In Fort Worth, a Deported Friend Was on One Voter's Mind: Reuters Finds Latino Voters Drove the Shift in Texas

FORT WORTH — When Geronimo Perez pulled up to vote at the Worth Heights Community Center in South Fort Worth, one thing was on his mind: a friend who had been deported just a week earlier. Perez, 56, cast his ballot for the entire Democratic ticket in this year's midterm elections, Reuters reported Thursday. He lamented the high cost of living, but said President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration enforcement agenda drove him to support Gina Hinojosa for governor and James Talarico for U.S. Senate. 'I represented my family, my culture,' Perez told Reuters. 'The United States is made up of immigrants of different colors.'

Reuters found Perez's vote reflected a broader shift among millions of Latino voters — from the border counties of Texas to Miami-Dade, Colorado and Arizona — swinging back toward Democrats after helping fuel Republican gains in recent elections. Affordability remained a major concern, but outside polling places on Election Day, immigration was the subject Reuters' interviewers heard repeatedly. Nationally, the economy still ranked first: in exit polling conducted by SSRS, 45% of Hispanic voters named the economy the country's top issue, and nearly 65% of Latinos voted for U.S. House candidates. Turnout set a record — as many as 14.5 million Latino voters nationwide, according to Janet Murguía, CEO of UnidosUS, the country's largest Latino civil rights organization. 'Latino voters sent a clear message about their anger and concern about the direction of our country,' Murguía said, in the Reuters file.

The county numbers give the interviews their weight. In a Reuters analysis of county-level voting trends, Republicans lost 14 points off their 2024 share across the 64 majority-Latino counties with Senate races that were mostly counted — outpacing national trends — and in Hidalgo County, in the Rio Grande Valley, Republican support dropped about 25 points. Nowhere was the picture clearer, Reuters reported, than in Texas, where Hinojosa defeated three-term Republican Governor Greg Abbott — a figure in Texas state politics for more than 30 years — by about 6.5 percentage points, 52.5% to 46%, according to the most recent vote totals. Her approach to Latino voters, as she described it to Reuters in January, was deliberately plain: the same message she gave non-Latino voters, just said in Spanish. Daniel Alegre, CEO of the Spanish-language media giant TelevisaUnivision, told Reuters that Talarico's effort to engage Latino voters across the state was one of the keys to his Senate victory.

The result also writes a first into the record books. With Democrat Xavier Becerra winning his gubernatorial race in California, Reuters noted, it will be the first time in modern history that the country's two most populous states — Texas and California — are led by Latino governors at the same time. For Dallas–Fort Worth, the Fort Worth dateline on the Reuters file is the local point worth keeping: the swing the analysts are measuring nationally was visible, voter by voter, at a South Fort Worth community center — and the voters Reuters quoted are already setting the terms for 2028, warning, in the words of Voto Latino's Beatriz Lopez in the same reporting, that no party holds this electorate for long.