As Hispanics become Texas’ largest demographic group, their political clout lags

Hispanics are now the largest demographic group in Texas, according to new census estimates, marking a milestone for a community whose political power lags far behind its share of the state’s population. There are an estimated 11.86 million Hispanic Texans who comprise 40.2 percent of the state’s population, according to the 2021 American Community Survey, which provides annual and unofficial population figures. White, non-Hispanic Texans made up the second-largest group, with 11.63 million people making up 39.4 percent of the population. The numbers have been trending that way for years in Texas, which added 4 million residents over the past decade — the highest population growth in the country over that time. People of color drove 95 percent of the increase, and Latinos accounted for half. Yet even as the group approached the same size as non-Hispanic whites, the Republican-led Texas Legislature diluted Latinos’ political influence during last year’s redistricting process.

Lawmakers, who claimed they drew the new districts “race blind,” declined to make any new majority-Hispanic districts at either the federal or state level. Instead, they reconfigured one congressional seat in which Hispanic voters made up a majority of the citizen voting age population. They also decreased the number of majority-Hispanic seats in the state House from 33 to 30. “When you redistrict an underrepresented population, if you break them up, then they’re not going to have much of an impact,” said Juan Carlos Huerta, a political science professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. “And when you feel you aren’t going to have much of an impact, you’re less likely to participate.” Barring any legal intervention, legislators will not update the maps again until 2031. Non-Hispanic white people made up a majority of Texas’ population until 2004 and have maintained a plurality in the years since — at least according to official census data. The Census “has not traditionally done a great job of fully capturing the Hispanic community,” said Darrell Lovell, an assistant professor of political science at West Texas A&M University.