In Texas, a political group bets $6 million on Latino voters coming back
to Democrats
[August 04, 2026]
By JONATHAN J. COOPER
A left-leaning group is planning to spend $6 million organizing Latino
voters in Texas, a group that has trended away from Democrats but is
pivotal to their hopes of picking up seats in Congress.
Somos Votantes has started a $2 million statewide voter education push
centered on door-to-door conversations and voter registration. Its
affiliated political committee, Somos PAC, is preparing a $4 million
advertising campaign focused on three South Texas House districts, where
they aim to channel voter angst about the economy into support for
Democratic candidates in Republican-leaning districts.
“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 is at the crossroads of the fight for control of the U.S. House in
the November midterms, and winning back Hispanics who were drawn to
President Donald Trump in 2024 will be key to Democrats' chances there.
Last fall, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, acting on pressure from
Trump, redrew district boundaries in the GOP’s favor, aiming to pick up
as many as five Democratic House seats. They made a bet that the
decade-long shift of working-class Hispanics toward the GOP was not an
aberration, though that’s far from a foregone conclusion.
Somos PAC is targeting three districts where Trump won by double-digit
margins in 2024: The 15th District, where Republican Rep. Monica De La
Cruz is facing Tejano music star Bobby Pulido; the 23rd, which is
currently vacant after Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez resigned after
admitting an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide; and the
35th, a largely new district created in the recent redistricting.
Morales said Somos PAC is targeting harder-to-win districts rather than
the top-tier battlegrounds getting a flood of national attention. Those
districts would make the difference between Democrats eking out a small
majority and running up the score with a 20-seat majority, she said.
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A man passes an early voting poll site, Feb. 14, 2022, in San
Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
“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.
In Texas, that means winning back Latinos.
While Trump gained with Hispanic voters in 2024, opinions of the
president have fallen among Hispanics overall since he took office,
according to AP-NORC polling. Only 29% of Hispanic adults nationally
approved of his performance as president in a June AP-NORC poll, an
apparent drop from 41% at the start of his second term.
Latino voters have historically been largely aligned with the
Democratic Party but during the 2024 election, they shifted
significantly toward Trump. A majority still supported Democrat
Kamala Harris for president, but Trump made big gains: 43% of Latino
voters nationally voted for him, compared with 35% in the 2020
presidential election, a change attributed in part to their concerns
about the economy.
But it's not enough for former Trump voters to lose faith in the
president, Morales said. They need a reason to vote for Democrats,
and that's where the ads come in.
“We risk people staying home because they’re disillusioned about
everything,” she said.
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