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For years, Latino voters reliably voted for Democratic presidential candidates, in many cases by double-digit margins. Then in 2024, they roughly split their vote, becoming a key swing group for Donald Trump’s return to power—perhaps because they liked his style, or they perceived him as an outsider, or they agreed that the border had gotten out of control. In 2026, though, polls are indicating that they may be over him.
One of the best test cases for the shift is the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, right along the southern U.S. border. The area was a Democratic stronghold for decades before it went for Trump in 2024. It’s dominated by working-class Latinos, mostly Mexican American. In the immediate post-pandemic years, the area saw an unprecedented number of illegal border crossings, and voters seemingly punished Joe Biden for the chaos. But their desire for order wasn’t a desire for what the administration delivered: ICE raids that have seemed random, law-abiding friends and family who have been deported, and treatment that has felt dehumanizing.
The Atlantic staff writer Nick Miroff traveled to the Rio Grande Valley and talked with people whose family members or employees had been targeted by ICE. He talked with politicians and candidates about how they’ve shifted their strategies, and he talked with people who had the same concerns as any middle-class American, about how much everything costs now. On Radio Atlantic, Miroff discusses the wild political swings in the Rio Grande Valley and what they might reveal about the statewide Texas races and the Latino vote in the rest of the country.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: One of the big surprises of the 2024 presidential election was how much Latino voters had shifted right. A bloc that has voted Democratic consistently, for decades, had helped reelect Donald Trump, which led to lots of gloating from Republicans about their new diverse coalition and angst from Democrats about what they’d gotten wrong.
Well, the punditry came too soon. In the upcoming midterms, it seems like Latinos are shifting back again, which you can see very clearly in Texas and especially in the Rio Grande Valley.
Nick Miroff: So the RGV, the Rio Grande Valley, is to me one of the most fascinating parts of the United States. And this is an area that is more than 90 percent Hispanic.
Rosin: Staff writer Nick Miroff, who covers immigration, recently did some reporting in South Texas.
Miroff: Got the sound of a guy welding, welding a cattle trailer.
[Music]
Miroff: This is an area that has been a Democratic Party stronghold for decades—or was up until this past election. And that was a real seismic shift in politics, and it was fundamental to the kind of coalition that Trump was able to put together in 2024.
And I wanted to go back and talk to voters there now to see how they’re feeling about the way the country is going, about their lives, and how they plan to vote in the midterms.
Miroff: Are you gonna vote for Talarico?
Benny Melendez: Yeah, definitely.
Miroff: All Democrats?
Melendez: All Democrat, yeah.
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.
Today on the show, we are taking a closer look at the Rio Grande Valley, because it could reveal what’s about to happen in Texas more broadly, but also possibly the whole country.
For next week’s midterms, Latinos might end up being the critical voting bloc. But here’s the thing: What Nick learned from visiting the Rio Grande Valley—what maybe everybody should have learned from the last presidential election—is that the mistake is to think of them as any kind of unified ethnic voting bloc at all.
In the story he wrote, Nick, for example, rechristened them the “Big-Ass Truck Vote” because love for big trucks and the high cost of filling up their tanks seemed higher on the list of motivators than undying party loyalty. Anyway, back to the valley.
[Music]
Rosin: Now, I’ve never been there. What does it look like? Like, can you just describe it? Is it rural? Is it farmland? What are people doing? How close is it to Mexico? How big is it? I’m just curious to get a picture in my head.
Miroff: Yeah. Well, the first thing I think is that calling it a valley is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more like this is the part, you know, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s really like a floodplain, so it’s flat. It’s very hot and muggy. And this was an area that was a big agricultural region for generations, but over the past several decades has been changing rapidly, predominantly after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.
These towns—Brownsville, McAllen—became kind of operational-logistics hubs for trade with Mexico. And so for many years, this has been an area that immigrants, as well as, you know, Hispanic Americans living in South Texas viewed, I think, as a place of opportunity, where the jobs were plentiful and where people could live a kind of—you know, aspire to a middle-class life.
This is an area where you have big, wide streets and brand-new subdivisions, but also many pockets of poverty, communities known as colonias that are kind of on unincorporated land.
Miroff: We’re in a colonia—lots of fences; lots of yard ornaments, beware of the dog signs, trampolines, junked cars.
Miroff: It’s really an area that’s been transformed, in particular, over the past, I would say, about 15 years by migration from Mexico and drug violence in northern Mexico, because the cartel wars sent so many middle-class and even upper-middle-class, you know, Mexicans fleeing for somewhere safe.
