Trump set the methodology based on his performance alone. He ignored Hispanics.
Texas Redistricting May Backfire
The Washington Post reports Texas Redistricting May Backfire — and Take Out Some Rising Latino GOP Stars
Last summer, the White House instructed Texas legislators to redraw their congressional maps to create five new Republican seats in Congress, a process that involved substantially redrawing four seats in South Texas. Yet from the beginning, South Texas conservatives worried that national Republicans had gotten overconfident about their advantage in the borderlands, where counties are majority Latino and disproportionately low-income. Now, decisions made in D.C. threaten to backfire, imperiling the promising political careers of Eric Flores [TX-34] and of multiple rising conservative Latino stars. [Mish Note: TX-34 is rated 89 percent likely Democrat by Split Ticket and 74.9 percent by Nate Silver]
On paper, Flores’s newly drawn district looked like an easy Republican victory, a seat Trump would have won by a 10-point margin. But while Trump won most South Texas counties in 2024, downballot Republicans did not perform nearly as well.
A data analysis by The Washington Post found that voters in South Texas were among the most likely to split their tickets in 2024. While Trump won the four newly redrawn districts in South Texas by a combined 12-point margin, Republican congressional candidates had an edge of eight points. That makes Democrats much more competitive. This year, all four seats are competitive, or even leaning Democratic, according to the Cook Political Report’s race ratings.
Along the border, local politicians have been quick to point out that the new maps weren’t drawn by South Texans; indeed, they weren’t drawn by Texans at all. The Republican National Committee hired a Virginia-based redistricting expert, Adam Kincaid, to create the maps.
Fielding demands from the White House, Kincaid used the 2024 presidential results, as well as recent gubernatorial and Senate races, to create districts where Trump would have had at least a 10-point edge over Kamala Harris in 2024. In total, Kincaid created five of these new Trump districts, four of which are in South Texas.
But in South Texas, the differences between statewide results and local congressional results are some of the most pronounced in the entire country. Across the borderlands in 2024, thousands of voters picked Trump, then voted Democrat down the rest of their ballots. In many counties that Trump carried, local Democrats still won by substantial margins.
Polls and forecasts indicate that voters may be swinging away from Republicans again; the question is how far. If voters vote like they did in 2018, Republicans will get clobbered in all four new districts by double-digit margins. Even if residents here vote as they did in 2020, when the rightward shift began, Democratic House candidates will still have an edge: They would win at least two of the four districts outright; one would be a true tossup.
After redistricting, Monica De La Cruz [TX-15] helped tap strong candidates to run for the new seats; besides Flores, she also recruited her brother Carlos De La Cruz, an Air Force veteran, to run in the new 35th District. That district, which went for Trump by a 10-point margin, was supposed to be one of the safer Republican seats created during redistricting. But over the past year, the Cook Political Report has rated it as more and more competitive; now it’s a battleground that leans Republican.
Both siblings could lose in November. Last year, Republicans carved apart Monica De La Cruz’s district, pulling her voters east and west to weaken Democratic incumbents there. [Mish Note: Both Split Ticket and Nate Silver have TX-15 flipping to Democrats. Thank you President Trump].
Now, that redistricting could cost the GOP one of its own incumbents. De La Cruz has admitted to her supporters that the redrawn maps have hurt her chances of holding her seat.
Would You Believe Net Zero?
A seat-by-seat analysis by Split Ticket and Nate Silver (only competitive races shown above) suggests the net change in favor of republicans is zero, one, or two.
Potential Flips
- TX-09: To Republicans – Expected
- TX-32: To Republicans – Expected
- TX-15: To Democrats – Expected
- TX-23: Tossup or Slight Tilt to Democrats
- TX-35: Possible Flip to Republicans or Democrat Hold
Whether or not Republicans have any gains from their Texas Gerrymandering war will come down to who wins TX-23 (rated tossup) and TX-35 (conflicting models).
My seat-of-the-pants model says democrats will win most completive races and a few extra solid upsets.
By this measure, it all comes down to TX-35 and conflicting models.
The gerrymandering goal was five. Expect zero or one.
I warned about this long ago, at the time in fact.
Cook Political picked up on this on September 14, 2026 in Hispanics in Texas Swung Hard Toward Trump in 2024. They Are Abandoning Him in 2026.
Amy, Carrie and Erin join the Roundtable this week.
They dig into the numbers in our new poll of Texas Hispanic likely voters, conducted for The Cook Political Report and TelevisaUnivision. Amy explains just how much Trump’s Hispanic support has collapsed and Erin looks at what it means for competitive House races in Southern Texas.
Wish Granted
Trump wants the election to be about him.
