What the 2027 Rankings Do—and Do Not—Tell Us about Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What the 2027 Rankings Do—and Do Not—Tell Us about Texas Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 22, 2026

The newly released U.S. News & World Report rankings deserve more scrutiny than the usual horse-race coverage of who moved up and who moved down. The headline is that six Texas universities remain among the nation's top 100. But underneath that relatively reassuring news is a striking pattern of decline among a number of the state's public universities—and particularly among institutions in the University of Texas System (Wilhelm, 2026).

UT Austin fell from No. 30 to No. 34 nationally. Texas A&M dropped eight places, from No. 51 to No. 59. Outside the top 100, UT Dallas fell 11 places, UT San Antonio and UT Arlington each fell 14, UT Rio Grande Valley fell 37, Texas State fell 31, UT Tyler fell 13, and the University of Houston–Clear Lake fell 35 (Wilhelm, 2026).

The UT System pattern in particular merits attention. Every UT System institution singled out in this article for year-to-year movement declined: Austin by four places, Dallas by 11, San Antonio by 14, Arlington by 14, Rio Grande Valley by 37, and Tyler by 13. That does not establish that something systemwide caused these declines. Texas Tech, Prairie View A&M, and Texas A&M–Kingsville, for example, moved upward, so there is no uniform “Texas effect” (Wilhelm, 2026). But when several institutions operating under the same system and state policy environment move downward simultaneously, it is reasonable to notice the pattern and watch whether it persists.

At the same time, we should be very careful about what these rankings actually measure. A university's ordinal position is not the equivalent of a report card. UT Austin did not suddenly become "four places worse" as a university. Rankings are relative: an institution can improve on important measures and still fall because other universities improve faster, because institutions enter or leave its comparison group, or because the ranking formula itself changes.

And the formula did change this year.

For the 2027 rankings, U.S. News replaced graduate indebtedness with a new "earnings by major" measure worth 5 percent of the score and began using the updated 2025 Carnegie classifications (Baity, 2026; U.S. News & World Report, L.P., 2026). More broadly, student outcomes account for about 52 percent of the U.S. News formula, while academic peer assessment alone accounts for another 20 percent; faculty and financial resources, standardized test scores, and research measures make up much of the remainder (Baity, 2026).

That context makes UT Austin’s decline especially interesting. The university itself reports that freshman applications reached a record 98,841 this year, its four-year graduation rate rose to a record 77.7 percent, and it awarded a record 16,801 degrees during 2025–26 (University of Texas at Austin, 2026). UT also remains the No. 1 public university in Texas and No. 8 among public universities nationally according to these same U.S. News rankings (University of Texas at Austin, 2026; Wilhelm, 2026). In other words, the four-place decline in the overall ranking coexists with several indicators of very strong institutional performance. That alone should caution us against interpreting No. 34 rather than No. 30 as evidence of a four-step deterioration in educational quality.

UTRGV offers an even more dramatic lesson about the limitations of composite rankings. Its overall national ranking fell an eye-catching 37 places to No. 250 (Wilhelm, 2026). Yet in the very same 2027 rankings, UTRGV climbed 30 places to No. 26 nationally for social mobility and tied for No. 1 among Texas public universities on that measure (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, 2026). Which ranking tells us what UTRGV actually contributes to higher education? 

For an institution whose mission centrally involves expanding opportunity in one of the nation's most economically challenged regions, its performance in graduating Pell Grant students arguably tells us something that its position in a single national prestige hierarchy cannot. The U.S. News social mobility measure specifically assesses institutions’ success in enrolling and graduating students who receive Pell Grants (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, 2026).

This is why rankings are never neutral descriptions of "quality." They embody decisions about what counts. Is a great university one whose graduates command high salaries? One with highly paid faculty and abundant financial resources? One highly regarded by other university presidents and provosts? One that produces research? One that enrolls economically disadvantaged students and actually gets them to graduation? 

U.S. News combines these different purposes into a single number using a weighted set of student-outcome, peer-assessment, faculty-resource, financial-resource, research, and other measures (Baity, 2026). The ranking then asks us to believe that No. 34 meaningfully distinguishes an institution from No. 30—or even from the seven universities tied with UT at No. 34. The ranking gives us a precise number, but not necessarily a precise measure of educational quality.

Still, I would not dismiss the Texas declines. Rankings matter precisely because people believe they matter. Prospective students see them. Parents see them. Legislators and governing boards cite them. Potential faculty recruits see them. University leaders use them in fundraising and institutional branding. And because 20 percent of the U.S. News score comes from peer assessment, reputation itself becomes part of the ranking calculation (Baity, 2026). A deterioration in how academic leaders elsewhere perceive an institution can therefore eventually become measurable even when its graduation rates and research productivity remain strong.