And a lot of them went to the Rio Grande Valley, and they brought this kind of new dynamism to that area. But as one of the candidates that I spent time with talked about, you know, it also brought a kind of integration with a lot more mixed-status families.
Rosin: Right. Okay, I think I’m getting the picture, and it’s an interesting picture, and now I see why you went there. It used to be agricultural. Now it’s maybe suburban or emerging suburban and—
Miroff: Yeah.
Rosin: —and still fast evolving, and so there’s a lot of different kinds of people. It’s not just, like, one flat demographic. There’s people of different socioeconomic levels, probably different relationships to Mexico, different relationships to immigration policy, kind of all in this one space.
Miroff: Yeah. This is a very kind of aspirational place with a lot of working-class, upwardly mobile families and people who have found jobs in oil and gas, driving to the oil and gas fields. A lot of people have found work in federal law enforcement, working for the Border Patrol, and of course now working for ICE, and also for, you know, cross-border trade.
And so this is a place that has for many years really thrived off of its relationship with northern Mexico, with the big assembly plants just south of the border and around the Monterrey, Mexico, region. And so these have been the drivers of the growth for so many years, and these are some of the industries that are also being squeezed by Trump’s presidency.
Rosin: Okay. So you get there. You have these thoughts in your head. There’s this very interesting, you know, in the polls, showing this demographic shift, where you’ve got, like, 2016 heavily, heavily Democratic; 2024 goes for Trump. Now the polls are saying: shifting Democratic again. What’s the first thing you see that’s surprising or that catches your eye?
Miroff: Well, given how pivotal the Rio Grande Valley is to this election cycle, it’s no surprise that political-advertising money and super-PAC money is just inundating the whole area. And so there are campaign signs lining the highways at all the intersections. And one of the first that caught my eye, actually, was a campaign sign showing this guy Eric Flores.
Now, he’s the Republican candidate for the Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, which stretches from Brownsville, kind of hugging the Gulf Coast, all the way up toward Corpus Christi. And most of the campaign signs for Eric Flores just show him with a thumbs-up and his bio. It says he’s an infantry officer, a prosecutor, a father. And they’re very striking ’cause they’re bright red.
And then there’s a second set of signs for Flores, and they look just like the first set—they’re also red—but they show him with President Trump. And Trump and Flores are giving the thumbs-up, and it says, across the top of the sign, Trump Endorsed, and below that it says Support ICE.
And I saw that sign and I was like, Why would a Republican candidate in the Rio Grande Valley want “Support ICE” on their sign? Well, if you look at the fine print at the bottom of the sign, it says Paid for by Northern Cameron County Democrats.
Rosin: Right.
Miroff: The Northern Cameron County Democrats are making these signs that show Flores with Trump and that said Support for ICE.
[Music]
Miroff: And so this is a negative sign that the Democrats have put up that just shows the Republican candidate with President Trump on it. And so, you know, that says, I think, everything in this area that voted for Trump two years ago. Running attack ads by just showing the candidate next to the president is, for these Democrats, the most important and effective messaging.
Rosin: So what do you read into that strategy? One, you have to distance yourself from Trump, even though he won the election. What else? Like, what else are we learning about ICE or about Trump from a sign like that?
Miroff: Well, ICE is overwhelmingly unpopular. It’s no big surprise in an area with a 90 percent Hispanic population. But I think you have to dig a little deeper, and one of the reasons that Trump won in 2024 was his promise to secure the border. This was an area where an overwhelming quantity of migrants arrived under Biden’s presidency. These are some of the communities that were strained the worst by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people in the first years of Biden’s term. And the perception that he couldn’t really get the situation under control, that the White House wasn’t interested in doing anything about it—these communities were intensely frustrated with that and with the government’s inability to respond, and that was one of the things that helped Trump a lot. But that doesn’t mean that people want ICE officers arresting their friends and family and the ordinary people in their community that don’t have criminal records.
And so what I heard over and over again is that, We thought Trump was gonna come for the worst of the worst. We thought he was gonna come in and arrest the criminals. We’re glad that he’s got the border under control, but this is going too far. And so ICE overreach has been a big one there, and then the other thing, which I think is probably the biggest issue for the voters I talked to, is the cost of living and affordability.
Rosin: I wanna listen to some of the people that you talked to. One of them was Benny Melendez.
Miroff: Do you mind if we switch over to English, Benny?
Melendez: No, that’s fine. Let me know.
Miroff: For the interview? Cool.
Melendez: Yeah, that’s fine.
Rosin: Can you talk about that conversation? What did he tell you?
