When Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map over the summer, they aimed to flip five districts held by Democrats and were guided by the 2024 presidential election results, which showed voters moving to the right.
But winning all five of those seats under the new maps is far from a lock for Republicans next November.
With Hispanic voters showing signs of souring on President Trump in special elections this year and concerns mounting over the cost of living, Democrats believe they could hold on to as many as three of the redrawn seats in Texas, two in the Rio Grande Valley and possibly a third centered in and around San Antonio. The party is also looking at flipping a Republican seat in the Valley, little changed in its partisan makeup by the new map, where a popular Tejano music star is running as a moderate Democrat.
The fight in Texas is ultimately about whether Republicans can maintain their narrow control of the U.S. House into the second half of the Trump administration. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the new map to go into effect last week.
Success for Democrats would mean bucking the voting trend that led Republicans to draw the new congressional district around San Antonio, Texas’ 35th. Its new lines encompass a range of modern Texas communities, including the southern working-class neighborhoods of the city, its eastern suburbs and some of the surrounding and fast-developing rural counties, where cows still graze alongside neatly arranged housing developments. The majority of residents are Hispanic, and about a third are white.
Such developing suburban areas have been among the most hotly contested in the state, with Democrats making gains in some recent elections, including in the suburbs and exurbs of Houston and Dallas. But Republicans surged back in 2024. Had the 35th existed in its redrawn form last year, it would have voted for Mr. Trump by a margin of a little over 10 percentage points.
The biggest question for next year’s midterm elections is whether the rightward trend will hold, or 2026 will look more like the 2018 midterms, during Mr. Trump’s first term, when Democrats made gains across the state.
“The assumption that Latino voters who voted for Trump in 2024 would continue to vote Republican is potentially a bad assumption,” said Michelle Lowe Solis, the chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party, which includes San Antonio. “We have a good shot at this.”
Ms. Solis pointed to local races in last month’s election, including in the Houston suburbs, where voters ousted hard-right conservatives from a school board, and a State Senate race outside of Fort Worth, where a Democrat came within 3 points of winning a district that had favored Mr. Trump by a wide margin, despite being considerably outspent. “That was literally a shock,” she said.
On Wednesday, the state party, along with Texas Majority PAC, which works to elect Democrats in Texas, announced that it had signed up candidates in every state house and senate race in 2026 as well as all of those for the U.S. House — what the party said was a first.
“We intend to fight for every single seat in 2026,” said Katherine Fischer, executive director of Texas Majority PAC.
At the same time, Republicans have made inroads in Hispanic communities along the border in areas formerly controlled by Democrats. Two of the seats targeted in the redistricting which Democrats think they still have a shot at belong to moderate Democratic representatives, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Both have held on even as their districts have voted for Trump.
Since the 2024 election, their districts were drawn to be even more Republican, based on those results. Still, Mr. Gonzalez said in an interview, he and Mr. Cuellar believe they can win. “The I.C.E. raids are pretty shocking to people, even people that were tough on the border, when they see, you know, blind old men getting tackled on the sidewalk,” he said. “I feel confident we’re going to win it.”
The 35th District around San Antonio is more of a tossup — albeit one that favors Republicans — because there is no incumbent. (Representative Greg Casar, a progressive Democrat, represented the old 35th, when it stretched from San Antonio to Austin. He decided to run for re-election in an Austin district.)
Some of the district’s Republican primary voters are looking for candidates who not only backed Mr. Trump but want to see his policies taken further. Sam Hines, a 32-year-old party activist in Bexar County, said he thought the Trump administration’s deportation program needed to be accelerated.
“I feel like it’s a lot of photo ops to make it look like an action movie,” Mr. Hines said. “It’s not really what he promised.”
Mr. Hines, who worked for several months as a state-employed monitor on migrant buses as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s program sending new arrivals to Democrat-led cities, said that the Democrats’ message of affordability was a valid issue.
“Anytime I’m at the grocery story or a restaurant, that’s when I notice it,” he said, adding that, in contrast, gas prices were pretty low, at least in Texas. Still, he said, that issue will not sway him away from supporting Republicans next fall.
The district also includes a pair of deeply conservative rural counties, and its urban areas are near military bases, recently electing a Republican to the state house after supporting Democrats for generations.
“I had a bunch of people saying, ‘I voted for you, and not your stinking party,’” John Lujan, a former San Antonio firefighter, said of that election, in which he flipped the state house district for Republicans in the southern part of the city four years ago.
Mr. Lujan is one of several candidates running in a crowded Republican primary in the 35th. While he said there was still excitement for Republicans in the area, he was also quick to stress his bipartisan approach and ability to get along with Democrats — including playing regular pingpong games with a Democratic colleague in the legislature.
“One hundred percent, I want to work together,” he said during an interview at a newly constructed commercial strip near the growing town of Schertz. “It’s gotten so divisive,” he said.
At the same time, he said that trying to win the Republican primary — in which candidates are vying to win over a more conservative party base — could complicate that message of cross-party unity. “Right now, in the primaries, I have to be far right, Mr. Lujan said.
Democratic strategists nationally have seen the district as potentially winnable, despite the Republican advantage, in part because of what they hope is the strength of a first-time candidate, Johnny Garcia, a cowboy-hat-wearing deputy sheriff and hostage negotiator in San Antonio.
At a Mexican restaurant in the city’s south side, Mr. Garcia stressed his commitment to public safety as a law enforcement officer, and his belief that the district, despite the new boundaries, was “very much in play,” and that the Republican Party had “overplayed their hand.”
Increasing prices at the grocery store, immigration raids, the cost of health care — all of those were issues in the race, he said. “Treating people humanely, justly, like human beings and citizens should be, is my main focus,” he said.
Ralph Gutierrez, 69, the conservative former mayor of Schertz who lost his bid for re-election in November, said his area remained solidly Republican, even if he and others did not support the president’s push for the mass deportation of those without criminal records.
“I have someone that I have known for 20 years, he has adopted three girls, and if he gets deported, what’s going to happen to the three little girls?” he said. “Where do you draw the line?”
Still, Mr. Gutierrez added, it was not enough to make him support Democrats. He blames the party for allowing so many migrants into the country in the first place.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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