That point bears watching in Texas. A recent 2026 Faculty in the South survey drew responses from 1,023 Texas faculty members; about 35 percent said they planned to seek employment outside Texas in the coming hiring cycle, and roughly 70 percent said they would not encourage graduate students or faculty colleagues to seek employment in the state (Surjadi, 2026). Because this was a voluntary survey rather than a representative sample of all Texas professors, those figures should not be treated as population estimates. The survey was distributed through email and social media, with invitations sent to more than 85,000 addresses across participating states (Boedy, 2026). But the results are meaningful evidence of faculty sentiment and of potential recruitment and retention problems that universities should take seriously.

We should therefore resist a tempting but premature conclusion: the 2027 rankings do not prove that recent changes in Texas higher education caused UT Austin or other Texas universities to fall. Much of the information entering these rankings is necessarily retrospective. The new earnings measure, for example, looks at graduates’ earnings four years after graduation (U.S. News & World Report, L.P., 2026). Policies and institutional decisions made in 2025 or 2026 therefore cannot plausibly explain many of the outcome measures appearing in a ranking released in September 2026.

The more important question is prospective: What happens to these universities over the next five years?

If Texas universities become less successful at recruiting and retaining distinguished faculty; if institutional reputation among academic peers weakens; if research capacity deteriorates; if students increasingly choose institutions elsewhere; or if the academic breadth of universities is narrowed, those effects will eventually appear somewhere—in research productivity, faculty resources, graduate programs, peer assessments, student demand, or other measures of institutional quality.

That is why UT Austin’s movement from No. 30 to No. 34 should neither be sensationalized nor waved away. One year's ranking is a data point, not a verdict. But alongside substantial declines at a number of other Texas public institutions—and particularly the cluster of declines across UT System campuses—it is a data point worth remembering (Wilhelm, 2026).

The real test will not be where Texas universities stand in one magazine's rankings this September. It will be whether, five or ten years from now, they remain places where exceptional faculty want to work, talented students want to study, consequential research can flourish, and universities possess the intellectual breadth and institutional conditions necessary to fulfill their public mission.

References

Baity, C. (2026, September 22). ECU once again named among nation’s best colleges. East Carolina University. https://news.ecu.edu/2026/09/22/ecu-once-again-named-among-nations-best-colleges/

Boedy, M. (2026, September 10). Results from the 2026 Faculty in the South Survey. Academe Blog. https://academeblog.org/2026/09/10/results-from-the-2026-faculty-in-the-south-survey/

Surjadi, M. (2026, September 14). More professors want to leave Texas this year, citing political climate, censorship, survey says. The Dallas Morning News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/more-professors-want-leave-texas-124335563.html

University of Texas at Austin. (2026, September 22). UT sets academic performance records, remains the No. 1 public university in Texas. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/09/22/ut-sets-academic-performance-records-remains-the-no-1-public-university-in-texas/

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. (2026, September 23). UTRGV rises to No. 26 nationally for social mobility in U.S. News & World Report rankings. The Newsroom. https://www.utrgv.edu/newsroom/2026/09/23/2027-us-news-world-report-best-colleges.htm

U.S. News & World Report, L.P. (2026, September 22). MIT claims No. 1 spot in U.S. News 2027 Best Colleges rankings. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mit-claims-no-1-spot-in-us-news-2027-best-colleges-rankings-302885278.html

Wilhelm, M. (2026, September 22). Six Texas schools crack U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 top 100. Chron. https://www.chron.com/texas/article/texas-us-news-2027-best-colleges-22436271.php

Six Texas schools crack U.S. News & World's 2027 top 100
Some Texas schools climbed while others took a tumble.
By Molly Wilhelm, Trending ReporterSep 22, 2026

19 FEB 2015: Campus Life photos taken at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX.
Sam Houston ranked among U.S. News & World's 2027 Best Colleges regional list for the West. NCAA Photos/NCAA Photos via Getty Images

April 3, 2012. Sewall Hall in Rice University with a student walking in the hallway. Rice University was the top ranking Texas university among U.S. News & World's 2027 Best Colleges list. aimintang/Getty Images
U.S. News & World Report released its Best Colleges of 2027 ranking, and six Texas institutions cracked the top 100.

Houston's Rice University was the top-ranked for Texas, landing at No. 16 nationally—tied with Brown University in Rhode Island, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The publication measured academic quality and student outcomes using graduation and retention rates, post-graduation earnings, faculty resources and research, financial resources, incoming students' SAT and ACT scores, and other factors, according to the methodology.

But how did other Texas institutions fare, and did any see a major shift?

Texas A&M main campus clock tower. Texas A&M ranked among U.S. News &
World's top 100 in its 2027 Best Colleges ranking, down eight spots from
last year.Riley Davidson/Getty Images

Texas schools in the top 100

No 16. Rice UniversityTied with Brown University, Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis.

