Hispanic voters in Texas helped deliver a record share of their vote to Donald Trump in 2024, but recent polling suggests that support has weakened ahead of the 3 November midterm elections. Surveys taken since late summer indicate that most Texan Hispanic voters disapprove of the president, and that they favour Democrats over Republicans by a significant margin.
The shift is being watched closely in the Rio Grande Valley, where the Democratic Party hopes to make gains in a state Republicans have long dominated. Analysts and voters interviewed in the region described a mix of frustration over immigration enforcement, anxiety about living costs and a wider unease with the two main parties.
Immigration enforcement divides voters along the border
Early one Friday, worshippers arrived at La Lomita Catholic Chapel, a small whitewashed building in the Rio Grande Valley that has stood since the American Civil War and sits about 200 yards from the river. Father Roy Snipes, who has served there for almost half a century and is known locally as the Cowboy Priest, used his short sermon to criticise the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
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“There’s no good excuse to detain, incarcerate and deport poor, good folks who are our neighbours,” Snipes told a congregation of about 30, mostly Hispanic worshippers. He said that while the government had promised to target the worst offenders, he had seen ordinary workers stopped and detained.
The concern is not confined to the chapel. According to government figures obtained by the Deportation Data Project, Texas accounted for roughly one-third of all ICE arrests nationwide in July 2026, a larger share than any other state. After the service, two members of the congregation said that many of their students were having to leave because their parents were being deported.
The Rio Grande Valley was once one of the busiest crossing points on the US-Mexico border. Under former President Joe Biden, hundreds of thousands of migrants passed through the area, and more than two and a half million apprehensions were recorded in a single year. Trump promised during his 2024 campaign to stop illegal crossings, and border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades.
Polls point to slipping Hispanic support for Trump
That promise helped drive Trump’s strong showing among Hispanic voters in Texas, where he took around 55% of their votes, a record for a Republican presidential candidate. Recent polling, however, suggests much of that support has ebbed away since 2024.
Javier Villalobos, the Republican mayor of McAllen, one of the largest cities in the valley, said he expected Republicans to find the coming election difficult. He credited the Trump administration with tackling the border problem, and said most people accepted the deportation of criminals and violent offenders. “But if you start deporting people that are productive and law-abiding, that is where the problem is,” he said.
Mario Guerrero, a young Mexican-American businessman who leads the South Texas Builders Association, voted for Trump three times in a row but plans to vote Democrat in November. He said he backed Trump in 2024 because of the rise in immigration under Biden and believed the border needed fixing. He said he had not understood how far the government would go, and he pointed to recent shootings involving ICE agents in US cities.
Guerrero’s experience reflects a distinction many border residents make between border security and immigration enforcement. He described a local businessman who once employed 35 workers every day and who now said he would be lucky to get four to six people to turn up.
Redrawn 15th district tests Democratic hopes
Mike Madrid, a leading Republican consultant and expert on Hispanic voters, said Latinos were more likely than any other racial or ethnic group in the country to identify as independents rather than Republicans or Democrats. Guerrero, who plans to vote Democrat, also described himself as neither a Democrat nor a Republican.
Republicans had hoped that Hispanic voters were moving permanently towards their party, and that belief helped prompt Trump to press states including Texas to redraw their congressional maps early, before the once-a-decade census. Texas’s 15th congressional district, which was redrawn after the 2020 census and won by a Republican in 2022, has since been redrawn again in 2025. That change created a notional 18-point Republican majority, yet current polling suggests a Democratic lead of five or six points.
Bobby Pulido, the Democratic candidate for the seat, is a popular Tejano singer and a two-time Latin Grammy winner. At a recent event he told the that many people were disillusioned with both parties. He has distanced himself from the national Democratic brand and focused on economic issues, arguing that voters in the valley want to hear about the economy before social justice or climate change.
That message matches what many polls show: the economy and the cost of living rank highest among voters’ priorities. At a local avocado festival, Dave Baldwin and Veronica Salazar quickly raised rising prices when asked about the election, and they blamed the president for the increases. “He is in control of our destiny with all that, and right now he’s not doing a very good job,” Baldwin said.
Republican campaigners in the area appear to be on the back foot. Alexis Uscanga, a student volunteer knocking on doors for Republicans in the district, said the midterms were largely a contest over turnout. Tano Tijerina, the Republican candidate in the neighbouring, Democratic-held 28th district, credited Trump with “breaking through barriers” but acknowledged that the “national political headwinds are real”.
If polling proves accurate, and there is no guarantee that it will, even a modest swing back to Democrats in November could reshape races well beyond Texas. In the state, it could also put a US Senate seat in play, a prospect that matters because Democrats have not won one there in more than 30 years.
