The handful of South Texas counties that helped fuel Republicans’ recent gains among Hispanic voters could once again prove decisive as Democrats seek to flip a Texas Senate seat in November’s midterm elections, Newsweek analysis shows.
Democratic state Representative James Talarico will face Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in November in one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races.
Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, and their challenge has become even steeper after President Donald Trump eroded Democrats’ long-held advantage in several heavily Hispanic border counties that had voted reliably Democratic for decades, including Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, Webb and Maverick.
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But the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and deportation campaign may have undermined these Republican gains, Hispanic business leaders have told Newsweek.
“As much as the swing that we witnessed was historic, it’s going to swing just as aggressively the other direction,” Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the United States Hispanic Business Council, said. “This administration has done itself harm in the way that they have managed the immigration system.”
Mario Guerrero, who runs a construction company in McAllen and said he voted for Trump in each of his three presidential campaigns, believes many South Texas voters now regret that decision.
“I can guarantee you that it’s gonna turn blue again,” Guerrero told Newsweek. “If you look at the history, this was the only time in history that it went red. There’s true buyer’s remorse.”
Indeed, one in five of the 1,012 surveyed Texas Hispanic business owners said they had lost an employee to deportation in the past year, while 70 percent said immigration raids affecting the workforce had negatively impacted their businesses, according to a recent United States Hispanic Business Council poll, carried out between June 2 and June 15.
The survey also found Democratic candidate Talarico leading Republican Paxton 43 percent to 36 percent among respondents, suggesting immigration enforcement may be reshaping political attitudes within a group Republicans have increasingly courted.
The Trump administration has defended its immigration crackdown as a public safety and national security measure, arguing that tougher enforcement is necessary to remove people living in the U.S. illegally, combat transnational criminal organizations and restore order at the southern border.
Paxton has embraced the administration’s immigration agenda, making border security a central theme of his Senate campaign. Earlier this month, he pledged to ensure “President Trump’s border security agenda is fully implemented, funded, and never undermined by partisan politics.”
Paxton’s office added that he was “defending Texas against illegal immigration, filing dozens of lawsuits to stop unconstitutional federal immigration policies, protecting Texas communities from cartel violence and deadly fentanyl.”
White House regional press secretary Liz Huston told Newsweek that Trump is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress.
“All Americans are directly benefiting from President Trump’s policies, which include the largest middle-class tax cuts in history, the most secure border in history, and the lowest murder rate since 1900,” she said in an emailed statement. “President Trump will continue to advance his proven economic agenda to accelerate growth, create jobs, and lower costs for Americans.”
Newsweek reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Paxton’s campaign for comment.
Mapping the Battleground
Newsweek’s analysis of county-level election results and demographic data highlights a cluster of South Texas counties that could prove pivotal in determining whether Democrats can flip the state’s Senate seat.
The maps show that many of the counties where Trump made his biggest gains between the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections, including Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, Webb and Maverick, also have some of Texas’ largest Hispanic populations.
Trump’s gains were particularly striking in South Texas. Newsweek’s analysis of official county-level presidential election results between 2016 and 2024. Starr County recorded the largest rise among the region’s key battlegrounds, with Trump’s share of the vote increasing by 38.8 percentage points over the two elections. Maverick County followed at 38.2 points, while Webb County saw a 27.9-point increase, Hidalgo 22.9 points and Cameron 20.5 points.
These counties were long among the Democratic Party’s most reliable bases in South Texas. Starr County had not voted Republican for president since 1892 before flipping in 2024, while Cameron, Webb and Maverick counties had backed Democratic presidential candidates for decades. Even Hidalgo County, which remained Democratic in 2024, saw its Democratic margin shrink substantially over the same period.
The significance of those gains becomes clearer when viewed alongside the region’s demographics. Newsweek’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows the counties where Trump made some of his biggest electoral advances are also among the most heavily Hispanic in Texas. Hispanic residents account for more than 90 percent of the population in Starr, Webb, Maverick and Hidalgo counties, while they make up more than 80 percent in Cameron County.
