By Jesus Mesa
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Latino voters moved away from President Donald Trump on Tuesday, from the Rio Grande Valley to Paterson, New Jersey, helping Democrats win seats Republicans had redrawn to hold and nearly toppling two in Miami.
An NBC News exit poll showed 60 percent of Latino voters backing Democratic House candidates and 35 percent backing Republicans. Two years ago, Pew Research Center's study of validated voters found Trump winning 48 percent of Latino voters to 51 percent for former Vice President Kamala Harris.
"What we saw was a massive rebuke of Donald Trump and a rejection of the Republican Party that's been enabling him," Mike Madrid, Republican strategist who studies the Latino vote, told Newsweek.
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"Nothing here could be inferred as an affirmation of the Democratic Party," Madrid said. He compared the result to the last election, saying, "It's really no different than what happened two years ago when Latinos rejected the Democrats and moved towards Trump."
His term for it is dealignment. "They're moving, they're rejecting both parties and they're rejecting the parties that are failing to address their economic concerns," he said.
South Texas Undoes the Republican Map
Texas' 15th is one of the districts that moved furthest. Trump carried the redrawn seat by 18 points in 2024, and Tejano singer Bobby Pulido won about 62 percent of the vote Tuesday to unseat Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz. The Associated Press (AP) put the shift at 42 points.
Republicans drew the new Texas map on the assumption that Trump's 2024 gains would last. Democratic Representatives Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar both won reelection anyway, with Gonzalez holding a seat Trump carried by 10 points. Democrats also picked up the 23rd District, which Trump won by 15, and captured the San Antonio-area 35th, which the president carried by 10.
The Texas Tribune found turnout in border counties rose 8 percent from 2022, the largest increase of any region in the state. Senator-elect James Talarico won nine border counties that Trump carried two years ago.
Exit polls had Trump winning about 55 percent of Hispanic Texan voters in 2024. On Tuesday, roughly six in 10 backed Talarico for Senate and about three in 10 backed Republican Ken Paxton, according to exit polls. Democrat Gina Hinojosa beat Republican Governor Greg Abbott 53 percent to 46 percent statewide.
On the border, Madrid said, voters punished Democrats for disorder in 2024 and are now punishing Republicans for what came after.
"In 2024, the border was out of control," Madrid said. "Now you have the exact reverse," he added, blaming the immigration crackdowns. "They were hunting our people down, terrorizing our communities."
Brendan Steinhauser, Republican strategist in Texas, doesn't dispute it. Hispanic voters "have moved away from the president quite a lot in the last two years," he told Newsweek, describing "a huge swing against the GOP" in the Rio Grande Valley.
"Some of that aggressiveness has caused some political problems for Republicans and for the president," he said.
Miami's Two Near Misses
Democrats flipped neither Miami seat, but two Republican incumbents came within a point of losing.
Florida Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican whose 26th District includes Doral and Hialeah, led Democrat Nicole Locklin 49.9 percent to 49.1 percent in a sector that Trump carried by 18 points.
Next door in the 27th, Republican Representative María Elvira Salazar led Democrat Eliott Rodriguez by about 1,100 votes of nearly 248,000 cast, a gap WLRN reported would trigger a recount. NBC News data show the race moved about 14 points toward Democrats from the 2024 presidential result.
The 27th sits entirely in Miami-Dade County, where the Hispanic vote drives the math. Much of Locklin's strength in the 26th came from the newly added Broward County portion, which she won by 22 points. Díaz-Balart won the Miami-Dade portion by the same margin.
Doral moved further than the Hispanic precincts around it. Trump won every precinct in the city in 2024, half of them by more than 20 points, largely on the strength of Venezuelan American voters. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) then targeted asylum seekers with pending cases and work permits, and the Trump administration ended temporary protected status (TPS) for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans.
On Tuesday, a slim majority in Doral backed Democrats David Jolly for governor and Angie Nixon for Senate, in an area Trump carried by 23 points.
Both incumbents broke with the crackdown during the campaign. Díaz-Balart called some of the enforcement an "overreaction," while Salazar warned Trump in a campaign ad that many Latino residents felt "betrayed."
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Eduardo Gamarra, political scientist at Florida International University who publishes a weekly tracking report on the Latino vote in Florida, told Newsweek before the election that his report had flagged Salazar's district as competitive for the first time this cycle. He later told Newsweek the seat looked as vulnerable as he "could remember."
Miami-Dade County as a whole swung 18 points toward Democrats from 2024, according to AP, and Jolly and Nixon both carried it while losing statewide to Republicans Byron Donalds and Senator Ashley Moody. The Miami Herald credited majority-Black and majority-white neighborhoods for powering those wins.