Up one place from 2026 rankings.

No 34. The University of Texas-AustinTied with Boston University, University of California-Davis, University of California-Irvine, University of Florida, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wake Forest University.

Dropped four places from 2026 rankings.

No 59. Texas A&M UniversityTied with Brandeis University, Florida State University, George Washington University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Stony Brook University-SUNY, Tulane University of Louisiana, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and University of Pittsburgh.

Dropped eight places from 2026 rankings.

No 85. Southern Methodist UniversityTied with Fordham University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University at Buffalo-SUNY and University of Delaware.

Rose three places from 2026 rankings.

No 90. Baylor University and Texas Christian UniversityTied with Gonzaga University, Marquette University and Yeshiva University

Baylor dropped two places from 2026 rankings, TCU rose seven places.

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus, Brownsville, Texas. The school
fell nearly 40 spots in U.S. News & World's 2027 Best Colleges list.Christine_Kohler/Getty Images

Outside of the top 100, some Texas institutions drop nearly 40 places

Outside the top 100, 12 Texas universities and colleges moved more than 10 spots from last year's national rankings, with some shifting by nearly 40 places:

No. 121. The University of Texas-Dallas (tied)Dropped 11 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 186. Texas Tech University (tied)Rose 12 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 227. University of Texas-San Antonio (tied)Dropped 14 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 236. University of Texas-Arlington (tied)Dropped 14 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 250. The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley (tied) Dropped 37 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 288. Texas State University (tied) Dropped 31 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 308. Abilene Christian University (tied) Rose 21 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 308. University of the Incarnate World (tied) Dropped 15 places from the 2026 rankings.

No. 317. Prairie View A&M University (tied) Rose 26 places from 2026 rankings.

No. 332. Texas A&M University- Kingsville (tied) Rose 20 places from the 2026 rankings.

No. 342. The University of Texas at Tyler (tied) Dropped 13 places from the 2026 rankings.

No. 353. University of Houston-Clear Lake (tied) Dropped 35 places from 2026 rankings.

19 FEB 2015: Campus Life photos taken at Sam Houston State
University in Huntsville, TX. Sam Houston ranked among U.S.
News & World's 2027 Best Colleges regional list for the West.

NCAA Photos/NCAA Photos via Getty Images

The top 10 Texas regional universities and colleges

In addition to its national rankings, U.S. News & World Report ranked the top 50 regional universities and colleges. Texas schools were included in the "West" category.

The publication defines regional universities as institutions offering a wide range of undergraduate programs and some master's degrees, but few doctoral programs. Regional colleges focus on undergraduate education, with most degrees in professional fields.

Texas' top 10 regional universities

St. Edward's University (No. 6 overall)
University of Dallas (No. 10 overall, tied)
St. Mary's University of San Antonio (No. 12 overall, tied)
LeTourneau University (No. 29 overall, tied)
Stephen F. Austin State University (No. 29 overall, tied)
Texas A&M International University (No. 34 overall, tied)
West Texas A&M University (No. 37 overall)
Hardin-Simmons University (No. 38 overall, tied)
Sam Houston State University (No. 48 overall, tied)
University of Houston-Downtown (No. 48 overall, tied)

Texas' top 9 regional colleges
Southwestern Adventist University (No. 12 overall, tied)
Texas Lutheran University (No. 12 overall, tied)
Houston-Tillotson University (No. 22 overall)
McMurry University (No. 23 overall)
Howard Payne University (No. 27 overall, tied)
Wiley College (No. 42 overall)
Jarvis Christian University (No. 46-50 overall)
South Texas College (No. 46-50 overall)
Texas College (No. 46-50 overall)

While the University of Houston didn't crack the top 100 nationally, it ranked No. 67 when compared to public universities across the U.S., tied with seven other institutions. It ranked fourth when looking solely at public universities in Texas, according to a UH press release.

"The University earned Top 100 rankings in several other key categories, including Most Innovative Schools (No. 65), Best Value Schools (No. 78) and Best Colleges for Veterans (No. 96)," UH wrote on Tuesday.

Several other schools also ranked in the top 100 for public colleges: UT Austin at No. 8, Texas A&M University at No. 24, The University of Texas-Dallas at No. 58 and Texas Tech University at No. 96.

Inside the Conservative Takeover of the University of Texas, by Forrest Wilder, Texas Monthly

Friends:

The conservative takeover of the University of Texas is well underway, and Forrest Wilder’s powerful Texas Monthly investigation lays bare just how far it has progressed. What emerges from his reporting is not simply a story of administrative restructuring or ideological disagreement, but a far-reaching transformation of our flagship university through political interference, the erosion of shared governance, and the systematic weakening of academic freedom. 

