Texas House Races 2026: South Texas & the Cuellar Problem
TX-15, TX-28, and TX-34 are the competitive seats in deep South Texas. Cuellar’s conviction makes TX-28 a Democratic vulnerability. De La Cruz holds a trending-D seat. Gonzalez defends D+3 in the Valley.
Texas Competitive House Seats — 2026 Ratings
South Texas House Races: The Battleground Explained
The Laredo Seat: Conviction Reshapes the Race
TX-28 covers Laredo and the Webb County border corridor, one of the most heavily Hispanic districts in the country. Under normal circumstances — a clean incumbent, standard environment — this seat would be safely Democratic. But Henry Cuellar’s 2025 federal bribery conviction changed the calculus entirely.
Cuellar was a conservative Democrat who had survived multiple primary challenges from the left, including near-defeats against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros. His conviction on charges related to payments from Mexican bank Intercam and the government of Mexico carries specific resonance in a border district where cross-border economic ties are intrinsic to daily life.
DCCC must now decide: back a Cuellar replacement in the primary, or let the primary play out and risk nominating a candidate too far left for the district’s culture. A Republican could win TX-28 for the first time in decades if Democrats fail to recruit a strong moderate candidate to replace Cuellar.
De La Cruz and the Valley’s Republican Turn
TX-15 covers the McAllen area and the northern Rio Grande Valley — ground zero of one of the most dramatic demographic political shifts in recent American political history. Hillary Clinton carried the district by 22 points in 2016. By 2020, Biden carried it by only 2 points. Monica De La Cruz, a Tejana Republican, flipped the seat in 2022 and held it in 2024.
The shift is driven by multiple factors: Trump’s outreach to working-class Hispanic voters on economic and cultural issues; immigration polling messaging that resonates with longer-established border families who perceive recent migration waves differently than Anglo liberals; and a Catholic social conservatism in the Valley that pulls against the Democratic Party’s cultural positions.
Democrats believe the district’s underlying demographics will eventually reassert themselves as the Republican economic agenda on tariffs and federal program cuts hits this low-income region. TX-15 is rated Lean R but is on the DCCC’s target list as a potential flip.
Gonzalez and the Southern Valley Defense
TX-34 covers the southern Rio Grande Valley from Brownsville to Edinburg, including Cameron and Hidalgo Counties. Vicente Gonzalez flipped this seat by winning the Republican-held territory after TX-15 was redrawn in 2022 redistricting. The D+3 lean is narrow enough to require a strong campaign but wide enough to favor the Democratic incumbent in a neutral environment.
Gonzalez is a conservative Democrat from McAllen — a banking and agriculture businessman who threads the ideological needle required in the Valley. His fundraising is strong and his constituent services operation is one of the better-resourced in South Texas.
In a normal pro-Democratic midterm environment, Gonzalez should hold TX-34 relatively comfortably. The risk: if the Trump administration’s deportation policies and immigration enforcement are popular in the Valley — as some polling suggests they may be among established border families — even D+3 terrain could tighten beyond projections.
