Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, there was a great deal of speculation about how Hispanic citizens would vote. Some pre-election polls showed them swinging dramatically toward Republicans, perhaps even coming close to splitting their vote evenly between the two parties, which would have represented a seismic shift in American politics.

Such a massive shift did not take place—and its failure to materialize is one of the reasons that Republicans are facing disappointingly small gains in the House. But we should nevertheless note that Republicans apparently had their best year with Hispanic voters since 2004. CNN exit polls indicate that what was a 40-point Democratic margin among Hispanic voters as recently as 2018 has now shrunk by almost half, to 60-39 in favor of Democrats. Put another way, one in 10 Hispanic voters has shifted their vote from Democrats to Republicans over the last four years.

We can see that improvement among Hispanics for Republicans by looking at the House district level, too. If we look at the 401 contests in which one Republican faced off against one Democrat (excluding unopposed, and third-party-only opposition, and California’s Democrat-Democrat general elections), and compare the actual result to the district-specific expectations based on the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections (which go into the Cook Partisan Voting Index), we see an average overperformance of 1.4 points for Republicans.

If we break out those districts with more than 25 percent Hispanic population (using demographic data provided by Dave’s Redistricting), we can see that many of Republicans’ best performing candidates (again, relative to expectations) were in high-Hispanic-population districts.

In the graph below, Republican candidates running in districts with greater than 25 percent Hispanic population are depicted in orange; all others are blue. As a quick glance reveals, the orange dots are mostly above the black 45-degree line, which represents precisely meeting expectations based on the district’s past performance.

That visual impression is backed up by the numbers. Whereas the 328 districts without high Hispanic population saw Republicans overperform expectations by an average of 0.5 points, in the 73 high-Hispanic-population districts Republicans overperformed expectations by an average of 5.3 points. That offers a nice confirmation of what the exit polls are telling us. High-Hispanic districts have become more Republican.

Notably, three California Republican incumbents pulled out wins in high-Hispanic districts that were rated as favoring Democrats (see the orange dots in the upper-left quadrant): David Valadao in the 22nd District (in the Central Valley), Mike Garcia in the 27th District (northern Los Angeles County), and Michelle Steel in the 45th District (Orange County). (It should be noted that slow reporting means that only Steel’s race has been officially called at this point.) In south Florida, Rep. Maria Salazar convincingly defended her seat in a district rated as even, winning 57-43. In an open seat in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, rated as very slightly favoring Republicans, Republican Monica De La Cruz won a solid victory, 53.3-44.8.

To be sure, even with gains, Republicans are still behind in high-Hispanic districts, which include some of the bluest districts in the country, most of them urban. And as the exit polls depicted above show, Republicans have gained some ground with Hispanics before, only to lose it shortly thereafter. We will have to see whether the party can hold on to or extend its gains in 2024 and beyond.

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