Former GOP Rep Flores says Texas map helps Hispanic representation

EXCLUSIVE: Former Rep. Mayra Flores, the millennial Republican who upset a border-district Democrat amid the Biden border crisis, said Texas redistricting is anything but disenfranchisement of minority voters as its critics claim.

“Four of the five new districts are actually Hispanic-majority districts. And, remember, in the previous map, the Democrats’ biggest complaint was that Hispanics were not represented well,” Flores, who is rumored to be considering returning to Congress in 2026, told Fox News Digital. 

Flores said that beyond the crowing about mid-decade redistricting, the left’s complaints about the new district lines are driven purely by political concerns.

“They’re upset because these Hispanics – they’re conservative Hispanics — have voted for President Trump. This map actually is more of a representation of what Texas is today,” said Flores, who was born in Tamaulipas, what is now one of the most violent Mexican states in terms of cartel violence. It directly abuts her home district.

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In 2024, 12 of 14 Texas border counties flipped red and went for President Donald Trump, in part because of such concerns – including one that hadn’t gone Republican since 1912. 

In 2022, Flores won a special election for the then-34th District, but then lost the seat to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in the next race.

“Conservative Hispanics contribute to the political landscape by supporting Republican candidates, policies; particularly on issues such as economic development, family values, religious freedom and, of course, border security,” she said.

She said liberal interests sued over the current maps, and that there is a sentiment of surprise over how many Hispanics in Texas actually support border security and conservative policies.

Flores said Hispanics and Latinos are not a homogeneous voting bloc for the left, pointing also to Florida, where Latinos and other minorities came out in large numbers for Trump – and where two Cuban-American lawmakers, Reps. Maria Salazar and Carlos Gimenez of Miami-Dade are both Republicans.

Politicians therefore need to seize the opportunity for such redistricting to make sure every congressional district is representative proportionally to their state’s political and ethnic makeup.

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Critics point to New England—where no state currently has a Republican member of Congress, despite conservative pockets in places like Massachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut—as a prime example.

By contrast, Democrats have lambasted the mid-decennial redistricting as a power grab orchestrated from afar by Trump.

Democrats and liberal voices, however, disagreed with Flores’ assertions.

“The Don demanded. The Texas Legislature complied. Voters got hurt,” blared a Monday editorial from the San Antonio Express-News.

The paper accused Republicans of directly “diluting” Latino and Black representation in the new map by “packing them into districts where they have more of a majority than needed to win representation of those seats” or “dispersing them into multiple districts where they lack the numbers to have a say in who their representatives are.”

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Along with other Democrats, the paper also referenced the new map’s merging of Reps. Lloyd Doggett and Gregorio Casar into the same district confines near Austin.

Casar is a millennial “Squad” member and Doggett is, conversely, the longest-serving member of the state’s delegation. Doggett indicated last week he won’t run again if facing Casar.

Casar told NPR the new map attempts to “silence the voices of my constituents and get folks like me out of Congress,” by adjusting Austin-area lines — and claimed it violates the Voting Rights Act.

Additionally, Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, went about 55-45 for former Vice President Kamala Harris, but also includes Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, among its political ranks. The county would see an increase in proportional representation for Republicans, according to reports.

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In California, which is about half Democratic and left-leaning independent, only nine of 52 congressional districts are held by Republicans. In Maryland, lawmakers finally redrew what a judge called a “broken-winged pterodactyl” of a Democratic district that included several noncontiguous pieces of Baltimore suburbs.

Flores said Texas, Florida, California and New York are worth revisiting on a congressional-districting basis if only for the trends of major ingress to the first two from the latter two states.

“We want to make sure that again every congressional district is a representation of the overall state and for critics to say that this [Texas] map silences the voices of minorities when four of the five of them you map are actually Hispanic majority,” Flores said.

“Look, Hispanics are switching toward the Republican Party and will continue to support the Republican Party because the Democrat Party has gone so far left, and you would think that after 2024, they would have learned their lesson and they would come more to the middle,” Flores said.

“Let’s see what happens in the 2026 midterms.”