For myself and others, it feels more like an "occupation," as opposed to "bureaucratic restructuring."

Particularly alarming is the dismantling of Ethnic and gender studies programs, the marginalization of faculty expertise, and the chilling climate of fear and self-censorship taking hold on campus. Wilder situates these developments within UT’s longer history of political assaults on intellectual independence, reminding us that the university has faced—and resisted—such threats before. 

The central contradiction is impossible to ignore: How can a university aspire to greatness while undermining the very intellectual freedom, diversity of knowledge, and democratic principles upon which academic excellence depends? What is at stake is not simply UT’s national standing, but its public mission, its moral credibility, and the future of higher education as a cornerstone of democracy. 

I am so very grateful to Wilder for this illuminating piece. We've been here before. We can and should push back on this today. 

Our reputation is at stake.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Politics & Policy

Inside the Conservative Takeover of the University of Texas

A secretive president. A crusading provost. A domineering legislature. What are UT’s new leaders building?

By Forrest Wilder | Nov. 2026 | Texas Monthly

Audio narration on this article is provided using an AI voice as a service to our subscribers. Texas Monthly’s journalism is reported, written, and edited by humans. Learn more and give feedback here.

IIt’s about 1,600 miles from Laredo to Detroit—a long haul by any measure. For Roberto Carlos, who made the trip often as a trucker, the drive was mostly a grind, monotonous and dangerous. Trucking was a hard way to make a living, but it was honest work that his parents, immigrants from Mexico who had settled in San Antonio, respected.

One of the highlights of the trip came in Austin, when he would pass by the University of Texas campus. Carlos would downshift to spend a few more moments gazing at the Forty Acres. Just off Interstate 35, there was the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, flanked by majestic live oaks. Nearby sat Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, one of the great venues in college football and the home of the Texas Longhorns. In the heart of campus rose the famous Tower, the 307-foot monument to the school’s ambition and power. From the eighteen-wheeler cab, it all seemed so close and yet so far away.

In a time when higher education is beset by crises and doubts, it’s easy to forget what a place like UT has meant for so many: a ticket out of poverty, an invitation to labor on matters of the mind, an opportunity to contribute, in some small way, to the world’s storehouse of knowledge.

But that was all just theory for Carlos. He had graduated from high school in San Antonio and gone straight to work. After two years of long-haul trucking, he decided that he needed to get a college degree. He didn’t have the grades to get into UT, so he went to Texas State University. After graduating, he taught at Churchill High School, in San Antonio, for five and a half years while working on a masters degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The idea was to become a better teacher, but he ended up falling in love with research. He left to get a doctorate at the University of Chicago and then landed his first faculty job at the University of Georgia in 2019.

Carlos and his wife were happy in Athens. They were restoring a home, and his career was taking off. He published an article in one of the top political science journals on how young Latinos often function as adults in their families, helping their immigrant parents navigate unfamiliar systems and customs. Suddenly he was a hot prospect in the brutal academic labor market. Carlos had his dream job in mind: “When my peers were talking about, ‘I want to teach at Harvard’ or ‘I want to teach at Stanford,’ I was like, ‘I want to teach at UT.’ And they would be like, ‘Really?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s the place to be.’ ”

The draw for Carlos wasn’t just the school. It was Texas. “I love Texas. I love H-E-B. I love my family, and I love Whataburger, probably in that order.”

In late 2021 the dream became reality. He landed a tenure-track job in UT’s
government department with an appointment in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, which was founded in 1940. In many ways, UT was everything Carlos had hoped for. He got season tickets to football and basketball games. He began working on a book for a top university press. In Carlos, the university had landed a rising star. “He’s such a high-caliber scholar with such a great reputation,” said Hannah Walker, a government professor who helped recruit him. And his students got that invaluable commodity on a college campus: a respected young scholar who loves to teach and is good at it.

Carlos figured he would bleed burnt orange for life. But what he didn’t realize was that he had wandered into the first battle of what was to be a long war.

Much of the Forty Acres is a construction site, with $2.4 billion in projects underway. 
Photograph by Jeff Wilson

In theory, Texas colleges enjoy a degree of freedom and independence. They have a layer of insulation from politics: The governor appoints board members, and these regents in turn hire (and fire) a university’s president. Under state law, governing boards are also obliged to “preserve institutional independence.” The day-to-day business is—or was—conducted through a model of “shared governance,” in which faculty and administrators each have a role in decision-making. To ensure academic freedom, the right to teach and conduct research without political interference, universities established a system of tenure for professors, a promise of indefinite employment that makes it hard, but not impossible, for faculty to be fired for speaking their minds.

But in 2021 that order began to break. That year, according to The Texas Tribune, billionaire donors such as Harlan Crow and Robert Rowling worked behind the scenes with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to set up a conservative think tank at UT-Austin, which the Lege seeded with $6 million. Now called the Civitas Institute, it trains students on “liberty and private enterprise.” 

