Group Bets $6 Million on Winning Back Latino Voters in Texas

A left-leaning organization is preparing to spend $6 million to organize Latino voters in Texas, betting that a bloc that drifted toward Republicans can be pulled back to the Democratic Party in time for November's midterm elections.

Somos Votantes has begun a $2 million statewide voter education effort built around door-to-door conversations and voter registration. Its affiliated political committee, Somos PAC, is preparing a $4 million advertising campaign concentrated on three South Texas House districts, where organizers hope to convert economic anxiety into support for Democratic candidates in Republican-leaning territory.

"We're really hoping that we can reconsolidate support for Democrats by presenting the positive economic vision that Democratic candidates in these House districts have," said Melissa Morales, the founder of Somos Votantes.

Texas sits at the center of the fight for control of the House of Representatives, and winning back Hispanic voters who were drawn to President Donald Trump in 2024 will be central to Democratic hopes in the state.

Last fall, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, acting under pressure from Trump, redrew district boundaries in the party's favor, aiming to pick up as many as five Democratic seats. That gamble assumed the decade-long shift of working-class Hispanics toward the GOP was not an aberration — a conclusion that remains unsettled.

Somos PAC is targeting three districts Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024: the 15th District, where Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz faces Tejano music star Bobby Pulido; the 23rd, now vacant after Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez resigned following his admission of an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide; and the 35th, a largely new district created in the recent redistricting.

Morales said the group is deliberately going after harder-to-win seats rather than the top-tier battlegrounds drawing national money. Those districts, she said, would be the difference between a narrow Democratic majority and a 20-seat one.

"If we're going to get to that 20, we're going to have to start investing in some of these more reach districts, and we're going to have to do it early," Morales said.

While Trump gained with Hispanic voters in 2024, his standing has since slipped. Only 29% of Hispanic adults nationally approved of his performance in a June AP-NORC poll, down from 41% at the start of his second term.

Nationally, 43% of Latino voters backed Trump in 2024, compared with 35% in 2020, though a majority still supported Democrat Kamala Harris. Morales said disillusionment alone is not enough.

"We risk people staying home because they're disillusioned about everything," she said.