2026 Election: Latino Vote Faces New Test Under Redrawn Maps

The upcoming 2026 elections will define many of the races that will determine the composition of the United States’ political map. The efforts by Texas and California to gain more seats in Congress carry a risk: assuming that Latinos, in particular, will vote the same way they did in 2024 and that those trends will hold—namely, more and more Latinos voting for Republicans, leaving Democrats very vulnerable.

Democratic analysts have assumed that President Donald Trump’s policies have harmed the Latino vote and that, in both California and Texas, they will win enough votes to come out victorious.

Republican theorists have determined that the Latino trend in favor of Trump will persist and that they will vote overwhelmingly for them.

Both could be wrong. So far, how Latinos are preparing for the upcoming elections remains a mystery.

Latinos’ big shift toward Republicans has been one of the major changes in American politics during the Trump era. Now, the durability of those GOP gains — and whether Vice President Kamala Harris’ low numbers in key swing states and swing districts represents a low-water mark for Democrats or a waypoint on the way to worse trends in the future — are key questions that will determine how newly drawn congressional districts perform for the parties drawing them.

“Those maps were drawn assuming that the 2024 and to a lesser extent, the 2020 results, will provide the strongest indication of what’s going to happen in 2026 for both parties,” said Erin Covey, a nonpartisan election analyst who is the House editor at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter to NBC.

“Republicans are banking on their gains with Hispanic voters that they’ve made in south Texas particularly, not just in 2024 but over the last eight years. … That’s kind of the whole ballgame for them if they want to keep the House,” Covey added.

“The underlying goal is this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance,” GOP state Rep. Todd Hunter said earlier this month during debate on the bill, adding that the primary changes to the state’s congressional map are “focused on only five districts for partisan purposes.”

He went on to note that “four of the five new districts are majority-minority Hispanic” by citizen voting-age population, before adding:

“Each of these newly drawn districts now trend Republican in political performance. While there’s no guarantee of an electorate success, Republicans will now have an opportunity to potentially win these districts,” he added.

In California, Democrats drew a map designed to counter Texas by creating up to five House pickups for their party.

But Covey noted they started out from a different point than Texas Republicans — California had far more potentially competitive seats in its map, which was drawn by an independent commission, than Texas’ previous map, drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2021 and designed to shore up incumbent Republicans instead of maximizing potential GOP gains.

Covey added that while Democrats “could have drawn a more aggressive map that gave them as many as seven pickup opportunities” because of how spread-out California Republicans are geographically, the map drawers also took steps to help insulate a handful of Democratic incumbents who could have been vulnerable at some point in the near future, depending on the national mood.

The redraws come after an election that saw Trump not only sweep the key swing states but gain ground compared to his 2020 margins in every single state, even when, in some cases, major Democratic candidates down the ballot outperformed the top of their ticket.

The dynamic raises an important question when considering the new maps: Did national Democrats reach a low in 2024, especially considering the historical trend of the out-of-power party gaining ground in the subsequent midterm? Or did 2024 and the significant voter realignment that powered it signal that the old assumptions are no longer on the table?

Paul Mitchell, a data consultant whose firm, Redistricting Partners, helped to make California Democrats’ new proposed maps, told NBC News that he believes Republicans planning their political futures around the “artificial, high number” of 2024 could be a “real trap,” even as he added his party was “cognizant” of the trends to make sure it wasn’t leaving seats unexpectedly vulnerable.

“Let’s say this trend is permanent, we didn’t want to get bitten by it, so we were being overly cautious. They didn’t seem like they were worried about that,” he added.