Then in 2022, Patrick announced that he was so sick of the “indoctrination” happening on college campuses—with critical race theory taught by “looney Marxist UT professors”—that he supported a radical proposition: the abolition of tenure for new faculty. Patrick’s proposal was shocking and potentially destabilizing to the state’s system of higher education. Though the ban died in the House, the Legislature codified weakened tenure rules and moved to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. UT dutifully laid off at least sixty staff members, and the campus’s multicultural center closed. Some faculty might have privately stomached the rollback of the DEI bureaucracy, but the effort to bring colleges to heel was far from over.

In the years to follow, the Republican-controlled Legislature paved the way for UT and other colleges to dissolve their faculty councils—elected bodies that help govern academic matters in the spirit of shared governance—and gave regents sweeping new authority over hiring, curriculum, and degree offerings. 

University governing boards read the room and went even further. Texas Tech University regents would order campuses to shut down any program “ ‘centered on’ . . .   sexual orientation and gender identity.” Meanwhile, at Texas A&M University, restrictions on gender-and race-studies classes would be so far-reaching that a philosophy professor would be told to remove a Plato reading from his course. Texas State would suggest that faculty use AI to help de-wokeify their course’s titles and descriptions.

Carlos, who studies politics for a living, was unnerved by what he was seeing. “The state legislature should have a role in what happens at public institutions,” he told me. But, he thought, politicians were jeopardizing the very thing that made universities a cornerstone of democracy: the right of scholars to teach and do research without government interference. “It really is this idea of, can we ask hard questions even when they’re uncomfortable?”

Carlos was up for tenure in 2025, but he found himself questioning whether UT would remain a place for free thinking. By April of that year—when Patrick encouraged “looney Marxist UT professors” to move to a blue state—he had already accepted a job at the University of Michigan. “Leaving UT was super hard,” he said. “My mom’s still mad.”

He stressed to me that the Michigan offer was attractive. “I don’t want my move to be read as a protest,” he said. “But I do think that the fact that a pretty proud Texan would leave—I would literally stop and clap if somebody sang ‘The stars at night’ —that should spark some reflection about the importance of protecting higher education from unnecessary interference.”

Roberto Carlos, a lifelong Longhorns fan, in November 2022, shortly after he came back to the state for his dream job.Courtesy of Roberto Carlos

While We Fight the Culture Wars, Who’s Picking Our Pockets? A Political Reckoning in South Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

While We Fight the Culture Wars, Who’s Picking Our Pockets? A Political Reckoning in South Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Happy Sunday morning.

Gaige Davila’s October 6, 2026, Texas Observer article, “South Texas Is Moving On from Trump,” offers a fascinating and potentially consequential look at the shifting political landscape of South Texas. After Donald Trump made significant gains among Latino voters in 2024, the region now appears to be reconsidering its support for the Republican Party. Rising living costs, increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement, data centers, and growing frustration with billionaire influence in politics are contributing to this shift.

Particularly revealing is Davila’s reporting on Republican candidates who are distancing themselves from Trump and his policies, even as Democrats seek to reconnect with voters around bread-and-butter issues such as affordable living, public education, infrastructure, and community safety. As several political observers caution, however, it remains too early to know whether this represents a lasting political realignment or a reaction to the present administration.

What I find especially compelling is the possibility that South Texas voters are moving beyond the divisive culture wars that have dominated our politics for far too long. State Representative and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, who grew up in Brownsville, captures this frustration when she observes that while ordinary Texans have been fighting among themselves over partisan differences, billionaires have been the real winners. Her question—“Who does Texas belong to?”—gets to the heart of what is at stake.

For communities whose histories are rooted in struggles for educational opportunity, economic justice, and civil rights, this election is about far more than party loyalty. It is about whether government serves working families and local communities or the wealthy and powerful interests that increasingly shape our political and economic lives.

What I find especially encouraging is that the curtain is finally being pulled back on the culture wars, exposing how they can function as political distractions that keep ordinary people divided and fighting among themselves while powerful interests consolidate their wealth, influence, and control over public policy. While we're encouraged to fight over race, immigration, gender, and identity, far too little attention is paid to who is profiting, who is paying the price, and how working families are being shortchanged.

This reminds me of a remarkably perceptive observation by President Lyndon B. Johnson, recounted by his former aide Bill Moyers in 1988. Reflecting on how racial prejudice could be exploited to distract working people from their shared economic interests, Johnson reportedly said:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

—Lyndon B. Johnson, as recalled by Bill Moyers (1988)

Johnson was speaking specifically about the exploitation of racial prejudice, but his observation speaks to a larger political dynamic that remains relevant today. When people are persuaded to see their neighbors as the source of their problems, they may pay less attention to those who wield economic and political power over their lives. And that is precisely why we must question whose interests are served by the seemingly endless culture wars consuming our public discourse.

