By expanding their attacks among the Latino community in the country, especially since the last presidential elections, Republicans hoped to make gains from this electorate that would favorably realign the political landscape in several decisive states.

Although Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, fulfilled those hopes by winning heavily Latino counties that no Republican gubernatorial candidate or president had won in a generation, other Republicans were unable to keep pace with it.

According to CNN, “polls and results in some key House races showed the party improving on the margins, but not making the leap among Latino voters GOP strategists had sought”.

In the historically Democratic region, which were once perceived as indicators of whether the Republican Party could benefit from the advantages gained by Donald Trump in 2020, Democrats won two of the three congressional races in South Texas, all in the Rio Grande Valley.

“Rep. Henry Cuellar, the most conservative Democrat in the House, posted a double-digit victory in the 28th District, which stretches from San Antonio to his hometown of Laredo. And in the 34th District, in the state’s southeastern tip – another border district that includes McAllen, Harlingen and Brownsville – Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who was running in a new district, delivered a clear victory over Republican Rep. Mayra Flores, who won a special election this year under the old district lines”, according to the same publication.

The only GOP victory in the region came from Monica De La Cruz, who won in the neighboring 15th District, which was drawn in last year’s redistricting process to be a GOP-leaning but competitive seat.

According to CNN’ s publication, Latinos are not a monolith, and South Texas – like Florida – isn’t a perfect window into the broader Latino population. Voters there are typically more culturally conservative – a reality that explains Cuellar’s survival despite two hard-fought primaries against a progressive challenger and a tough general election while under the cloud of an FBI investigation”.

Nationwide, Democrats won Latino voters – 60% to the GOP’s 39% – according to exit polls conducted for CNN and other news networks by Edison Research. That’s a slight improvement for Republicans over 2020.

The strongest performance of Democrats was among Latinos and younger women, while Republicans fared better with older men and voters.

“The exit polls showed Democrats dominating among the 75% of Latino voters who said abortion should be legal, winning that group by 58 percentage points. The party also avoided massive blame for an economy that 69% of Latinos said is fair or poor, winning those voters by 12 percentage points”, according to CNN.

But the most important question about long-term trends on Latino voters is whether a marginal shift in favor of the Republican Party this year will be significant enough to change the political landscape of undecided states like Arizona and Nevada, which, like Texas, have large Latino populations, largely descendants of Mexicans.