Texas redistricting left these Latino voters confused, but will it impact midterm vote?

HOUSTON — When José Cantú checked his voter registration information one morning in early October, he discovered that his house was no longer in Texas’s 29th Congressional District, which Democratic Congresswoman Sylvia García represents.

Two years ago, when he voted for the first time, Cantú cast a ballot for García, whom he says he’s known since he was “a little boy.”

Now, “I texted my mom and said, ‘Mom, we’re now part of District 9. What am I going to do?’” said Cantú, a medical student at the University of Houston, referring to the fact that he didn’t recognize anyone listed on the ballot and had to figure out who the candidates were.

Although Cantú, 20, didn’t move, the map of his district had changed. His friend, Jessica Campos, 44, a mother of three, was also unaware of the changes and believed she still voted in District 29, not District 9.

“I didn’t know until a few days ago who our candidate was,” she said. “Even though I’m very interested in politics, I didn’t know who was representing me.”

Cantú and Campos are not isolated cases. In 2025, at the request of President Donald Trump, the Texas Legislature redrew its electoral map with the aim of taking away five congressional seats from Democrats who represented a Latino- or Black majority-district. Texas thus opened a redistricting race that extended to a dozen states, from California to Florida.

Districts 9 and 34 show what this change means for many Latino voters.

In Houston’s newly created District 9, 97 out of every 100 residents were in a different district in the 2024 election; in the case of District 34, in the southern part of the state, the map swapped areas near McAllen with Corpus Christi. Both districts have a Hispanic majority and, according to experts, both were drawn to favor a Republican candidate.

According to analysts, the Republican strategy for the new electoral map rests on two assumptions: that many Latinos don’t vote and that those who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 will vote Republican again.

On Nov. 3, with control of the House of Representatives at stake, it will become clear whether this was a sound gamble. But first, nearly all residents of the new 9th District and more than a third of those in the 34th District, which is also a new district, will have to figure out who the candidates on their ballots are.

Most people unaware their district has changed

“Our studies show that most people don’t know they’re in a new district,” said Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.

Republicans have made no secret of their intentions in pushing for the new maps. “The underlying goal of this plan is simple: to improve Republican political performance,” state representative Todd Hunter, a Corpus Christi Republican who introduced the map in the House, said in August of 2025. Hunter emphasized that four of the five new districts have a Hispanic majority.

This electoral practice, known as gerrymandering, involves drawing districts to give an advantage to a particular party or group. In November 2025, a federal court ruled 2-1 that Texas’ gerrymandering was racial-based: the map was drawn using voters’ race as the primary criterion, which violates the Constitution. Texas countered that its motive was partisan, not racial, and asked the Supreme Court to block the federal ruling. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the state to use its new maps.

“We thought the 2021 map was a problem, but the 2025 map made it much worse,” said Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which is litigating against both maps. According to Saenz, the new redrawing eliminated effective Latino majorities in several districts. The lawsuit remains open and, he said, will be resolved after the election.

In response to a request for comment from Noticias Telemundo, Eduardo Leal, campaign spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said the maps “were drawn to comply with the law.”

Same number, new district

The old District 9, in southwest Houston, united Black and Latino voters; Kamala Harris won it by 44 points in 2004 and veteran Democrat Al Green had represented it since 2005. When the new map drew much of that territory into District 18, Green followed suit and in May lost the Democratic primary runoff to Christian Menefee.

The new District 9 retains its number and almost nothing else. Only 3% of its residents lived in the old district: the rest came from the former Districts 29, 36 and 2, according to an analysis by Jones and Michael O. Adams of Texas Southern University. The new boundaries encompass eastern Harris County, including the East End, the Houston Canal corridor and all of rural, predominantly white Liberty County. Had this been the case two years ago, Trump would have won it by 20 points.

On paper, District 9 is a Latino district: 62% of its residents are Hispanic. But only about 50% are eligible to vote due to age and citizenship status, and only 45% are registered voters. In 2024, Latinos accounted for only 37% of TX-9 voters, according to Jones’ and Adams’ analysis.

“Although it has a Latino majority, it’s a district where the majority of voters are white,” Jones said. Districts are drawn using the total population, including minors and noncitizens, and the designers “know that within that Latino district there’s a low percentage who are actually going to turn out to vote,” he explained.

Liberty County, a rural area that accounts for just under a fifth of the district’s voters, tips the scales in favor of Republicans. There, Republican Alex Mealer leads Democrat Leticia Gutierrez by 37 points, while on Harris’ side it’s a virtual tie, according to a University of Houston Hobby School poll co-authored by Jones.

Ryan Taylor, chairman of the Republican Party in Liberty, said that the new district gives its voters a more important role. “It would be a mistake to assume that a voter’s ethnicity determines their political priorities,” he said.