Wish granted by Southern Texas Hispanics who are going to flip a Texas Senate seat as well.
Related Posts
October 15, 2026: Who Is Favored to Win the Senate in 6 Different Models
Here are 10 Senate races in 6 models, one of them mine.
October 16, 2026: Elon Musk Gave $158 Million to Paxton’s Campaign? Will It Help?
Musk gave the money to Super-PACs which immediately gave it all to Paxton.
October 16, 2026: Trump Has a 91% Disapproval Rating from Voters Under 30 on Inflation
“The worst I have ever seen in any poll, on any issue for any president”
October 19, 2026: Republicans Have a Huge Gap in Ad Spending, But Does It matter?
The Republican cash edge is entirely in the Senate. The House is a lost cause.
The republicans will lose a senator in Texas as Talarico will win with massive working class support especially hispanic and black Americans. The gerrymandering will backfire the republicans will not benefit in the house races
Sounds good to me.
“Brown, a Libertarian, wants to cut government spending, repeal the federal income tax, abolish the Internal Revenue Service, end Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rescind President Donald Trump’s tariffs and pull out of the Iran War.”
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-texas-el-paso/news/2026/10/21/texas-senate-libertarian-ted-brown
Well if some of the Bush’s are voting for Talarico, that should tell ya something…
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/george-w-bushs-republican-brother-shreds-paxton-trump-and-reveals-he-voted-for-talarico/
Former President George W. Bush’s brother, Neil Bush, revealed on Tuesday that he crossed party lines to vote for Democrat James Talarico in the Texas Senate race while landing a stinging rebuke of Trump-backed Republican Ken Paxton and President Donald Trump.
Bush, son of former President George H.W. Bush, announced via Facebook that he had cast his early ballot for Talarico, despite spending most of his life as a Republican.
“I voted early today, and I voted for James Talarico for the United States Senate,” Bush wrote on Facebook, arguing that character “matters more than party affiliation.”
of course, it won’t matter one bit, nothing is going to change, it’ll be the same dog & pony show featuring new animals with the same old tricks.
I bet Dubya votes for him and giggles about it.
He’s always been our most charming mass murderer.
No baseline.
You cannot subtract the results of an election with the last election to sum up to the result of the gerrymandering — way too many variables.
No two elections are alike, gerry-math is not exact math.
The thing is if you take ten R+10 seats together with others that are D or R+5 or lower and gerrymander them all to get 20 R+6 seats, you could end up with a lot fewer than 10 seats in a wave election.
Yes. Put another way, that’s why republicans didn’t mind Lani Guinere’s plan in the ‘90’s to create majority black districts in the South – because in non-wave elections (which is most of them), they ended up with more GOP districts. They would much prefer democrats to be lumped into districts that are overwhelmingly democrat – like Ilhan Omar’s where I live – than to have them spread out, making more districts competitive. Dems can choose to have more democrat-friendly districts or “minority-majority” districts – but not both. That’s where identity politics bites them in the butt.
bingo. i had met Lani back in 80s in NYC at a political action “party”. i also used GIS and computer cartography for NYS task force to gerrymander districts. it was a great insight to see how corrupt the system was when i was in my early 20s techie………..paperless office and instant messaging and intranet in the 1980s. we were 20 years ahead of most people’s access to tech. most amerikans are now waking up to how corrupt their empire is. poor dumb bastards.
All the gerrymandering and the electoral college, and yet people still think that voting matters.
Nobody of influence and authority would tolerate giving the masses any actual say.
its run by the white man
https://vimeo.com/1050224184
Hilarious. Sending to my buddy in Jville.
Excellent description of the Electoral College!
It hasn’t mattered since the restrictive Australian ballot was adopted in the 1880’s.
We have the tech to vote easily, instantly, and with a much better verification process than any we have ever used so far. All this districting stuff is left over from the pony express days.
The system isn’t being allowed to evolve to match the times because there are people exploiting its vulnerabilities that don’t want to stop.
f house goes Republican in Nov 2028, they could appoint Donald as speaker of house in 2029
He’d sit in the Oval Office of course, as acting POTUS, behind the desk with JD or little Marco on the couch taking notes…….FOUR MORE YEARS of the Fuhrer and little Elmo Musk, the ultimate bastard maker
Thank you. That is a bracing antidote to my hallucination that things might revert toward something I once (thought I) knew as normal.
That wasn’t normal, that was a bug that’s been duly fixed.
ha ha ha. de nada, amigo
I expect him to test the waters of the 22nd amendment trying to run as VP.
I think he will just run again.and SCOTUS will rule that the 22nd Amendment doesn’t apply to him.
