Republican Redistricting Backfires in South Texas House Races
Left 50%
Center 0%
Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
In Tuesday's elections after the Republican-led Texas Legislature redrew congressional maps in 2025, Decision Desk HQ projected Republican attorney Jace Yarbrough the winner over Richardson City Council member Dan Barrios in the open 32nd District previously held by Democrat Julie Johnson, who ran elsewhere; that district had been redrawn to favor Republicans. In South Texas, Democrat Tejano singer Bobby Pulido unseated two-term Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz in the Rio Grande Valley; Democrat Katy Padilla Stout defeated Republican Brandon Herrera in the 23rd Congressional District, covering areas from San Antonio to El Paso; and Democrat Johnny Garcia, a Bexar County sheriff's deputy, defeated Republican Carlos De La Cruz in the newly redrawn 35th District in the San Antonio area. Cook Political Report figures cited in coverage said President Donald Trump would have won Pulido's newly drawn district by 18 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, that De La Cruz had won in 2024 by 14 points, and that Trump carried the redrawn 35th by 10 points; before the redistricting, the 23rd had not elected a Democrat since 2012. Democratic incumbents Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen also won re-election.
Sourcing check · Mostly on the record · 2 articles
1 of 2 articles cite a named source for the story. It started with unnamed sources; a named source appeared 4 hours later.
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
The two sides are not covering the same races, so they are not covering the same verdict on the remap. Left-leaning coverage reports a Republican taking Julie Johnson's former Dallas seat after it was redrawn to favor the GOP, and never mentions South Texas. Right-leaning coverage reports Democrats taking multiple South Texas seats that Trump had carried, and never mentions that Dallas result. No shared race appears in both accounts.
Right-leaning coverage leads with a "blue tsunami" and treats Latino voters as a bloc that soured on Republicans after backing Trump. Left-leaning coverage leads with a projected Republican win and does not discuss Latino voters at all.
What was the net Republican seat change on the new map once Dallas and South Texas are both counted?
Bottom line
The Hill covers the remap as Yarbrough winning Julie Johnson's Dallas seat; Daily Wire covers it as Democrats taking South Texas districts, including one Trump would have won by 18 points. Neither outlet reports the other result.
The receipts — 2 facts one side's coverage lacks
- Republican Jace Yarbrough is projected to win the redrawn 32nd District, defeating Democrat Dan Barrios for Julie Johnson's former seat
- Trump would have won De La Cruz's newly drawn district by 18 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election
The Left View
The Hill focused on the 32nd District, reporting Yarbrough's projected win in a seat "redrawn to favor Republicans last year" after Johnson opted to run elsewhere. That account treats the result as a Republican victory in a map drawn for that purpose and does not address the South Texas contests.
The Right View
The Daily Wire described the 2025 redistricting as having "backfired," with a "blue tsunami sweeping through South Texas" that "happened largely among Latino voters." It cited University of Texas at San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor saying Republicans "may have been overly confident," assuming Latino voters would "stick with the party," when they should be viewed as "swing voters." The piece said Trump won Hispanic voters in 2024 "in part due to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border" and dissatisfaction with the Biden administration's "mishandling of the chaos," and that the Legislature redrew the map "assuming Republican support would hold," after which "polling showed that the voting bloc began to sour on Republicans." Senator-elect James Talarico said he showed up where "a lot of national Democrats stopped doing" so, that Democrats "took the Latino vote for granted" and "took South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley for granted," and that voters "desperately want to bring down costs so that they can get ahead in this economy."
Our Take (balanced)
The strongest point in the left-leaning coverage is the 32nd District result: a Republican won a seat the map was redrawn to favor after the Democratic incumbent left, evidence that at least one targeted change performed as designed. The strongest point in the right-leaning coverage is that several South Texas seats drawn over territory Trump carried by double digits in 2024 still went Democratic, matching Taylor's "swing voters" description and polling that the Latino bloc had soured on Republicans before the midterm. The central unresolved tension is whether those South Texas losses mean the 2025 map failed as a partisan instrument, or whether they reflect a midterm preference shift among Latino voters that the new lines were never going to lock in—and thus which set of races is the fair test of the redistricting.
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