Hispanic-majority precincts in the county stayed Republican, by the Herald's count. Donalds won a little under 52 percent there, about 5 points more than Jolly, and Moody beat Nixon by around 4. Governor Ron DeSantis took roughly 65 percent in those precincts in 2022.
Across Florida, an NBC News exit poll put Latino voters at 55 percent to 44 percent for both Jolly and Nixon, after NBC's 2024 exit poll gave Trump 58 percent of them. Cuban voters still leaned Republican, with 58 percent for Donalds and 59 percent for Moody, down from the 70 percent 2024 exit polls gave Trump. Puerto Rican voters gave Jolly 68 percent and Nixon 67 percent.
"In Florida and in Texas, there are some, you know, raids on construction sites, and if your construction crew loses enough people, you can't build, so everybody loses their job," Madrid said.
Puerto Rican Voters in Central Florida
Puerto Ricans are the largest Hispanic community in Osceola County, the largest piece of Florida's 9th District.
Trump won the county by 1.4 points in 2024. Democratic Representative Darren Soto carried it 65,349 votes to 41,425 on Tuesday, which helped him lead by 1,477 votes across a district Republicans had redrawn to take in Republican-leaning counties. The AP had not called the race as of Wednesday.
Class ties these communities together, in Madrid's view. Latinos "shouldn't be looked at for their differences between their country of origins," he said.
"You saw in 2024, all the Latino communities moved to the right, and in 2026, all of the Latino communities moved to the left," he said.
The Largest Swing in New Jersey
New Jersey's 9th District, built around Paterson, Passaic and Clifton, was one of the clearest warnings for Democrats in 2024. Trump carried it by 1.2 points after President Joe Biden won it 59 percent to 40 percent in 2020, a swing mostly driven to massive gains among Hispanic voters. The city of Passaic voted for Trump by 6.5 points that year after backing Biden by 26.
Democratic Representative Nellie Pou won reelection Tuesday with 66.7 percent of the vote, a margin of about 35 points. NBC News calculated a 36.1-point shift toward Democrats from the 2024 presidential result. Pou won the Passaic County portion of the district 72.6 percent to 25.7 percent.
The reversal had started a year earlier. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won Passaic County by 15 points in the 2025 governor's race after Trump carried it by 3.
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A Central Valley Blowout
Democrats had tried and failed for years to win California's 22nd, a majority-Latino farm district, before redistricting narrowed Trump's 2024 advantage there to less than 2 points. Randy Villegas, son of Mexican immigrants, had about 66 percent of the vote against Republican Representative David Valadao with about 57 percent counted when AP called the race.
If that lead holds, the swing tops 30 points.
The Denver Suburbs
Democrat Manny Rutinel beat Republican Representative Gabe Evans about 55 percent to 41 percent in Colorado's 8th, a shift of about 16 points from Trump's 2-point win there. Evans took the seat by less than a point in 2024. Hispanics make up 38.5 percent of adults in the district, the state's largest Hispanic population.
'From Representation to Results'
Texas elected Hinojosa as governor and California elected Xavier Becerra, both children of Mexican immigrants. Madrid credited "historically high Latino turnout" in both states.
"The focus now is going to have to move from representation to results," he said.
He said Democrats can hold the young Latino men who first engaged in politics through Trump only by delivering for them. "They've got to develop a working class agenda and a blue collar economy," Madrid said.
Matt Angle, Democratic strategist and director of the Lone Star Project, told Newsweek that Latinos along the border feel singled out by an administration they helped elect.
"They feel like they've been targeted and persecuted," Angle said. "A lot of Hispanics on the border do believe in border enforcement and do believe in law and order."
Asked how decisive immigration enforcement was, Madrid put it behind the cost of living. "It was definitely an important issue, but not nearly as important as the economy," he said.
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What Democrats Need to Do to Keep Them
Madrid warned that the volatility cuts both ways. The economic frustration that pushed Latinos toward Trump in 2024 is not tied to either party. "They're just blaming whoever's in power at that time," he said.
Now that Democrats have won them back, Angle outlined three steps to keep those voters. The first is to stop treating any vote as permanent.
"People don't necessarily decide they're Republicans one day, Democrats the other," he said. "Everybody's on a continuum. And to assume that just because somebody voted with your party that time, that they're gonna stick with your party is a big mistake."
The second is ideological room. "Our party has to be willing to be a big tent party and include people who consider themselves moderate and conservative, too," Angle said, adding that some of the most conservative Democrats in Texas are Hispanic Democrats along the border.
Third, he said, Democrats have to "demonstrate that Democrats in Texas will fight for South Texas and will fight for Latino Texans," something he argued Abbott, Paxton and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick failed to do when the raids came.
Madrid put it more bluntly: "And they've got to provide results."
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Edward T. Cummins
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