If Trump were on the 2028 ticket as veep, they’d lose by 25 points. With Vance or Rubio on the top of the ticket and some non-Trump for veep, they’ll only lose by about 9 points. Trump has destroyed the GOP for at least ten years. Republican Congresspeople have helped. Hopefully Dems won’t trans all the children before they lose power.
You never know. If the next 2 years are nothing but impeachment hearings and the dems get nothing done, he might bellyache that he deserves another 2 years. If JD thought it would work I’d think he might give it a shot. Apparently he may not be so eager to run for president in 2028. But I’m not sure Taco’s ego could stand losing as the second banana. But then again he could just blame it on JD. But would JD approve the electoral college in 2028 if he loses??? Well I expect the economy to get worse either way and people almost always follow their pocketbook.
Ten years? You overestimate the Usonian connective memory.
What were you talking about again?
Was it not written of old that when you put a clown in the palace, the clown does not become a king. Rather, the palace becomes a circus.
That said, we were assured that 1/6 had ended Trump and Team R for a generation, but here we are.
that would be interesting and fun to see unfold
Since “Name” didnt say and I was curious, I asked an LLM about electronic voting system makers and their market shares. The largest supplier ES&S bought Diebold in 2009. It sells bigly into D and R states alike.
So, even if that dirty rotten scoundrel Barry helped spread electronic voting systems, it seems the unibody R-wing loves them too and even from the same suppliers.
[scans the room for surprise…finds none] 😉
I worked for my local county for awhile when GWB was President. We introduced voting machines back then. I was the IT Director for the county. The machines, then and now, just scan the position of a filled in bubble, pass that position to the software, which looks it up and either assigns a vote to someone (at that position), throws an error if it thinks a vote was cast for multiple people running against each other, or flags the ballot for hand review if it sees a name written in. The only possible tampering would be for someone in the elections office to assign a position to the wrong candidate. But we had both Republicans, Democrats and independent volunteers review all of that before the machines were loaded and confirmation tests were run. They actually are far more fair and accurate than having ballots hand counted.
I presume you mean well. People who mean well are at a disadvantage against people who dont.
The problem isnt with what you and your peers can control. The problem is what well-meaning people like you can’t control… You just stated it yourself: “The only possible tampering would be for someone in the elections office to assign a position to the wrong candidate.”. And thanks to electronic voting, it takes fewer bad apples to spoil the numbers, because you only need a few sysadmins now.
I prefer manual counts with many humans involved. I prefer (a) risking rigging of 5%, the results contested, and paper ballots as the source of truth than (b) risking rigging of 30% and the results being uncontestable because a small number of double-payrolled sysadmins control all the evidence.
So, while I wasnt fond of Name’s smear implying war criminal oligarch jagoff Barak is somehow particularly responsible for the prevalence of electronic voting, I prefer manual counting — so that the work people like you do continues to matter.
Tangentially, as ive said before, election day rigging is less important than the “rigging” of people’s beliefs days, weeks, months, and years before elections. Brainwashing (misinfo, disinfo, false flags, hoaxes, Orwellian work etc) matters far more. So, I promise you I dont and won’t go around harping on electronic voting. 🙂
Machines give a quick tally.
Paper ballots can be hand-counted, and are, any time a candidate requests a recount, and any candidate can request a recount.
All this kerfuffle about the machines is just people getting brainwashed by the conspiracy mass media machines, which generate millions of dollars and views for their owners.
Optical scanners are fine since the paper ballots still exist. The problem is touch screen voting – a solution in search of a problem.
For a country that endlessly lectures the rest of the world about democracy, America’s willingness to tolerate such blatant manipulation of its own elections exposes just how deeply dysfunctional and fundamentally flawed its political system has become.
It is part of the reason why, increasingly, America looks less like a mature democracy and more like a corrupt third-world country.
You mean like Pakistan or Brazil, where each winning presidential party routinely puts the former leader of the opposition party in jail?
We are well on our way
If you can afford it, vote with your feet.
If you dont know whether you can afford it, do your homework.
Would Santa Anna be elected today?
As long as he promised to stick to the Libs!
Would he “stand with Israel”? That seems to be a necessary condition.
Most likely since he was a Scottish Rite freemason.
How many will trump steal? There is nothing that he won’t do to impact the outcome of the elections, even he has to stoop to another Jan. 6th proud boy takeover.
There are a few softer federal initiatives happening in CA, to at least have a psychological impact. There is a big (or at least strategically placed and noticeable) presence of ICE. I would think this is to trumpet and publicize fears of supposed immigration threats. There are charges of previous claimed voter fraud, splashed across media with color pictures of faces (which gives greater impact to the tiny number of faces, 30 or so in a state of 30+ million people). All this I see as calculated to excite the MAGA voters nationwide to get out and vote.
