One of the key factors behind Donald Trump’s re-election was his substantial gains among Hispanic voters. Post-election estimates indicate that, relative to 2024, they swung Rightward by 17.7 points. And though Trump did not win them outright, he still captured around 45% of these voters, a modern-day record for a Republican presidential nominee.

Pre-election evidence suggested that Hispanics’ growing support for Trump stemmed primarily from prioritising the economy in their vote choice, which was in rough shape heading into the election. A sizeable share also favoured his immigration policies, such as building a wall at the southern border and deporting people living in the country illegally. More broadly, Hispanics also tend to be ideologically moderate — many are patriotic, religious, and upwardly mobile — and therefore aren’t necessarily wedded to the Democratic Party.

Republicans are now banking on retaining these gains as they work to build power in the years ahead. The Texas State Legislature offers the latest evidence of this. The GOP-dominated body is currently working to redraw the state’s congressional maps to boost the party’s chances of keeping its US House majority, and it’s hoping Hispanic Texans will help.

The new map is targeting two heavily Hispanic, Democratic-controlled districts (the 28th and the 34th) in the Rio Grande Valley by adding more rural and Trump-leaning areas to them. Some of these places saw dramatic Rightward swings during Trump’s elections. For example, the 28th District includes Zapata County, a 94% Hispanic county that had voted overwhelmingly Democratic since 1920. But in 2020, Trump narrowly flipped it.

However, there is some reason to be sceptical that Trump’s gains with Hispanics will stick over the long run. Firstly, it’s not yet clear that the Hispanics he brought into his coalition will turn out when he is not on the ballot. Consider the 28th District. Though most of the counties within it swung sharply to the Right in 2020, several shifted back toward the Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Turnout in key counties dropped significantly, even as the state as a whole continued its Rightward shift from 2020. But when Trump ran again in 2024, all the counties in the district moved back to the Right. This dynamic could pose a problem for the Republicans in a post-Trump future.

In the near term, it doesn’t appear the new maps will give Republicans a huge boost in these districts ahead of next year’s midterm election. This is what New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn observes, too: “Even as redrawn, these districts voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Add in a favourable midterm environment, subtract the relatively Trump-friendly general election turnout, and add the variable of a less predictable Hispanic vote, and suddenly there are a lot of ways Democrats could hang tough in these seats next year.”

There is also growing evidence that many Hispanics are souring on Trump’s second term. After his 45% showing in last year’s election, his average approval rating with this group sits at just 35% today. A July survey by Equis Research, a Democratic-affiliated organisation, found that just 31% of Hispanic voters approve of how Trump is handling the economy. An earlier Equis poll from May showed that two-thirds (including 36% of his own voters) believe his actions on immigration have gone “too far” — a view taking hold in the Rio Grande Valley. Consequently. the Equis survey shows that around one-third of Hispanics who voted for Trump last year are not set on voting Republican in 2026.

However, even in the face of these developments, there is some reason to suspect that the GOP will retain a decent share of Trump’s Hispanic support moving forward. A post-election study by Blue Rose Research found that the electorate under Trump has, perhaps counterintuitively, become less racially polarised — especially Hispanics. One result is that Hispanics who are ideologically moderate or conservative are starting to vote more in line with their beliefs than their ethnicity, the latter of which has historically aligned them more with the Democrats. In 2024, for instance, a meagre 17% of conservative Hispanic voters supported Kamala Harris, down from 24% for Joe Biden in 2020 and 34% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even moderates swung 23 points Rightward from 2016 to 2024.

Still, Trump’s early moves have clearly antagonised many Hispanic Americans, including even some of his supporters. Republicans will have to contend with this as well as the unpredictable nature of the Hispanic vote if they hope to make these voters a reliable part of their coalition moving forward.

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Michael Baharaeen is chief political analyst at The Liberal Patriot substack.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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