Republican Jace Yarbrough won Texas's redrawn 32nd congressional district near Dallas, becoming the only Republican to flip a Texas seat in this year's midterms despite a broader Democratic surge that cost Republicans control of the state.
Yarbrough defeated Democrat Dan Barrios with 51.5 percent of the vote to Barrios's 48.5 percent. Matthew Wilson, a Southern Methodist University political science professor in the district, attributed Yarbrough's narrow victory to two factors. First, Yarbrough shifted his campaign message from primary-focused social issues to general-election emphasis on economic concerns like lowering prices. Second, the district itself was redrawn heavily in Republicans' favor.
The 32nd district had previously included left-leaning Dallas and its suburbs. Texas's state legislature redrew it in August 2025 at President Donald Trump's urging to stretch eastward into Republican-dominated counties while reducing the share of Latino, Black and Asian residents from about 60 percent of the population to a lower proportion and adding predominantly white areas.
Despite the redistricting advantage, Yarbrough's margin was tighter than expected. Wilson noted "there was a pretty uniform Democratic swing across congressional districts." Republicans won four other Texas seats they had targeted through redistricting but lost them to Democrats, who will hold 14 Texas House seats in the new Congress compared to Republicans' 24.
Political experts attributed the Republican losses partly to miscalculations about Latino voters, who make up 40 percent of Texas's population. Though Latinos swung toward Trump in 2024, they tilted back toward Democrats this year, driven by affordability concerns and opposition to Trump's immigration policies. Leticia Gutierrez, a Democrat in the ninth congressional district in Houston, won nearly 58 percent of the vote, partly through targeted Spanish-language outreach on economic issues.