For many voters, confusion

For Jones, the biggest effect of the map is confusion. In Houston, many people no longer know who their representative is, he said, and with the second redistricting in a decade (the first was in 2021, after the 2020 census), “many are going to realize” when they go to vote.

Leticia Gutierrez, the Democratic candidate in District 9, says she’s noticed confusion at her campaign events because some voters believe she’s running against Rep. Sylvia Garcia, also a Democrat. “They’re confusing them, and it’s on purpose,” she said.

Daron Shaw, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, says the strongest argument against redrawing the maps mid-decade is the confusion it creates because voters “don’t really know who their representative is,” and that damages the quality of representation. However, he added, “This isn’t new. Parties that control legislatures will almost always redraw districts in their favor.”

Campos, the voter from District 9, sums it up like this: “It’s not fair that we don’t know who wants to represent us.”

In July, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Magnolia Park, an East End neighborhood that falls within the new district.

His death shocked the Hispanic community in Texas and has prompted voters with a low propensity to participate to express their desire to vote to send a message to the Trump administration, according to local politicians and analysts.

Gutierrez, District 9’s Democratic candidate, described Salgado Araujo as “a hard-working man who was employing people” and who “was simply going to his job.” Following his death, she said in a video posted to her Facebook account that the new District 9 layout was designed “to silence the East End.”

Noticias Telemundo requested comment from candidate Alex Mealer’s team but had not received a response by the time of publication. The Republican candidate said in July that she trusted the investigations into Salgado’s death would provide “a full account” of what happened and that speculation “is neither helpful nor productive.”

A district with two heads

In South Texas, the map followed a different logic. District 34 lost its portion of Hidalgo County, near McAllen, and gained most of Nueces County, including Corpus Christi, which had belonged to the Republican 27th District. In 2024, with the previous boundaries, Trump won the district by 4.5 points, but the same voters re-elected Democrat Vicente Gonzalez as their representative. With the new boundaries, the district is now 77% Hispanic, and Trump would have won it by 10 points in 2024.

As Jones explains, “it is now a district with two heads,” Brownsville to the south and more Democratic, and Corpus Christi to the north and more Republican.

“They did this to try to get me out of Congress,” Vicente Gonzalez, the Democratic congressman running for re-election in that district, said. “What they didn’t count on is that I’m from Corpus Christi. That’s the community where I was born and raised.” Gonzalez estimates that, with the changes, he lost about 250,000 voters.

With the changes, Hidalgo County was completely removed from District 34, and its eastern part was moved to District 15, according to Richard Gonzalez, chairman of the Democratic Party in that county. He fears that many voters may not know that these changes have already taken place.

“Some may think they are voting for Vicente Gonzalez when in reality they are now voting for Bobby Pulido (Democratic candidate of the 15th),” he stated.

An August poll by Texas Southern University gave Gonzalez a 2-point lead over Republican Eric Flores, within the margin of error. Among Latino voters alone, Gonzalez led 53 to 34; white voters favored Flores 57 to 31.

Noticias Telemundo requested comments from Flores’ team but, at the time of publication, had not received a response.

Flores, a former federal prosecutor in McAllen and former National Guard captain, has the backing of both Trump and Abbott. “South Texas needs a fighter, not an absentee congressman,” he said in May. On immigration, he has shown nuance: in 2025, he said he wants employers to “have the workers they need” through an efficient legal process.

According to Jones, there are no radical candidates competing in this district: The candidates from both parties are centrist Latinos, and ultimately the election will be decided by “the centrist Latino who voted for Trump in 2024, but today has doubts.”

‘We have a lot of power’

Some analysts agree that the new Texas maps were drawn based on the results of the 2024 election, but they disagree on how much that will weigh on the November vote.

“There is no evidence that Hispanics are becoming more Republican,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and critic of Trump. His party, he said, “mistakenly believed” after 2024 that it had figured out Latinos. He said that, between that mistake and the political climate, the election is shaping up to be “an extraordinary fiasco” for Republicans.

Jason Villalba, a former Republican legislator and founder of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, called the new map “a blatant political maneuver” and believes the Legislature mistook an economic vote for a realignment. “Republicans are in for a big surprise on election night,” he asserted.

Shaw, the University of Texas professor, estimates that Republicans have gone from having nearly 50% of the Latino vote in 2024 to perhaps 40% in current polls. He calculates that, in the best-case scenario, Republicans will win two or three of the five seats they were seeking.

Meanwhile, Cantú, the medical student, said he wanted to organize workshops so other young people can learn about the changes in their districts and get to know the candidates. “It makes me angry because they don’t give us the correct information,” he said.

For her part, Cantu’s friend Jessica Campos said that Hispanic voters have “a lot of power.”

“The problem is,” she said, “we don’t know it yet.”

An earlier version of this story was first featured in Noticias Telemundo.