It was only one state senate race in Texas. Low-turnout, off-cycle elections are seldom good predictors of larger trends. And the Democrats had a better candidate: a working-class aircraft mechanic running against a hardline MAGA idealogue heartily endorsed by President Trump.

Still. Democrat Taylor Rehmet won by 14 points in a district Trump had carried by 17 – a 31-point swing. The stunning outcome sent tremors of trepidation, even terror, rippling through Republican ranks. There are many reasons for their distress, but here’s a major one: plunging support among Latino voters, who played a critical role in giving Trump a second term.

In 2024, 46% of Latinos voted Republican, according to national exit polls, up from 32% in 2020 and 28% in 2016. In Texas, Trump drew 55% of the Latino vote – the best showing ever for a Republican.

But in the state senate race, that trend shifted sharply.

“Hispanic voters, according to the exit polls, were voting 9 to 1 for the Democrats,” said Bud Kennedy, a political columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to local station KVUE. “All you heard about last year, when Hispanic voters, men in particular, voted for Trump – all that is completely gone away. They were all solidly Democrat.”

“Whatever inroads the GOP was making recently among Latinos in Texas has begun to really revert,” said Jason Villalba, a former GOP state lawmaker who now leads the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, to the Wall Street Journal. “That will have implications around Texas and around the country.”

For years, Democrats assumed Latinos would vote like Black Americans, the party’s most loyal group. But in some ways, they more closely resemble other immigrant groups, whose voting patterns are more fluid.

Many Latinos backed Trump because they were disillusioned with the Democrats’ failure to restrain prices, and they’re now abandoning Republicans for exactly the same reason. In a Pew poll last November, 70% of Latinos said they disapproved of the way Trump is handling his job, with 55% feeling that disapproval “very strongly.” And 61% said Trump’s policies “have made economic conditions worse.”

This rising discontent showed up clearly last November in the New Jersey governor’s race, won easily by Democrat Mikie Sherrill.

“The Democratic Party clawed back much of the ground it had lost with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential race,” reported the New York Times in November. “The outcome suggests that President Trump’s surge of support among Hispanic voters last year may have been fleeting, or at least not transferable to other candidates in his party.”

All voters are affected by inflation, political scientist Matthew Wilson at Southern Methodist University told Axios, but the Latin electorate is “especially attuned to cost of living and economy issues. They’re disproportionately affected by working class discontent, so there’s more swing in the electorate.”

This economic anxiety has been badly aggravated by Trump’s increasingly visible, and violent, crusade against immigrants. Many Latinos backed Trump’s promotion of secure borders that, he told them, enhanced their safety by keeping out rapists and drug dealers.

But today, reports Pew, 2 out of 3 Latinos disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration. Many victims of Trump’s policies are not criminals, or faceless “others,” but their friends and neighbors – even themselves.

The Associated Press visited a swing congressional district in northeast Colorado that is about 40% Hispanic. “In more than two dozen interviews across the district, every voter who identified as Hispanic spoke of being offended by Trump’s immigration crackdown,” reported the AP. “Many – U.S. citizens all – feared for their own safety."

As one of them, 30-year-old Jennifer Hernandez, put it: “I don’t know if, just because of my last name or how I look, they might go after me.”

The BBC heard similar sentiments from Oscar Sarmiento, a Houston electrician, who said, “There’s a lot of people who are good people. Law-abiding immigrants. ... They want to be in the U.S. and contributing. They’re following the rules. Like grandmas, moms, aunts and uncles. Leave those people alone.”

“The broader Hispanic community certainly feels let down,” Javier Palomarez, president of the Hispanic Business Council, told Politico. “We didn’t get what we thought we were going to get.”

For much too long, the Democrats took Latino voters for granted. Now Republicans are making the same mistake. They paid for it in Texas, and they could pay again in November.

• Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be reached at stevecokie@gmail.com.