When Cruz ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas in 2012, there was no exit poll at all. But there, too, we can approximate the boost Cruz earned in Hispanic communities using election returns. This analysis is particularly important for 2016, since Texas is home to approximately 8 million Latinos of Mexican descent, and since Mexicans are by far the largest Latino group nationally, at 64 percent.

The chart below plots the Hispanic population of Texas’s 254 counties on the x-axis and the difference in support won by Cruz and by Romney, who appeared on the same ballot in 2012, on the y-axis.

Overall, Romney out-polled Cruz by just under half a percentage point. But as the chart shows, in what was an uncompetitive race for Senate, Cruz did better than Romney in heavily Latino counties, sometimes markedly so. In Texas, the fifth-percentile county is 7 percent Latino, while the 95th-percentile county is 83 percent Latino. As we move from the former to the latter, Cruz’s advantage compared to Romney grows by a whopping 8 percentage points.