Miroff: Yeah, so Benny Melendez is a contractor who asked me to meet him at his job site. And I drove out to this kind of half-built subdivision in the outskirts of McAllen.
Miroff: So what are we doing right here, Benny? What is this? Is this a house you’re building?
Melendez: Yeah, this is one of my custom homes.
Miroff: Okay.
Miroff: Benny was there, and he was in this house where his crews had not shown up that day, he said, because word had gone out earlier in the morning that there were ICE officers on patrol in the area, making arrests.
Miroff: But there’s nothing happening to this home today? No, you don’t have a crew here?
Melendez: No. No, there’s no one here. There’s no—and I called them. I did call them. They told me they were scared, that they were not gonna come today.
Miroff: How many guys?
Melendez: Mm, let me see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Miroff: And they saw some ICE vehicles? Or did that, was that on social media, where they—
Melendez: Social media, yeah. And the news. They saw it in the morning, so they decided to take the day off. So the ICE agents, they start—if you have a ladder on your truck, they’ll start following you, and they’ll stop you. And if you’re illegal, they’ll arrest you.
Miroff: Benny is 32 years old. He grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, and he started his home-building business about seven years ago. And he voted for Trump, and he said he’s just been galvanized by the past two years by ICE arresting—and he said ICE has arrested and deported 15 of the guys that he used to work with. And he said that not only has it made home-building in the Rio Grande Valley much more difficult; it’s really kind of destroying the housing market, he said.
It’s the combination of high interest rates, the rise in costs, but also just the inability for homes to get built. He said that he used to be able to get a house built in about four months. Now it takes eight months to a year.
[Music]
Miroff: And so, you know, he said that this has become the issue for him, and he’s gonna do everything he can to get Democrats elected and to send a strong message about the Trump administration going too far in the Rio Grande Valley and arresting people who, you know, in his view, shouldn’t be the target for ICE.
Melendez: Yeah, it is difficult for me to hear a 40-, 50-year-old guy cry in private with me, telling me he’s afraid that ICE is gonna take him, ’cause he has to attend this meeting two weeks from now and potentially be deported. Así está pone. That’s how they write it. Potentially be deported. Oh, man, are you gonna be able to sleep in the next two weeks?
Rosin: I see why you chose him, ’cause there’s so much in there. Like, he does represent some of the central shifts. I’m curious, you know, when you were talking with him, did you ask him or get the impression that he identifies with either party? Like, does—he thought of himself as a Republican; now he thinks of himself as a Democrat? Or it doesn’t work like that? Like, it’s not about attaching yourself to a party in some way?
Miroff: It doesn’t work like that at all, and I think for guys like Benny, there was a certain degree of rebellion in voting for Trump and in bucking, you know, the older generation in the valley that just kind of voted Democrat out of habit.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Miroff: Like many other young men in the valley, I think, and I’m talking about the Rio Grande Valley, there was something a little bit transgressive about voting Republican that signaled that you were an independent thinker. And so he said he’s voting very much against Trump and against the Trump administration and the Republicans this cycle, but he says, you know, very clearly that Democrats are gonna have to earn his support in the future, and that, you know, he’s not taking anything for granted, and he’s gonna vote for whoever he thinks is gonna deliver for the community and is gonna be best for him and his family.
Rosin: Yeah. I guess that’s why they’re known as swing voters. That’s literally what they are. Like, they care about a wide range of things, and sometimes those things can be vibes, like, I wanna be transgressive in this election, but sometimes they can be extremely concrete, like, You fired all my workers, and I can’t build homes anymore, you know?
Miroff: Yeah. I think one of the takeaways I had from this trip is that even if the Democrats end up doing well in this cycle because there’s so much anger at Trump, it isn’t as if all of these voters are just gonna go back to voting Democrat out of habit, the way they used to.
Melendez: Because before voting for Trump, and before voting for the Republicans, I voted for Biden, and I voted for other Democrats, and they have done nothing for my people. Nothing.
[Music]
Miroff: These voters are gonna be up for grabs every single time. Yeah. And they’re gonna go for whichever candidate is really gonna be able to deliver better lives for them and their families.
Melendez: What are you gonna do different this time? Are you gonna do the same thing you did when Biden was president? Nothing for my people? I mean, yes, the Republicans, it’s bad with them, but is it better with the Democrats? We’re in a lose-lose situation here.
Rosin: After the break, Nick takes us inside a key congressional race in Texas where one Democrat might have a fighting chance against a Republican incumbent in a district that was redrawn by state Republicans.
More in a minute.
[Break]
Rosin: Another person you talked to was Bobby Pulido. Who is Bobby Pulido?