All opposition outside a basement is controlled. Just ask 60s lefties how many agents attended even small gatherings. So, I dont see any chance that Jan 6th wasnt a bipartisan MIC party.
Now I used to think Trump consciously helped trick his own base supporters into a trap. But seeing as he is unstable and shits out his mouth, I now doubt his handlers told him their real plan, even then.
Indeed, whatever happens next, someone with mental problems like Trump is no longer a decider. He is a tool, possibly becoming dangerous to his own backers as he loses more of his marbles.
https://www.denvergazette.com/2024/03/13/cia-played-key-jan-6-roles-texts-reveal-ba37480a-286b-53e3-8774-7cbec68b3fca/
Texas is not California. Latinos in California are proud of their race and stand up for themselves. Texas Latinos are white wannabes even though most white Texans despise them. I wish Trump had deported all of them because they are idiots who deserve exactly that! Then they cry about how ICE picked them up – pendejos you voted for that!!
Texas and Florida Latinos thought that they were “members of the club”. They aren’t. They are allowed in as cleaners and servers only. Some are still in denial.
Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in Texas. Nearly one in five Texas Hispanics aged 25 or older hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. Their median household and personal incomes aren’t far behind non-hispanic whites. They are also well represented in leadership positions
Also, one in five Texas Hispanics have a spouse of a different ethincity. They have been equals in Texas in every way since before the state began.
What a disgusting economically illiterate racist bigot you are
Unfortunately, he represents a significant population of MAGA.
Huh? He’s obviously a liberal.
Is this where we’re at now? Billionaires fuck children openly, but we’re fighting over the scraps like animals. What is wrong with you? What is wrong with us?
My dealings with many Latinos have added tremendous value to my life. These people have been productive, at good prices. This has been an overwhelming net positive for me.
Also, look at the demographic cliffs nations are falling off of worldwide.
In Marfa TX, SW county on the border, there are 2 gas stations. One the Latinos use and one everyone else uses. I was in the Latino one, waiting in line and a man came in and said something in Spanish to a friend of his in front of me. The friend laughed and then looked back at me like it was kind of an insult but then looked away. I’m sure it was about the gringo in the wrong place, but not in a threatening way. Money is all green to me so I didn’t care. Maybe if I lived there I would have to, IDK. But I imagine there are many who don’t speak English, or Spanish is their primary language. I don’t speak Spanish but it would definently be a help in that county. Down on the border is a town where Spanish is the primary language. I’ve never traveled abroad so it’s interesting that there’s a place inside the US where English is not the primary language. There are sections of cities like this but this was a whole town.
Down the road after you get through Big Bend you reach an area where illegals and coyotes come through. I stopped at a mom & pop convenience shop. They had cameras all around the place and had to buzz me inside. Inside were tons of MAGA on the walls including the poster with trump carrying 2 .50 cals and a bandana wrapped around his head. They told me they had their own guns and used them on occasion to hold banditos until the law could come get them. They were a white couple and all I could wonder was why in the hell did they stay on a spit of earth, think a 3 or 4 building “town” not deserving of a name, dry as a freakin’ bone, hot as hell in the summer, and put up with the threat of coyotes and illegals? I guess Texans are just a defiant bunch. Fun fact: only 3% of Texas land is publicly owned.
Interesting stuff… That 3% seems extreme to me. It could be a nice experiment to replace income tax by footprint tax. I mean the more land you own, the more certain services work in your favor.
Texas already has a wildly high property tax rate.
Is this to make up for the lack of a state income tax?
That’s because Spanish was spoken in that part of Texas before any English was ever heard.
Well there are 700 million Latinos south of the border and after trump’s theft of oil and gold down there, fully expect them to come get what was taken one way or another. And fully expect that you won’t be able to do a damn thing to stop them either.
Ironically, same thing happened in Europe, all those colonizers helped themselves to resources that didn’t belong to them and now Europe is over run with people from those places they stole from. Karma is a b!tch ain’t it.
i’m sure you know the history of europe is a bit more complicated. my family hails from a part of europe that were the moors. sicily. the moors invaded spain and fast forward to 1492, the spanish kicked out the jews and then the muslims. i love the moorish castles of spain. i vote in italia and usa. the amerikas is so young and only had a few bad episodes of growing pains since 1492. of course the kingdoms of the seminoles and north of the klamath river out west were really slave states………with the native and first peoples.
Thick fog of war. The best laid analyses (good one here), plans and rationalizations will careen into the actual events.