Bobby Pulido’s Model for Winning Back Latino Voters
New polling from Equis and WelcomePAC shows why swing Latino voters are abandoning both parties, and why Bobby Pulido might just be the model to win them over.
At the conclusion of 2024, Republicans were high on their own supply. The decade-long project to win the fastest growing segment of the population had, they believed, finally come to fruition. Democrats, still reeling from their weakest performance with Latino voters since the Bush era, largely agreed that the realignment was nearly complete.
Fast forward 20 months, and it turns out both parties had it wrong.
Today, according to new polling from Equis, Trump’s approval among Latinos has dropped to net -31% (63% disapprove, 31% approve); defections of Latino Trump voters who say they’ll vote for Democrats in 2026 or are undecided has climbed to 21%; and, most notably, a two-term incumbent congresswoman in south Texas’s 15th congressional district (a Trump+18 ruby red district) trails a conservative Latino Democrat and Tejano legend in Bobby Pulido, who leads her by a 48-46% margin, according to new polling from WelcomePAC. (And it has the congresswoman worrying privately to donors.)
If you’re a Democrat reading this and feeling good, stop. This isn’t a reversion of Latino voters from the GOP back to Democrats, it’s a dealignment from both parties, as Latino political strategist Mike Madrid has been shouting for years:
“Dealignment has two signature characteristics: increasingly volatile electoral swings as voters become progressively disaffected by whichever party holds power, and depressed turnout as voters disengage from both parties. Latino voters are exhibiting both patterns in textbook fashion.”
Equis’s new national polling demonstrates this in real time. The GOP’s brand advantage with Latino voters on metrics like “getting things done,” being the “party of order and stability,” and “valuing hard work” have been erased—at least for now. Republicans led on half of the brand metrics in Equis’s April 2025 poll. Democrats are now leading or tied across the board—but that’s only half the story.
The Republican collapse is not translating into Democratic gains. Of the 21% of Latino Trump voters showing signs of defection, half haven’t moved toward Democrats—they are undecided and potentially heading for the exits in 2026. Democratic support among Latinos has been flat all year, even as Trump’s support has cratered. If this were a realignment to Democrats, we would be seeing a rise in Democratic support as Trump’s numbers dip, but we aren’t.
Digging into those undecided Latino voters and the dealignment becomes stark. Most have no clear view of what either party stands for or who it fights for: “42% say neither party cares about people like them, 38% say neither party gets things done.” And among the disaffected Trump voters that Democrats need to make inroads with, more see Democrats as the party of corruption than Republicans. To sum it up, the parties will struggle to win these voters over, but the right candidates might.
This brings us back to Bobby Pulido, who understands this trend better than almost anyone in the country, because he’s running in the middle of it.
In a district where conservatives outnumber liberals by a 51-22% margin, and where Latinos make up 75% of the eligible voter population, Pulido is running as a Blue Dog Democrat. Pulido respects his community’s history and heritage, and he understands that his voters are not prioritizing culture war or racial identity issues—they’re working-class economic voters.
Pulido grasps the economic anxiety in his district better than most strategists ever will. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “I feel like Democrats focus on the poor, but a lot of people here do not consider themselves poor. They consider themselves broke… We say, ‘We’re broke, but tomorrow we’re going to make it.’” And he said that many of his voters gave Trump a chance “because of the promise of a better life for their own families.”
And Pulido is just as clear-eyed about why the Democratic Party keeps failing to reach his voters. Democrats, he says, “have been terrible about letting people know why we are better on the economy because I feel like we get bogged down with the culture issues.”
The data backs him up. The Welcome Democracy Institute asked TX-15 voters why they had drifted from Democrats, and the top answer at 28% was that the party had moved away from their values. Democrats’ position on immigration and the border followed closely behind at 26%.
But south Texas voters remain open to voting for Pulido because he is culturally moderate, locally rooted, and independent from the national party—especially on border security and immigration. Pulido has said flat out that the Biden administration “did not handle the border correctly,” and that both the Biden and Trump administration approaches are non-options. He wants to secure the border and stop ICE from paralyzing his community; he wants to make a push for comprehensive immigration reform and remove criminals who are in the country illegally. And he is listening to south Texas construction businesses who are saying, “these ICE raids are hurting our pocketbooks. I can’t fill the crew”—when Rep. Monica De La Cruz is nowhere to be found.
This is simply where south Texas voters are, and it’s a position Democrats at the national level might take note of.
Trump won Latino voters by promising order and economic security, and he is now failing to deliver on both. Democrats might not win these voters back running on the party brand, but the right candidates can. Those who reflect their community’s values, treat Latino voters as workers with economic aspirations, and talk about the cost of everyday living with the same urgency that voters feel. In other words, candidates who run the way Bobby Pulido is running.