Miroff: So Bobby Pulido is the Democratic candidate in McAllen area. This is the Fifteenth Congressional District. And Bobby is one of the most fascinating stories of, I think, the entire midterm cycle. And Bobby is a Tejano-music star, and that is a kind of a particular style of South Texas music that is a blend of, kind of, country and pop and, you know, in Spanish.
And Bobby had a hit song in the 1990s. He’s a two-time Latin Grammy winner.
Rosin: What was the hit song? Just curious.
Miroff: It’s called “Desvelado.”
[“Desvelado,” by Bobby Pulido]
Miroff: Which kind of means, like, “sleepless.” It’s about, and the video is really striking. It shows—it was filmed on the streets of San Francisco, and he’s, like, in his early 20s. And he’s kind of going around San Francisco, and he’s thinking about the woman he loves, and he’s just restless.
[“Desvelado,” by Bobby Pulido]
Miroff: That song was a huge hit. You know, he was already a star in the Rio Grande Valley before he announced his candidacy, and it’s no wonder that the Democrats recruited him. He comes from a prominent political family down there. And I spent some time driving around the suburbs where he grew up in Edinburg, right outside McAllen.
Miroff: So you guys are delivering signs?
Campaign staffer: Yep, yep, yep. We try to do this. Obviously we don’t have as much time as we used to.
Miroff: And he and his team were delivering yard signs to supporters that had called and, you know, wanted a yard sign. So he was chatting with everybody. He was, you know, knocking on doors and, you know, people were coming out, and they said, Hey, you know, we went to high school together, and, Oh, I remember you, and, Oh, I saw your concert, you know, at so and so.
Pulido: Hello. How are y’all doing?
Woman: Good. How are you?
Miroff: He’s just run this, like, very intensive kind of ground-game strategy to go out and meet as many people as possible. And his opponent, Monica De La Cruz, the incumbent, she got in in 2022, and she made, I think, probably a tactical mistake early on when she kinda tried to dismiss Bobby Pulido as almost like a washed-up quinceañera singer—
Rosin: Yeah, yeah.
Miroff: —like the guy who plays at the parties for 15-year-old girls.
Monica De La Cruz: This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.
Miroff: And he took that and he said, Okay, well, I’ll start—if you want me to, just give me a call, and I’ll come and play at your quinceañera. And so he started going around playing for free at all these quinceañera parties.
Bobby Pulido: Buenas noches, Alinah.
Miroff: He pointed out, you know, he says people are already—they’ve had something to drink, they’re already in a good mood, they’re feeling great, and he gets to, you know, perform and meet hundreds of people. And they see him, and they know he’s running.
Pulido: Thank you so much. My name is Bobby Pulido, and I’m running for Congress in District Fifteen. Thank you. Gracias.
Rosin: And then what are each of their lines politically? Besides just being fun, like, what is Bobby Pulido’s political line that he’s taking, and then what is Monica De La Cruz’s line in terms of distancing or aligning herself more with Trump?
Miroff: Yeah, it’s been very interesting. Pulido has been laser-focused on the affordability issue and ICE overreach. And so he has been the one who, probably more than anyone in the Rio Grande Valley, has highlighted these cases in which, you know, ICE officers have detained U.S. citizens, you know, or outrageous arrests.
Pulido: This immigration thing is not just for immigrants. It’s anti-American, because down here, we’ve integrated with them. There’s so many mixed-status families in the Rio Grande Valley—you have no idea. And that’s gonna be the hurricane that’s coming down here, because they’re freaking pissed.
Miroff: Pulido’s opponent—the incumbent, Monica De La Cruz—she has, I think, tried to distance herself from Trump’s immigration-enforcement policies. I sat down with her for an interview.
Miroff: I wanna start by just asking you, and how much time do you have to answer? Okay. I’ll be pretty succinct.
De La Cruz: Sure.
Miroff: She said that she believes in a common-sense approach and wants to be kind of a moderate voice.
De La Cruz: I have been direct with leadership in saying that enforcement should focus on the criminals and the cartels, not hardworking families that are trying to navigate the complex immigration system. That being said, when I call Washington, D.C., for one of these families, guess what? They pick up the phone, and they answer my calls, and we look for real solutions, not only in immigration.
Miroff: But she, as did all the other Republicans, voted for two funding packages that have given the Department of Homeland Security nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars for immigration enforcement. And that includes more than $100 billion for ICE, more than 10 times its annual budget. And so she’s tried to kind of distance herself from Trump’s immigration-enforcement policies and highlight some kind of the affordability messaging that she thinks is gonna be a winner, like around her support for the no tax on tips.
