Texas polls suggest Hispanic voters are moving away from Trump before midterms

Redrawn 15th District carries a notional 18-point Republican majority

Surveys taken since late summer suggest much of Donald Trump’s support among Texas Hispanic voters has ebbed since 2024. They indicate that a majority of Texas Hispanic voters disapprove of the president and favor Democrats over Republicans by a significant margin, while the BBC cautioned there was no guarantee the polls would prove correct. Trump took around 55% of Hispanic votes in Texas in 2024, a record for a Republican presidential candidate; the BBC called the Hispanic shift toward him “one of the most striking political facts of the past decade.” A BBC image caption noted that Trump had campaigned in Texas earlier in October 2026 and described the close Senate race as “hotly contested.”

It was in part the belief that Hispanic voters were shifting permanently toward the Republican Party that led Trump to press states such as Texas to redraw their congressional maps early, before the once-a-decade census, the BBC reported. The strategy was intended to capitalize on what Republicans saw as a realignment in Hispanic voting behavior, particularly in border districts that had been Democratic strongholds for more than a century.

Texas’s 15th congressional district was among those redrawn, and the BBC described it as one of the clearest tests of whether electoral maps can guarantee political outcomes. The seat was redrawn after the 2020 census and won by a Republican in 2022. It was redrawn again in 2025, creating a notional 18-point Republican majority for the midterms; current polling suggests a Democratic lead of five or six points. The BBC also noted that Hispanic voters may not have much love for either party, even though a two-party system leaves them mostly forced to make a choice.

At La Lomita Catholic Chapel in the Rio Grande Valley, Father Roy Snipes has served for almost half a century. The whitewashed building has stood since the American Civil War, rises from the surrounding scrub and sits about 200 yards from the Rio Grande. As cars pulled up before dawn on Friday, the sound of Snipes’s barking dogs signaled his arrival. Known locally as the “Cowboy Priest,” he said, “I’m not sure why I picked that up, but it’s nice.” He wears a Stetson in place of a more traditional priest’s hat, and moments later the chapel filled with the sound of a Roy Rogers song — the singer and actor known as the King of the Cowboys. During the first Trump administration, Snipes resisted plans to seize the chapel’s land for a border wall. Eight years on, his short sermon at the early Friday service focused on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. About 30, mainly Hispanic worshippers attended. “There’s no good excuse to detain, incarcerate and deport poor, good folks who are our neighbours,” Snipes told the congregation.

“They said we’re gonna seek out, capture, detain and deport the worst of the worst,” Snipes said in his sermon. “Well, we’re here on the border and the cartel is the worst-of-the-worst. So we thought, well, that’s a good thing. But it turned out, you can hear almost every day, some poor guy going to work and they stop him and detain him and start a big fight.” 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 stopped to chat. “We’re educators, and we have a lot of students that are having to go back because their parents are getting deported,” one said. “The cruelty that we’re seeing - I think that’s turning the tide, at least I hope so,” their friend added. Turning the tide politically is what Democrats are hoping they can do in Texas in the midterm elections on November 3; the BBC said that will not be easy.

This stretch of the Rio Grande was once one of the busiest crossing points on the U.S.-Mexico border. Under former President Joe Biden, hundreds of thousands of migrants came through here, with more than two and a half million apprehensions recorded in a single year. Trump promised to stop illegal crossings during his 2024 campaign and, in large parts, has delivered, the BBC reported. Border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades, and the BBC said that promise in part drove his astonishingly high level of support in the state, taking around 55% of Hispanic votes in Texas alone — a record for a Republican presidential candidate.

Javier Villalobos, the Republican mayor of McAllen, one of the biggest cities in the Rio Grande Valley, expects Republicans to find the election difficult this time. He credits the Trump administration with stemming the border problem. “I remember I put out a video … thanking the administration for immediately securing the border. That was great,” he said. “And I think generally most people are okay with the deportation of criminals, violent people, or people that really are not productive at all.” But, he added, “if you start deporting people that are productive and law-abiding, that is where the problem is.”

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 Democratic in November. “When I voted for President Trump, I voted for him because we saw an influx of immigration during the Biden administration,” he said. It needed to be fixed. “We thought that we were in the right by voting for Trump, and that he was going to do what was best in order to fix the crisis on the border.” He added, “And I think to myself, we were really not told the extreme that they were willing to go to make a point,” before referencing recent shootings involving ICE agents in U.S. cities.

The BBC said Guerrero’s case shows that, for many who live and work close to the U.S.-Mexico border, security and immigration enforcement are two distinct issues: a voter may support securing the border and stopping illegal crossings while opposing the actions of ICE and how the administration is enforcing its immigration policies. Guerrero said his unease with those enforcement actions was in part why he planned to vote Democratic. “There’s a man that I know that… last year, had 35 workers that were working for him every day,” he said. “Right now, he just told me two days ago that he would be lucky if he would get four to six guys to show up to work.”

Even though Guerrero plans to vote Democratic, he describes himself as neither Democrat nor Republican. That, according to Mike Madrid, a leading Republican consultant and expert on Hispanic voters, is key to understanding the largest ethnic demographic voting group in the country. “Latinos are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to identify as independents rather than Republicans or Democrats,” Madrid said.

Bobby Pulido, the Democratic candidate, is a popular Tejano singer, a two-time Latin Grammy winner and a household name in the Rio Grande Valley. At an event just weeks before the vote, he delivered what the BBC described as a stock political speech, followed by a musical performance. “A lot of people are disillusioned with both parties,” he told the BBC shortly before taking the stage. “And I hear them.” The BBC said winning this part of Texas requires a conservative approach. Pulido has distanced himself from the national Democratic Party brand and focused deliberately and consistently on economic issues. “This isn’t New York, this isn’t LA,” he said. “When you lead with issues like social justice, climate change and other topics, that’s not what people want to hear first. They want to hear about the economy.”

The BBC said that message is consistent with what many current polls are suggesting — the economy, and the cost of living specifically, rank top on the list of most voters’ priorities. At a local avocado festival, where the fruit is a staple among Hispanic communities in the valley, a couple — Dave Baldwin and Veronica Salazar — began discussing rising prices as soon as they were asked about the upcoming elections. Asked who they blamed for spiking costs, the answer was swift: “The president,” they said. “He is in control of our destiny with all that, and right now he’s not doing a very good job,” Baldwin added. The BBC also carried video of Texas voters sharing concerns over cost of living ahead of the midterms.

Among many Republican campaigners, the BBC reported a feeling of being on the back foot just weeks before the vote. Alexis Uscanga, a student volunteer tasked with knocking on doors and checking on likely Republican voters in the district, was realistic about his goal. “The midterms are just purely a game of turnout,” he said. “It’s not trying so much to convince individuals to vote one way or the other, it’s about trying to get our people mostly to show up.” Tano Tijerina, the Republican candidate in the neighboring, Democratic-held 28th District, credited Trump with “breaking through barriers” but acknowledged that “the national political headwinds are real.”

If the polling is correct — and the BBC said there is no guarantee of that — even a modest swing back to Democrats in November could reshape races not just across Texas but far beyond. In Texas, it could even be enough to put a U.S. Senate seat in play; Democrats have not won one in the state in more than 30 years.