Latino Voters, White Grievance Politics, and the Limits of the Anti-Immigrant Strategy
Recent reporting on the Texas primaries suggests that Republicans are beginning to worry about something that once seemed improbable: that the Latino voters who helped power Donald Trump’s 2024 victory may be drifting away from the coalition they helped build.
In heavily Latino parts of Texas, Democratic primary turnout last week significantly outpaced Republican turnout. Local officials in the Rio Grande Valley—long considered a key testing ground for Republican gains among Latino voters—are now warning that enthusiasm for the GOP appears to be fading.
But in many ways, this should not come as a surprise.
The political coalition that helped Republicans expand their Latino vote in 2024 was always built on a fragile foundation. Latino voters, like other Americans, hold diverse views on issues such as the economy, education, religion, and public safety. Some were drawn to Republican messaging around economic opportunity or border management. Yet the broader ideological framework shaping the modern Republican Party remains deeply rooted in white grievance politics—a politics that often frames immigrants and communities of color as threats to national identity, culture, and security.
There is a limit to how long that contradiction can hold.
For years, anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a central organizing force within the party. But rhetoric has increasingly been translated into policy. The administration’s aggressive deportation campaign—promoted as the largest in U.S. history—has swept up not only recent arrivals but also long-time undocumented residents and families with deep roots in their communities. Federal raids, workplace enforcement, and high-profile immigration crackdowns have made the consequences of this politics visible in everyday life.
Even voters who supported tougher border enforcement did not necessarily anticipate policies that would reach so deeply into communities, workplaces, and families.
When a political movement is fueled by grievance—particularly grievance centered on race, demographic change, and national belonging—it inevitably produces policies that punish the very communities it seeks to court politically. Latino voters may swing between parties, as many analysts note, but they are also paying close attention to how policies affect their neighbors, their workplaces, and their families.
What the Texas primaries may be revealing is not a sudden shift, but the limits of a political strategy built on exclusion.
Coalitions built through fear and resentment are inherently unstable. And when policies begin to translate rhetoric into lived consequences, voters notice.
Texas primaries raise GOP alarm about Latino voters
Strong Democratic turnout last week in heavily Latino parts of Texas has some Republicans fearing they will struggle to maintain the coalition Trump built in 2024.
March 8, 2026 | Washington Post
By Hannah Knowles and Clara Ence Morse
The Republican mayor of McAllen, Texas, says he wasn’t surprised last week when Democrats saw robust primary turnout in his heavily Latino border region of the state.
“The excitement there was with the Hispanic community and the Republican Party is kind of waning,” Mayor Javier Villalobos lamented.
Some of Villalobos’s family members who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 — fueling Republicans’ gains with Latino voters around the country — are telling him they think they made a mistake, the mayor said. Many people who initially cheered Trump for securing the border now think his immigration crackdown has gone too far.
Villalobos worries that Republicans’ hopes of picking up five House seats with a redrawn Texas map are fading — particularly because four of those districts are majority-Latino.
“There’s a good chance that we may lose one or two of those … maybe even more, based on the way that things are going right now,” he said.
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| People protest President Donald Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, in McAllen, Texas. (Eric Gay/AP) |
Trump was elected on promises to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But the scope of his administration’s crackdown has still surprised some supporters who expected him to focus more narrowly on violent criminals. His deportation push has ensnared undocumented immigrants living in the United States for years, including children, and his deployment of federal agents in Democratic-led cities drew intense backlash — especially after the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida), who has championed immigration reform legislation, said in an interview that Texas is part of a string of warning signs. She pointed to November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where the most heavily Latino counties swung most sharply toward Democrats.
Republicans, she said, are “understanding that because of those excesses of what happened the first year with immigration … the Republican Party has lost this great coalition that we put together in ’24.”
“Republicans must course-correct now before it’s too late,” she urged last week on social media.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida) says Texas is part of a string of warning signs for Republicans. (Marta Lavandier/AP)
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida), who has championed immigration reform legislation, said in an interview that Texas is part of a string of warning signs. She pointed to November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where the most heavily Latino counties swung most sharply toward Democrats.
Republicans, she said, are “understanding that because of those excesses of what happened the first year with immigration … the Republican Party has lost this great coalition that we put together in ’24.”
“Republicans must course-correct now before it’s too late,” she urged last week on social media.
“Democrats can burn piles of cash into a primary and temporarily juice their turnout, but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground that Latino voters are moving toward the Republican Party,” said Christian Martinez, a spokesman for House Republicans’ campaign arm.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said Trump got historic support from Latino voters and “is working diligently to deliver on his agenda to enforce federal immigration law, fix Biden’s affordability crisis, bring investment back to the United States, and more.”
There are caveats to Democrats’ high turnout in Texas’s primaries last week. In heavily Hispanic Starr County, for instance, many voters in the Democratic primary did not pick a Senate candidate, suggesting a disconnect with the broader party.
Still, Democrats’ turnout edge was striking in a red state where both parties held expensive and competitive primaries on Tuesday. Among the 21 Texas counties that are at least 75 percent Hispanic, 20 cast more votes in the Democratic primary for Senate than in the Republican race.
Democratic turnout was also higher in key House races in heavily Latino districts that Trump won handily in 2024. Among 10 Texas districts where the voting-age population is majority-Hispanic, several broke for Trump in 2024 by 10 or more points and last week saw more Democrats than Republicans vote in their House primaries.
Trump set off an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering push in Texas last summer in an effort to maintain GOP control of the House. Trump has openly expressed concern that Democrats — who responded with a redrawn map in California and have an effort underway in Virginia — could investigate him and his administration if they win back control of the chamber.
Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map they hope will net five additional GOP seats. But Democrats could hold some of the seats if Republicans fall significantly short of Trump’s 2024 performance.
In the redrawn 34th District, where Trump won by 10 points, about 56,000 people cast primary votes for Democratic House candidates on Tuesday, while about 34,000 cast primary votes for Republican candidates.
“November’s still a long way away. … We have to be careful and thoughtful,” said Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who is seeking reelection to the district. “But it looks to be a potential blue wave if the election was today.”
Gonzalez said voters are upset about the cost of living, the cost of health care and the aggressiveness of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Local builders who have been supportive of Trump have been sounding the alarm about their loss of labor. The executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter, traveled to Washington last month to warn lawmakers that “South Texas will never be red again.”
Dave Carney, a GOP strategist and adviser to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), said Republicans still “feel great” about South Texas. They plan to make major investments in races there and have recruited candidates to run for local offices that previously went uncontested, he said.
Like many Republicans, he also suggested the backlash to Trump’s immigration policies would ease after recent administration changes. Trump in January sidelined a controversial border official amid an uproar over federal agents’ killings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis and last week replaced Kristi L. Noem as head of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s unclear whether the new leadership will result in significant changes to Trump’s immigration policy.
“I think we’re going to see many of the headlines, and the crisis being fanned by the left, dissipate to a great extent,” Carney said.
But Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist focused on Latino voters, said he’s been struck by the consistency of the trend lines among different Latino communities around the country — from Dominican Americans in New Jersey to Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.
His takeaway: Latino voters are “de-aligned and detached from both parties,” meaning they can swing back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. Right now, Madrid said, Republicans have “completely overplayed their hand.”
Scott Clement and Teo Armus contributed to this report.