Perhaps the most hopeful development is that more voters are beginning to connect the dots, recognizing that the real struggle is not necessarily between neighbors with different political loyalties, but between the public interest and a political and economic system increasingly responsive to those with the deepest pockets. The more clearly voters see through these distractions, the harder it becomes for those in power to divide us while picking our pockets.

Davila’s reporting reminds us that Latino voters are neither politically monolithic nor permanently aligned with any party. Their votes must be earned through policies that meaningfully improve their lives and honor their communities.

Indeed, no political party or candidate is entitled to anyone’s vote. Period. In my opinion, every vote must be earned, and every elected official must remain accountable to the people they serve. Political loyalty should never be presumed on the basis of race, ethnicity, geography, or historical party affiliation. Nor should voters be treated as electoral commodities, courted when their support is needed and forgotten once the ballots are counted.

Voters deserve to be taken seriously, listened to, and respected. Their support should be earned through meaningful engagement, demonstrated integrity, and policies that address the real concerns and aspirations of their communities.

Ultimately, democracy is strongest when voters hold elected officials accountable, question their promises, and insist that public service means serving the public rather than powerful special interests. No party owns our votes, and none should ever take them for granted.

Democracy belongs to the people—not to political parties, wealthy donors, tech billionaires, or powerful special interests. And the moment we allow any political party to take our votes for granted, we diminish our own power to demand the representation, accountability, and justice we deserve.

References

Davila, G. (2026, October 6). South Texas is moving on from Trump. The Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/south-texas-2026-trump-cuellar-gonzalez-hinojosa/

Moyers, B. D. (1988, November 13). What a real president was like: To Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society meant hope and dignity. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/

South Texas Is Moving On from Trump

The region looks poised to return to its centrist-Democrat roots, as the president fails to bring down costs and the reality of mass deportations takes hold. But 2028 could be another test.

by Gaige Davila October 6, 2026, 7:15 AM, CDT

Ten years after Donald Trump was first elected President, the Republican Party has placed its chips on a region that would have made little sense at any other time in the last century: South Texas. Yet, if current polling holds, the GOP may have already overplayed its hand.

Congressional districts from San Antonio down to Brownsville, aggressively (and perhaps foolishly) redrawn at Trump’s orders, are at the crux of any Republican midterm hopes to hold the U.S. House, and state legislative races are similarly key to the party keeping its comfortable supermajority in Texas’ lower chamber. Up to the top of the ballot, where South Texas voters were key to James Talarico’s primary victory and where Brownsville-raised Gina Hinojosa sits one rung down, the region may hold the car keys. All as Republicans run without the man who seemed to break Democrats’ hold in the area on the ticket.

With weeks left to go, proclamations of another “red wave” coming to the region—after Trump flipped the majority-Latino South Texas border in 2024 and the GOP seized a state Senate seat while holding onto a congressional and state House district snagged two years before—are no more. Instead, national GOP leadership, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, is anxiously coming to stump for South Texas’ GOP candidates, working to convince voters that the stakes are high for the Republican Party this year.


Supporters of Texas Democratic candidate for Governor Gina Hinojosa
during a campaign rally in Brownsville on September 15 (Gaige Davila)

“[Democrats] want to remove the president, okay. They want one, unicameral body, the House, to run everything. You have to ask yourself why,” Johnson told a couple dozen people in Sinton in August at The Butter Churn, where he was campaigning for Monica De La Cruz, who since 2022 has represented Congressional District 15, which sprawls from near San Antonio down to the Rio Grande. “Because they have calculated that, over the next couple of cycles, they can elect enough Marxist communists to take over the whole thing.”

The national GOP has opened a “battle station” in Harlingen, near Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley, much like they did in McAllen years prior, hoping to hold the electoral gains it made in the four-county, 1.4-million-person southern tip of the region. That hold looks increasingly tenuous as the popular Tejano singer Bobby Pulido has turned De La Cruz’s CD-15 into a toss-up, per the Cook Political Report, and incumbents Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar look increasingly likely to keep their districts, the 34th and 28th, that were re-gerrymandered for GOP pickup.

The prognosis is perhaps unsurprising in retrospect, since there were always signs the 2024 South Texas swing could have been peculiar to that specific presidential context. Downballot Democrats largely survived the Trump wave. And all that was before, of course, South Texas became ground zero for the harsh realities of Trump’s mass deportation project.

South Texas GOP candidates are appearing to now distance themselves from Trump and his policies—after ICE has arrested tens of thousands of people in the agency’s Harlingen and San Antonio sectors, where most of these races are located; after the cost of living has continued to increase in these metro areas; and after sometimes-trillionaire Elon Musk’s company town and its proliferation outside of Brownsville has drawn more ire from surrounding communities with each rocket launch. Democrats are capitalizing on the frustration, with the party’s confidence resurging.

