GOP Redistricting Yields Democrat Gains In South Texas

Republican redistricting in 2025 backfired for the party during Tuesday’s election, with a blue tsunami sweeping through South Texas.

In the Rio Grande Valley, Democrat Tejano singer Bobby Pulido unseated two-term Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz. President Donald Trump would have won the newly drawn district by 18 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, according to Cook Political Report. De La Cruz won in 2024 by 14 points.

Democrat Katy Padilla Stout defeated Republican Brandon Herrera in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, which covers areas from San Antonio to El Paso. Before the redistricting, voters in the 23rd district had not elected a Democrat since 2012.

Bexar County sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia beat Republican Carlos De La Cruz, Monica De La Cruz’s brother, in the newly redrawn 35th Congressional District in the San Antonio area that Trump carried by 10 points.

South Texas Democrat incumbents Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen also won re-election.

The Democrat sweep in South Texas happened largely among Latino voters.

Jon Taylor, department chair and political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, recently told The Daily Wire that Republicans may have been overly confident in their redistricting, assuming that Latino voters would stick with the party.

In reality, Taylor said, they should be viewed as “swing voters.”

Trump won over Hispanic voters in South Texas in 2024 in part due to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border and their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s mishandling of the chaos. The Texas Legislature, instructed by Trump, redrew the state’s congressional map in 2025 assuming Republican support would hold.

As the midterm election loomed, polling showed that the voting bloc began to sour on Republicans.

Texas Senator-elect James Talarico said Trump won Hispanic voters over in 2024 because Democrats had neglected them.

“I went down there a lot. I showed up, which is something a lot of national Democrats stopped doing. We took the Latino vote for granted. We took South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley for granted and I refused to make that same mistake,” Talarico told Fox News on Wednesday morning.

“These voters, like a lot of voters across Texas, are looking for change and it’s why they supported President Trump in the last election and it’s why they supported me in this election,” he added. “They desperately want to bring down costs so that they can get ahead in this economy.”