De La Cruz: No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime.
Miroff: But, you know, in her campaign literature, she doesn’t, like, you know, appear alongside the president. And so she’s one of the Republicans that’s also, I think, trying to put some distance between her and the White House.
Miroff: I’m down with what—I mean, there’s a dog on the porch.
Roel Garza: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Miroff: But he’s not barking at us.
Rosin: You also went door-knocking with a canvasser for Democrats. Did you learn anything from talking to voters that way?
Miroff: I did. You know, it was really fascinating. This was a young man, a 20-year-old student named Roel Garza.
Miroff: Are you a college student, or are you older?
Garza: I just graduated. I’m 20. I just graduated from college, but I’m doing my master’s now, my M.B.A.
Miroff: You know, he had the addresses of people who had voted in the last election and, you know, he had an interesting strategy. He would go and knock on their door and ask them, What are the issues that you care about? What are the problems in your community that you wanna see fixed?
He would take their answers, and then he would try to describe the solutions that Democratic candidates were proposing for some of the things that mattered to them, as a way to kinda steer them to the candidates, you know, before he would hand them some campaign literature endorsing very much the Democratic ticket.
Garza: And you could go vote at any polling location in Hidalgo County.
Woman: Okay.
Garza: So these are the candidates that we’re endorsing—James Talarico, Bobby Pulido—and in the back you have some more.
Miroff: It was really eye-opening. It was a good reminder that a lot of people who are busy, who have busy lives, are not paying that much attention, not as much attention to politics as, you know, reporters and candidates. And it was also interesting to hear from working-class folks who voted for Trump last time, you know? I think one of the things that struck me the most was that there’s still a degree of kind of sympathy for Trump himself, that people think they sort of see him as this kind of outside figure who has shaken things up.
And I was also struck by the degree to which they were kind of confused about the candidates, and they had seen so much negative advertising that they really didn’t know what to believe.
[Music]
Miroff: And so I think there’s a lot of confusion. I think there’s a high probability that a lot of these people are just gonna end up splitting their tickets and are gonna vote for candidates with whom they think they can be comfortable with regardless of their party affiliation.
Rosin: So what we know about the pattern is: In 2024, as we discussed, Trump won a more diverse coalition than anyone expected. Then Democrats had their reckoning. It sounds like that’s all playing out in the places where you visited. If there was a swing back to Democrats now, what do you think would be the correct thing to understand about it, and what would be a misunderstanding about it?
Miroff: Well, I do think the two most salient issues are the cost of living. You know, think about how many Hispanic families in the United States are blue-collar, who aspire to, you know, joining the middle class. And so if they’re getting squeezed, I think that that is really gonna hurt, you know, whichever candidate is gonna take the blame for that or gonna be associated with that. But then the big one also is overreach on immigration enforcement.
And again, you know, people voted for border security. Border security is broadly popular in the United States. People do not like images of chaos and disorder along the border, but that doesn’t mean that they want intense ICE enforcement on the streets. And, you know, what they see on the streets of, you know, U.S. cities with ICE arrests also looks chaotic and ugly.
And whenever people see what immigration enforcement looks like, they often kind of recoil from it. And so for Hispanic families who feel like they’re being targeted, and that the people who are backing the president who are his core supporters are speaking in just openly racist terms, it once more, I think, questions for them whether the Republican Party wants them in the United States.
Rosin: Yeah.
Miroff: I mean, if you’re a minority in this country and one of the parties is speaking in a way that makes you feel like they consider you less American and even less human, then why would you vote for them? You know, to the extent that these are kind of unresolved tensions within the Republican Party—I’m wondering if this midterm result, especially if there’s a blue wave and it’s driven partly by Hispanic voters—if this forces some kind of reckoning within the Republican Party about whether or not you really want racists openly part of your coalition if it’s gonna drive away so many other voters.
Rosin: Well, Nick, thank you again for joining us.
Miroff: Oh, my pleasure. Anytime.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West with help from Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Fact-checking by Gisela Salim-Peyer and Sam Fentress. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
And in case you haven’t heard, this Tuesday night, November 3, we’re going to host a special Election Night livestream. I’ll be joined by my Radio Atlantic co-host, Adam Harris. We’ll talk with Atlantic staffers about midterm results as they come in and what new directions the country could be headed in. We’ll have familiar guests like Tom Nichols, David Frum, and Anne Applebaum, among others. We’ll be live for two hours starting at 9 p.m. eastern.
And, as always, listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
