gerrymandered it earlier this year. The new poll, however, shows the race is extremely close between Republican Carlos De La Cruz and Democrat Johnny Garcia, both political newcomers.
Political scientist Larry Sabato recently moved this race from a likely Republican victory to a “toss-up,” another sign of the opportunity for Democrats in Texas, where they are also vying to win close gubernatorial and Senate races in a state that for years has been a Republican stronghold.
In the nearby 34th Congressional District, which runs along the Gulf Coast from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande Valley, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D) holds a modest 50 percent-43 percent edge over Republican Eric Flores. The poll has a margin of error of 5.4 percentage points that applies to each candidate’s support.
These results are striking. Other polls taken earlier in the race showed a much closer contest or a lead for the Republican. A loss would threaten to upend the rise of Flores, one of the Republican Party’s most promising Latino conservatives.
Trump won both districts by 10 points, but many of his voters are wavering. Nineteen percent of Trump voters in the 34th District now disapprove of Trump’s job performance, and 24 percent disapprove in the 35th. Forty-one percent of likely voters in each district approve of the president’s performance, slightly higher than the 38 percent of likely voters nationally in the most recent Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Thirty-five-year-old Juan Ramirez of Brownsville, who attends school and works as a customer service representative, is an example of a Trump voter who has soured on the president’s handling of the economy.
Ramirez, who was one of the poll respondents, plans to back both Gonzalez and James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, after voting for Trump in both 2016 and 2024.
“It is a retaliation vote; my party sucked this year,” the registered Republican said. “They’ve broken promises, mostly on the economy,” he said, citing high gas and mortgage prices as evidence.
Hispanic voters are a key group in both districts, making up about two-thirds of likely voters in the 34th District and about 4 in 10 likely voters in the 35th.
In the Post-Schar School poll, Gonzalez outperforms Flores among Hispanics as well as those with family incomes under $50,000, and narrowly edges him among voters who did not attend college — all key parts of Trump’s base.
Hispanic voters in the 34th District favor Gonzalez over Flores by seven percentage points, a margin that is far smaller than Democrats’ 21-point advantage among Hispanic likely voters in a national Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll this month.
In the 35th District, Hispanic voters narrowly support the Republican, De La Cruz. There’s little gap between Hispanic and White voters in either district, the poll found.
Both races test whether Republican redistricting efforts will backfire, especially with Hispanics, who feel underwhelmed by Trump’s policy agenda and the state of the economy.
Republicans redistricted the state earlier this year and drew lines on the assumption that Hispanic voters would continue to back their party at levels near Trump’s support in the presidential election. That bet appears to have gone sour, leaving the party at risk, the new poll indicates.
Narrow majorities of voters in both districts, including people who identified as independents, say they prefer to have Democrats control the U.S. House of Representatives after November rather than Republicans.
The poll also highlights the way voters’ economic anxiety underpins political decisions; in both districts, voters cite the cost of living as the top concern far and above other issues such as immigration, health care, taxes, the war in Iran or data centers. Forty-eight percent of voters in the 34th District and 46 percent in the 35th called the cost of living their top concern.
Roughly half of voters in both districts say they are not as well off financially as they were when Trump took office. Just slightly more than 1 in 5 say they are better off.
Immigration was the No. 2 issue in both of the districts, with 16 percent of voters citing it.
The poll also posed a question about the two candidates for U.S. Senate in Texas, asking respondents for whom they would vote if the election were held today. In both districts, Talarico, the Democrat, prevails over the Republican nominee, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Talarico leads Paxton 54 percent-41 percent in the 34th District and 56 percent-40 percent in the 35th. Talarico performed well with Democrats and also earned a majority of support from independent voters, according the poll.
A Democrat has not been elected to the U.S. Senate in Texas since 1988.
Speaking after a campaign speech in Harlingen, Texas, in September, Flores acknowledged that, even though Trump won his district handily in 2024, the congressional election had turned into a much closer race.
“I don’t think it’s a slam dunk for Democrats, and I don’t think it’s a slam dunk for us,” Flores said. “Midterm elections are harder. It doesn’t matter who’s on the ballot. Republican, Democrat, independent, Green Party, Libertarian … people are trained, especially Republicans, to only vote in the general.”
Flores argued that redistricting didn’t make his district Republican-leaning; it simply made it more competitive for both parties. “You’ve made races … that were either landslides one way or the other, you’ve made them more competitive,” he argued.
His opponent, Gonzalez, offered a different take. After years of Latinos living near the border shifting right, Gonzalez said Trump’s unpopularity has poisoned Republican’s chances here.
“When they first started talking about redistricting Texas, I said, ‘This is going to screw with a lot of y’all,” he said, adding that he was cautiously optimistic about his chances.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was first elected to Congress in 2004, once represented parts of the newly drawn 35th District. Speaking to The Post after a ceremony in Laredo in September, Cuellar said that, after the district was redrawn, his colleague Rep. Joaquin Castro lamented that Democrats didn’t have a chance of winning such a conservative district.
Even before the latest polls showed a close race, Cuellar was bullish about Garcia’s chances.
“There is a way to win in that district; there is a way,” Cuellar said. “He really has a good shot.”
This poll was conducted by The Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government from Oct. 14 to 19 among samples of 626 likely voters in Texas’s 34th Congressional District and 605 likely voters in Texas’s 35th Congressional District. Voters were randomly selected from a database of Texas registered voters in each district; live-caller interviewers reached respondents on cellphones (68 percent) and landlines (8 percent); 27 percent of respondents were reached via text message and invited to take the survey online. The overall margin of error for results for likely voters in each district is plus or minus 5.4 percentage points in the 34th District and 6.2 points in the 35th District; all registered voters were assigned a probability of voting to produce likely voter results. Full results at wapo.st/poll archive.
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