Politics

Republicans are freaking out about Hispanic voters after a Texas upset

Published

5 months ago

February 4, 2026

Republicans are in full-out panic mode over their plunging support with Hispanic voters after losing a special election in a ruby-red Texas district over the weekend.

On Saturday, a Democrat posted a 14-point victory in a Fort Worth-based state senate district President Donald Trump had won by 17 points in 2024, a staggering swing that was powered by significant shifts across the district’s Hispanic areas.

It’s the clearest sign yet that the GOP’s newfound coalition that propelled Trump’s return to the White House may be short-lived. Many Republicans are warning the party needs to change course on immigration, focus on bread-and-butter economic issues and start pouring money into competitive races — or risk getting stomped in November.

Polling already showed that Republicans were rapidly losing support from Hispanic voters. But the electoral results were a confirmation of that drop.

“It should be an eye-opener to all of us that we all need to pick up the pace,” U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from a majority-Hispanic district in South Texas, said in an interview. “The candidate has to do their part, the party has to do their part. And then those of us in the arena, we have to do our part to help them as well.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters Tuesday that the election was a “very concerning outcome.” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted on X that the results should be a “wake-up call for Republicans across Texas. Our voters cannot take anything for granted.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “a swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed.”

Taylor Rehmet, the Democrat who flipped the state Senate seat over the weekend, made huge gains with Hispanic voters amid national pushback to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and widespread economic frustration across demographic groups.

Ahead of the election, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — an immigration hardliner who bused migrants to Democratic-led cities during the Biden administration — said the White House needed to “recalibrate” on its immigration crackdowns following the shooting of Alex Pretti by an immigration officer in Minneapolis.

“That imagery coming out of Minnesota in the last few days has had a huge impact on not only Hispanic voters, but swing voters, independents in Texas and around the country,” said Texas GOP consultant Brendan Steinhauser. “What’s transpired there has definitely led to a bit of a political backlash.”

As Republicans panic, Democrats are feeling a renewed jolt of optimism after they swept statewide races last year in Virginia and New Jersey. They believe they found a winning formula with Rehmet, whose working-class biography as a union leader, Air Force veteran and Lockheed Martin machinist resonated with voters, along with his narrow focus on local issues like maintaining public school funding.

Tory Gavito, president of Democratic donor network Way to Win, said she received excited texts from several major donors over the weekend after the win. “Knowing it’s a wave year, this just adds a little bit of more wind in our sails,” she said. “It’s not just a question around Texas, it’s a question around Texas and Mississippi and Alabama and what does this mean for lots of places.”

Texas Republicans have the most to worry about of any in their party about a major Hispanic snapback towards Democrats.

Hispanics are now the largest ethnic group in Texas, making up 40 percent of the population. Trump carried Latinos in the state in 2024, exit polls showed, a massive swing from earlier elections, and Republicans had been making especially strong gains with rural, more conservative Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley. But as Texas Democrats look to win a U.S. Senate election for the first time since 1988, they’re eyeing an opportunity to pull those voters back in.

“They are leaving in droves and going in the opposite direction,” said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council. “This is a warning sign.”

And Texas Republicans also banked on retaining at least some of their newfound Hispanic support when they redrew their Congressional map last year, creating several majority-Hispanic districts that Trump would have carried by double digits last year. That includes rejiggering district lines for two top GOP targets, Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, as well as a third district outside San Antonio.

“They’ve banged three of these five new Republican seats on a demographic that Democrats were never able to turn out for 30-40 years, ” said GOP consultant and Trump critic Mike Madrid, referring to young, Hispanic male voters. But now, Trump’s hardline immigration policies have “angered and upset them.”

Samuel Benson and Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.

Politics

World Cup match collides with Florida GOP bash

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

HOLLYWOOD, Florida — Colombia and Portugal’s World Cup match in Miami Gardens won’t be the only major draw pulling crowds to South Florida this weekend: Florida’s Republican grassroots are heading to Hollywood for their “Sunshine State Showdown.”

The GOP’s event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is one of the state party’s biggest of the year. The GOP sold more than 800 tickets, with the party’s most devoted volunteers and many donors coming in from all over the state to get revved up for the midterms, gameplan their messaging and hear directly from top candidates.

The shindig will feature speeches from Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as gubernatorial candidates Rep. Byron Donalds, former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. It will also include two congressional debates.

Several “Showdown” attendees said they were thrilled about the convergence of their party’s bash with a World Cup match. South Florida has already seen a huge economic boom in recent years, and the Magic City is poised to become even more prominent given Miami is set to be home to Donald Trump’s future presidential library and will host the G20 in December. “Miami is again at the center of the universe,” observed Miami-Dade County GOP Chair Kevin Cooper.

