The risky bet behind redistricting

Underlying the redistricting arms race that Texas Republicans kicked off this summer (and to which California Democrats are responding) are two wagers both parties are making about Latino voters.

Texas Republicans are expecting that Latinos will either continue the rightward shift they’ve been undergoing for the last two presidential cycles — or at least remain as Republican as they were in 2024. Democrats in California, meanwhile, are expecting that Latino voters will retain their allegiances and boost Democratic candidates in redrawn battleground districts around the state.

Who ends up being right — and which way the trend with Latino voters unfolds — may determine not just a handful of seats, but overall control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterms.

These new political maps being drawn in both states might also teach America’s political parties a familiar lesson: Population changes don’t guarantee political outcomes, and political power shifts are never permanent. Latinos make up about a third of eligible voters in both states, and have been trending toward Republicans over the last few years, but there are plenty of signs this shift might slow down — or even reverse — in the future.

Of the five new Republican-leaning congressional districts that the Texas GOP has pushed through the state legislature, two are majority-Latino districts in southern Texas. It’s these two districts that the elections analyst Eli McKown-Dawson has noted are not necessarily guaranteed Republican pick-ups.

These two districts are about 87 and 72 percent Latino, currently represented by incumbent Democrats, and even under the new map, would have voted for Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn has written, these districts are still full of Democratic-leaning Latino voters. With the dynamic during midterm elections of lower propensity, Trump-friendly voters not showing up at the same rate as during presidential elections, it’s conceivable that Democrats could still hold onto these seats next year.

McKown-Dawson actually ran a few experiments to see what those conditions would be, and the result shouldn’t be that surprising: Regardless of whether Democrats experience a strong anti-Trump and anti-incumbent midterm boost around the country, they will need to win back a good amount of Latino support in the state. In 2024, a majority of Latino voters sided with Trump, who won them 55 percent to 45 percent. It was emblematic of the national rightward shift that spiked from the 2020 election to last year.

However, a reversal in this dynamic, to something closer to the pre-2024 baseline, would yield Democratic wins. McKown-Dawson estimates that Democrats winning a slight majority of Latino voters, something between 51 and 53 percent, could be enough for Democrats to hold one, or even both seats.

With the evidence we have, this all seems like a possibility. Recent polling and analysis conducted by the Democratic-aligned Equis firm has found a consistent trend among Latino voters in general, and Trump-voting Latinos specifically: dissatisfaction with Trump and the GOP, changed minds over future votes, and room for Democrats to expand their level of support. Dissatisfaction with Trump’s performance is high among Latino voters nationally. That will need to trickle down to battleground districts like these two south Texas seats, where the field is more competitive. Democrats have a narrow 47 percent to 36 percent lead in these districts, not as wide as it might need to be, yet.

If Republicans end up being proven right, however, and Latino voters across the country continue to shift right, that could mean more danger for Democrats in California. In the Golden State, Democrats chose to respond to Texas’s redrawing of maps not just by targeting Republican-held seats and adding in more supposedly Democratic voters, but also by trying to shore up support for Democratic incumbents in battleground seats that would be competitive next year. The California redistricting plan, passed by the legislature, is up for a statewide vote in November. For now, polling suggests it will pass by comfortable margins.

Key to this, as Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote this week, are Latino voters in the Central Valley, Orange County, and pockets around the state. At least one Republican-held seat in northern California is being made more Democratic by adding a swath of Latino voters to the district, while one GOP-held seat in the majority-Latino Central Valley would still be a toss-up, even under the new boundaries of the district. Three other Democratic districts, represented by Josh Harder, Adam Gray, and Derek Tran, meanwhile, are all being made safer by including more Latino voters in their electorates.

But these moves all assume that California Latinos will remain as Democratic as they are right now, or that any rightward drift from the past ten years will revert back to their side. Trump’s unpopularity and the signs of buyer’s remorse among Trump-voting Latinos offer some evidence, but historically, it’s these districts, and Latino voters specifically, that have become more Republican since Trump’s first election.

Over the last two presidential cycles, Latino support for Democratic presidential candidates in California has fallen by nearly 20 points, according to research from the Democratic firm Catalist. Last year in California, Kamala Harris saw a 10-point drop compared to Biden in 2020. And Biden himself saw a 7-point drop compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016. So it’s completely plausible that any continued rightward shift might end up causing these Democratic moves to backfire.

Overall, both parties in both states are making a bet that Latino political support moves solidly in one direction or the other. It’s obviously too early to say which side will be proven right, but the ethnic and racial politics at play here will probably demonstrate yet again how diverse and different Latino voters are, while also showing that they are America’s new swing voters.