Palomarez said the research the United States Hispanic Business Council had done showed that many people in South Texas believed Trump “would be the better option because they believed them to be a businessman who could fix the fundamentals: Interest rates, inflation, cost of goods.”
Indeed, Guerrero said he and many others voted for Trump because “a bunch of us thought that he would be good for business.” But now, he argues, immigration enforcement has left construction sites short of workers and many voters questioning that decision.
Guerrero said many workers are “too scared to go to work,” leaving contractors unable to fill crews and delaying projects across the Rio Grande Valley. Developments that once took around six months to complete are now taking almost twice as long, he said, because “there’s nobody to work.”
Texas has become one of the focal points of the administration’s immigration crackdown. Federal ICE operations have been bolstered by Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which coordinates state and federal resources to enforce immigration laws across the state.
To examine where immigration enforcement has taken place, Newsweek analyzed more than 100,000 individual ICE arrest records from January 2025 through March 2026. The data set, compiled by the Deportation Data Project, was matched to Texas counties where arrest locations could be identified. Arrests without sufficient location information to assign them to a county were excluded from the county-level analysis.
The analysis found ICE arrests were recorded across Texas, with the largest numbers in McLennan (17,536), Dallas (16,153) and Bexar (10,300) counties. Newsweek also identified at least 15,437 arrests across Hidalgo, Cameron, Webb, Starr and Maverick between January 2025 and March 2026. – more than were recorded in every Texas county except McLennan and Dallas over the same period.
The arrest records cannot explain why voters backed Republicans or whether immigration enforcement will affect future elections. They do, however, illustrate the scale of enforcement activity in counties likely to play a pivotal role in the 2026 Senate race.
Can Democrats Win Back South Texas?
South Texas alone is unlikely to decide the race. Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston, said Democrats must also continue making gains among suburban voters in counties including Fort Bend, Collin, Denton, Williamson and Hays, where growing Hispanic populations have become increasingly influential in statewide elections.
“Texas elections increasingly resemble a tug-of-war between two trends,” Rottinghaus told Newsweek. “Republicans making gains among working-class Hispanic voters, particularly along the border, while Democrats continue improving among college-educated suburban voters. Whichever trend proves stronger probably wins statewide.”
“The question is whether Democrats can stop the Republican gains we’ve seen since 2016,” Rottinghaus said. “Watch Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Webb, and Maverick counties along the border. Republicans don’t necessarily have to win them; they simply need to keep Democratic margins much smaller than they were a decade ago. If Democrats restore those earlier margins, it dramatically changes the statewide math.”
Whether the region continues trending Republican or begins shifting back toward Democrats remains one of the central questions of the campaign, and both candidates have made competing appeals to Hispanic voters.
Talarico told Newsweek his campaign was focused on voters frustrated with both parties.
“If you feel like you’ve been conned, if you feel like you’ve been let down by both political parties, if you feel like politicians aren’t doing anything to lower your costs or fix this broken immigration system—you’ve got a place in this campaign,” he said.
Paxton, meanwhile, has centered his campaign on border security, the economy and conservative social values during visits to South Texas. Speaking in McAllen earlier this month, he said: “I’m about reducing costs, making your gas prices lower, reducing the cost of housing and lowering your taxes.”
He has also said Democrats are out of touch with the values of the Rio Grande Valley and take the region for granted.
Earlier this month, Paxton and Talarico launched competing South Texas campaign swings aimed at Latino voters.
At a rally in McAllen, Paxton made a direct appeal to the region’s Hispanic electorate, telling supporters: “As Texans, and particularly in this area, with Hispanics moving more Republican, we have the opportunity with this group of people to not only defend Texas values, to not only provide more opportunity for ourselves, but for our children and our grandchildren. And it’s all up to you.”
Talarico, meanwhile, visited border communities including Eagle Pass, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, where he emphasized affordability and called for a more balanced approach to border security.
The counties that helped fuel Republicans’ rise among Hispanic voters in 2024 are now at the center of both campaigns’ strategy. Whether they continue moving right or begin shifting back toward Democrats could offer one of the clearest indications of which party is better positioned to shape Texas politics in the years ahead.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Sam Wilson.