Dems are coalescing around messaging that also seems to be resonating statewide, such as the platform of Austin state Representative Gina Hinojosa, the gubernatorial hopeful whose roots are in the Valley. This includes lowering the cost of living, holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accountable after repeated violence, and getting billionaires out of politics.

Red scare efforts aside, South Texas’ GOP candidates for Congress and the state Legislature are actually running on similar platforms to Democrats on some issues, vying for the same kind of support that has kept the region—up until recently—a stronghold for moderate Democrats. Republican legislator Janie Lopez, who won her San Benito-based state House seat in 2022, is campaigning on fixing roads and flood infrastructure. One of De La Cruz’s TV ads talks about lowering costs for people working in restaurants. Eric Flores, a former federal prosecutor under the Biden administration who’s challenging Gonzalez, has made water one of his campaign focuses. Nary a “mass deportations” sign in sight.

Two years prior, it seemed everyone running in South Texas races had a border security ad, even Michelle Vallejo, a progressive who was then running in a losing bid against De La Cruz.

Now, De La Cruz herself has advocated for and helped release some people from ICE detention. But it may be too late to create distance from ICE, Trump, and the cost of living, experts told the Texas Observer.

“We’ve seen a sea change, in just two years: a sea change in Latino voting from what we saw in ’24, where we saw a substantial number of Latinos vote for Trump, vote for Republicans,” Jon Taylor, the University of Texas San Antonio’s political science department chair, told the Observer. “And now, if you look at polling, consistently now you’re seeing a complete flip in the other direction toward Democrats.”

This loss of support isn’t limited to Latino voters in South Texas, but—as both the site of 2024’s perhaps most surprising pro-Trump swing and many of the president’s most harmful policies in practice—South Texas may serve as the definitive referendum on the White House occupant this November.

“I have to say, it doesn’t feel like 2018 quite for me,” Vicente Gonzalez, the incumbent Democratic congressman for CD-34, which runs from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, told the Observer in a September phone call. “I wasn’t working near as hard as I am right now in 2018, I’ll tell you that.”

Having been redrawn last summer into a district that went for Trump in 2024 by 10 points, Gonzalez says Democrats can’t take another election for granted in South Texas. But Democratic turnout during the primaries this March has Gonzalez hopeful.

That’s partly because Gonzalez has already managed to survive a decade’s worth of election cycles, in the 34th and in the neighboring 15th, which he vacated voluntarily and is now held by De La Cruz.

Back in 2022, the self-described “triple threat” of De La Cruz plus Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia all of whom were Rio Grande Valley-based, right-wing Latinas vying for seats with districts that stretched as far as San Antonio and its suburbs, garnered much media attention. South Texas’ Latino voters were simultaneously being invested in by the Republican party and disinvested in by Democrats, or so the narrative went. But the Blue Dog Dem congressmen, Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar—whose Laredo-based 28th stretches down into the Valley—held Flores and Garcia at bay. Cuellar then rebuffed (criminal pardon-related) speculation that he might change parties late last year, setting up the two men, often derided by liberals within their own party in the past, as the resilient paragons of the South Texas Democrat style.

Vicente Gonzalez in November 2022 (Denise Cathey/The Brownsville
Herald via AP)

Eric Flores, Gonzalez’s opponent, prevailed in the March GOP primary thanks to Trump’s backing and recently got a stump speech from Vice President JD Vance in Harlingen. Earlier this year, Trump visited a Corpus Christi Whataburger with Flores in tow. The president has twice posted a video on his social media channels calling for people to vote for Flores. He’s done similar for De La Cruz.

But, following the primaries, Flores’ campaign signs don’t say he’s endorsed by Trump anymore. He also recoiled when a local Democratic Party made campaign signs that looked like Flores’ older signs, saying the National Guard Army veteran was “Trump Endorsed” and supported ICE. In a statement on social media, Flores used the term “dirty tricks” to describe the signs that tied him to the president who likely secured his congressional nomination for him and to the federal agency that’s carrying out the same president’s signature policy promise.

A survey from Texas Southern University’s policy research arm says the race is now in Gonzalez’s favor. Mark P. Jones, one of the authors of the survey report and a professor of political science at Rice University, said the GOP, when they redrew districts in 2025, depended on a voting bloc to turn out that likely won’t this election: young, Latino men who voted for Trump.

“It’s not that many of them have decided to become Democrats, although some will vote Democratic,” Jones told the Observer, describing some of the survey respondents. “They are disillusioned by Trump and are not motivated to turn out to vote for anyone this year.”

