New congressional maps will test the Latino vote in the 2026 election

As a wave of mid-decade redistricting sweeps the country, politicians on both sides of the aisle are being uncharacteristically blunt about their endgame: political power.

With only slightly more subtlety, Texas Republicans and California Democrats are also signaling where they think trends in the Latino vote are going — and how they think those voters will help them gain power in 2026 and beyond.

Latinos’ big shift toward Republicans has been one of the major changes in American politics during the Trump era. Now, the durability of those GOP gains — and whether Vice President Kamala Harris’ low numbers in key swing states and swing districts represents a low-water mark for Democrats or a waypoint on the way to worse trends in the future — are key questions that will determine how newly drawn congressional districts perform for the parties drawing them.

“Those maps were drawn assuming that the 2024 and to a lesser extent, the 2020 results, will provide the strongest indication of what’s going to happen in 2026 for both parties,” said Erin Covey, a nonpartisan election analyst who is the House editor at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

“Republicans are banking on their gains with Hispanic voters that they’ve made in south Texas particularly, not just in 2024 but over the last eight years. … That’s kind of the whole ballgame for them if they want to keep the House,” Covey added.

Texas Republicans bet big on Hispanic voters

Republicans’ optimism about building on their improvement with Hispanics is a clear through line in their Texas congressional map redraw.

As the mapmakers sought to improve GOP chances of dethroning Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, a tough longtime opponent despite a federal bribery indictment, they pushed his district boundaries farther east, creating a district that Donald Trump would have won by more than 10 percentage points in 2024 (Trump won Cuellar’s old district by more than 7 points). In doing so, they turned a 73% Hispanic district into a 91% Hispanic one, a clear bet that political upheaval in the Rio Grande Valley, particularly among Hispanics moving toward Republicans, will continue.

On the other side of south Texas, the 34th District, represented by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, got less Hispanic, but its putative 2024 margin for Trump also grew.

The more dramatic changes happened in Democratic-held districts in Texas’ major metro areas. The new 9th District, now a ruby-red district in eastern Houston and the surrounding area, is 62% Hispanic, and Trump would have won the seat by almost 20 points last fall.

And then there’s the new 35th District east of San Antonio, an area that’s 57% Hispanic that Trump would have won by 10 points in 2024.

Throughout the redistricting process, Republican lawmakers repeatedly stressed their sole lens for redrawing the maps was a political one — pushing back on Democratic accusations, and lawsuits from outside groups, alleging the redraw amounts to an unconstitutional race-based gerrymander. But they highlighted that most of the districts where they hope make gains have Hispanic majorities.

“The underlying goal is this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance,” GOP state Rep. Todd Hunter said earlier this month during debate on the bill, adding that the primary changes to the state’s congressional map are “focused on only five districts for partisan purposes.”

He went on to note that “four of the five new districts are majority-minority Hispanic” by citizen voting-age population, before adding: “Each of these newly drawn districts now trend Republican in political performance. While there’s no guarantee of an electorate success, Republicans will now have an opportunity to potentially win these districts,” he added.

Partially because of rightward-trending Latino voters, no Republican incumbent in Texas will represent a district that Trump won by less than a double-digit margin, and all five potential Republican pickups sport that same floor.

But some of these districts were more competitive in previous elections — particularly the Democratic-held 28th and 34th districts, as well as the potential Republican targets in the 9th and 35th districts.

Brendan Steinhauser, a former campaign manager for Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, told NBC News the “key element” ahead of 2026 is whether Republicans not named Trump can replicate his performance with Hispanics.

“It’s a very plausible scenario that it is durable, but if not, we might have some competitive seats to defend,” he said.

Steinhauser went on to note that Cornyn performed well with Hispanics on his way to re-election in 2014, and he said there are nuanced differences among Latino voters — like between south Texas and the rest of the state, between male and female voters, and differences based on education and income levels. He added that his “gut” tells him that Trump’s Hispanic vote share will likely be a “high-water mark” for Republicans next cycle, “and we’ll be working to get as close as we can to that.”

But partisans disagree, to varying degrees, about what lessons to draw from past elections, particularly given that these Republican-leaning seats were more competitive when Democrat Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost his Senate bid to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018.

Steinhauser said he believed those margins had “more to do with Beto O’Rourke than anything,” and that the Democrat “captured lightning in a bottle.”

Texas Democrats told NBC News that they’ve seen ample evidence in recent cycles of Democrats outperforming the presidential ballot.

Manny Garcia, a Democratic strategist who used to be the state party’s executive director, panned the district changes as a racial gerrymander that drowns out lower-turnout Hispanic areas with higher-turnout white areas (echoing the arguments made against the redraw in court). He added that if Republicans really thought the moves among Hispanics were durable and widespread, they would have made different choices around urban areas.

“When you dig deeper into what is going on, it is the Republican Party hoping and convincing itself that the unique phenomena that happened with Donald Trump and a sliver of the Latino population, particularly rural Latino males, that that relationship will carry on downballot and for many years to come,” he said. “Republicans are making a bad bet.”

Success of the maps could rest on whether Democrats already bottomed out

In California, Democrats drew a map designed to counter Texas by creating up to five House pickups for their party.

But Covey noted they started out from a different point than Texas Republicans — California had far more potentially competitive seats in its map, which was drawn by an independent commission, than Texas’ previous map, drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2021 and designed to shore up incumbent Republicans instead of maximizing potential GOP gains.

Covey added that while Democrats “could have drawn a more aggressive map that gave them as many as seven pickup opportunities” because of how spread-out California Republicans are geographically, the map drawers also took steps to help insulate a handful of Democratic incumbents who could have been vulnerable at some point in the near future, depending on the national mood.

The redraws come after an election that saw Trump not only sweep the key swing states but gain ground compared to his 2020 margins in every single state, even when, in some cases, major Democratic candidates down the ballot outperformed the top of their ticket.

The dynamic raises an important question when considering the new maps: Did national Democrats reach a low in 2024, especially considering the historical trend of the out-of-power party gaining ground in the subsequent midterm? Or did 2024 and the significant voter realignment that powered it signal that the old assumptions are no longer on the table?

Paul Mitchell, a data consultant whose firm, Redistricting Partners, helped to make California Democrats’ new proposed maps, told NBC News that he believes Republicans planning their political futures around the “artificial, high number” of 2024 could be a “real trap,” even as he added his party was “cognizant” of the trends to make sure it wasn’t leaving seats unexpectedly vulnerable.

“Let’s say this trend is permanent, we didn’t want to get bitten by it, so we were being overly cautious. They didn’t seem like they were worried about that,” he added.

Rob Pyers, the research director at the California Target Book, told NBC News he believed that Democrats didn’t take a more “maximalist approach” less out of strategy and more because they feared running afoul of constitutional concerns, after the state’s independent commission drew the maps in 2021 to add more majority-Latino districts. And while some key, potentially vulnerable Democratic seats were shored up in the redraw, he noted that some “previously safe Democratic districts [got] much more competitive.”

“There’s an obvious gamble that the rightward trend in a number of these districts will halt,” he said.

But he also raised another potential wrinkle, one that makes California’s redraw less straightforward than Texas’: the state’s top-two primary system, where candidates run in a blanket primary and the top two candidates move on to a general election, regardless of party.

“When Republicans make up 20%-30% of the vote, the chances of a crowded Democratic field producing an R-versus-R runoff is remote. When Republicans make up 40% or more of the vote, then things can get perilous in a hurry,” he said.

“Factor in multiple younger progressives running in the same district, all looking to take out entrenched geriatric members,” he added, “it’s not difficult to picture things going sideways.”