Several prominent Republicans said they see the international event as an opportunity to showcase the state. State Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville, who also chairs the Republican Party of Florida’s fundraising committee, said he’d enjoyed seeing fans from abroad show appreciation over social media for American culture. “They have fallen in love with the greatness of America,” Black said. “By being exposed to the Republican Party event, they will learn just how that greatness came to be.”

Collins’ team said that while the lieutenant governor wasn’t attending the game, he was “happy the state of Florida is hosting so many fans from across the world experiencing the beauty of our state.”

Former Fox 35 Orlando anchor Ryan Elijah, a GOP candidate for Congress who’s attending the showdown, said he would be checking his phone regularly for World Cup updates.

“What a night for Florida to see the biggest names in Florida politics and World Cup soccer be just miles apart!” he said in a text. “It’s a dream night for tourism numbers and local businesses!”

But the packed weekend also risks turning into a logistical headache. The Hard Rock Hotel is one of the pickup points offering shuttle services to Miami Stadium. It’s less than 9 miles away from the big game.

Angie Wong, Republican executive committeewoman in Miami-Dade, attended Wednesday’s match between Scotland and Brazil. She said her family paid $200 for parking near the stadium and that it took more than an hour just to get out of the parking lot.

“We were lucky — we actually left before the game ended,” she said.

Yet this year’s “Showdown” is a more scaled-back affair than in the recent past. It won’t, for example, feature a dinner like in previous years. But that’s probably good news for any attendees who don’t want to miss the soccer match — or who are just trying to get back home without getting stuck in traffic. And it doesn’t have any major Trump administration officials attending, in comparison to last year, when the event prominently featured White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and now-former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who is currently running Trump’s political operation for the midterms.

Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — who remains highly popular with the state’s grassroots — won’t be speaking at the “Showdown” this weekend and his office didn’t reply to an inquiry about whether he’d attend Saturday night’s game. The governor was in the Miami area during the last couple of days, including hitting the Brazil-Scotland game on Wednesday night and holding a press conference at the former Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention center on Thursday.

Evan Power, chair of the state party, had already arrived at the Hard Rock Hotel on Wednesday night and said he got to watch a Brazilian victory parade happening right outside the restaurant where he was having dinner. He added he hadn’t had any issues getting in and out of the events center and that Republicans sold out their room block, “so I think we were able to get in before the craziness.”

“In our room block, people are happy because they’re not paying the market rate that is out there,” Power said. “Seeing some of the prices — they’re crazy now.”

Politics

A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game FIFA can’t control

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s “Pride Match” designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.

“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.

Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.

It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.

“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.

Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.

Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.

Politics

The world’s not big on the US. The World Cup might help.

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

America’s stint hosting the World Cup is drawing mostly positive reviews to date — and it couldn’t come at a better time.

According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, views of America across the world are worsening and confidence in President Donald Trump’s leadership is dropping.

Pew surveyed 42,000 people across 36 countries between February and May, and found that America has a largely negative impression on the global theater. Only 23 percent of surveyed adults expressed confidence in Trump’s leadership — eliciting less confidence than Chinese leader Xi Jinping (34 percent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (31 percent).

Foreign policy is the biggest pain point for Trump’s international critics, who take issue with his handling of tariffs, Gaza, Iran, Greenland and the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Pew’s findings.

Meanwhile, fewer countries — and longtime allies — believe the U.S. is a reliable partner. In Canada, where 83 percent of respondents described the U.S. as reliable in 2022, that number is now down to 35 percent.

In 2023, 60 percent of Germans said the U.S. considers international interests in its foreign policy decisions. That share has now dwindled to 23 percent — Germany’s public opinion of the U.S. is “now similar to or more negative than what was measured during George W. Bush’s presidency, when many people in Europe and elsewhere strongly opposed the war in Iraq and other major elements of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Pew.

There are only seven nations where a majority rate the U.S. well — Israel leads the pack, with 81 percent of respondents viewing America favorably. Some of the country’s lowest ratings come from predominantly Muslim publics, “such as Malaysians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Over the past decade, Pew’s polling has found growing concerns about the health of American democracy. A 2013 Pew survey, just as Barack Obama entered his second term, an all-time high of 75 percent of respondents in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Philippines, South Korea and the U.K. said the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal freedoms.

Since then, declining shares of world respondents believe the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal liberties — and this year, 56 percent of respondents said the U.S. does not.