Redistricting is also a factor in De La Cruz’s reelection chances. The new CD-15 map, though shifted just slightly east, removed about 60 percent of De La Cruz’s previous constituents, meaning she had to introduce herself to voters while her opponent, Bobby Pulido, is one of the most successful Tejano artists of all time. In South Texas, his name recognition is undeniable, and policy-wise he’s running in the established mold of Gonzalez and Cuellar. Which means De La Cruz, arguably, does not have the incumbent advantage, despite two terms in Congress.

“You add that with he had a profile of someone who you can’t easily portray as left, as a coastal elite, or a coastal liberal, and that he’s from the Valley,” Jones said. “But [he] also has, historically, had a set of positions and has a profile of somebody who’s a traditional South Texas centrist.”

Democrats are largely eschewing progressivism this cycle, after the failed congressional bids in recent cycles of Vallejo and Jessica Cisneros, who nearly ousted Cuellar in two Dem primaries. With one exception: the Bernie Sanders-backed Julio Salinas, who won the Democratic primary for the McAllen-based House District 41 against former city council member and moderate Democrat Seby Haddad.

“South Texas voters are, in their heart of hearts, centrist Democrats. The majority are,” Jones said of the region’s electorate going from blue to red and possibly back to blue. “That’s the dominant political organization in South Texas. … They also are not going to vote for extreme Republican candidates if they’re given a palatable Democratic alternative.”


Henry Cuellar and Tano Tijerina 2026 campaign signs posted next to each
other in Laredo (Justin Miller)

As for whether the Blue Dogs are truly back in town, Gonzalez said it will take some time to know for sure. Trump is omnipresent in the GOP’s South Texas races, having endorsed all the current Republican congressional and legislative candidates and made a handful of appearances in the area, but this remains a midterm race. Time will tell if, one way or another, a 2024-like effect can be achieved in 2028.

“I think it’s going to take another couple of election cycles to really say there is a trend one way or another,” Gonzalez said. “I always said Donald Trump brings a different type of excitement to an election.”

Eric Flores’ campaign did not respond to the Observer’s request for an interview.

In mid-September, at an event center on the southwestern edge of Brownsville, Gina Hinojosa was welcomed by hundreds of people, as Selena’s “Como Me Duele” reverberated from several loudspeakers through a space that hosts many of the city’s quinceañeras.

It was as “South Texas” of a homecoming as Hinojosa could have. She’s represented central Austin in the Texas Legislature since 2017 but was raised in Brownsville, making the Rio Grande Valley a recurring campaign stop since she announced her candidacy in her hometown eleven months prior. With less than two months left before the election, Hinojosa blamed the state’s healthcare, public school, and electricity woes on Greg Abbott, his donors, and tech billionaires.

“What people have finally figured out is, as we’ve been in our partisan tribes for the last 10 years, fighting each other with the culture wars over Thanksgiving dinner, fighting with our families about culture wars, the only people winning those wars are the billionaires,” Hinojosa said. “Like, 15 billionaire tech dudes who just have massive money and massive power and all of our data, and are about to blow up this planet … if we don’t come together fast to save ourselves—that’s what this election is about. Who does Texas belong to?”

Though she didn’t mention issues particular to the Valley in her speech, she did tell the Observer afterward that ICE was not the kind of border security she supported. That morning, she had visited homes under construction with the South Texas Builders Association, a group with a president that has become particularly outspoken about ICE detaining people on job sites and about regretting his prior support of Trump. A few days before her visit to Brownsville, two ICE agents pulled a teenager out of a car at an Alamo intersection, punched his face several times, then put him in handcuffs.

“These ICE raids are not making us more safe. They’re making us less safe,” she said. “I support border security here at the border. We want secure communities, right? But that’s making us less safe, not more safe.”

Nearly everyone who came to the rally lined up to take photos with Hinojosa, as Cameron County’s senior Democratic players talked among themselves, leaning against the stage. Former classmates of Hinojosa brought yearbooks to sign, supporters their campaign signs, and one person an infant child.


Hinojosa signs the shirt of Lisa Peña’s son, Romeo, on September 15
(Gaige Davila)

Zoe Griffith, a first-time voter from Brownsville who has organized with Healthy Futures of Texas, attended the rally with her mother, Christine Ramos, a local high school teacher and Marine veteran. Griffith said that Hinojosa’s positions against data centers and egregious ICE arrests are why she’ll be voting for her.

“Having seen Greg Abbott and how he runs in Texas, I want to see better change from my generation, and especially the generations that come before me,” she told the Observer. “Having people like Gina, especially as a female role model, it brings me more hope.”

Gaige Davila is the Texas Observer's 2026-27 David McHam investigative reporting fellow covering the border and immigration. Davila is from Port Isabel in the Rio Grande Valley. He studied investigative journalism at Arizona State University.