LOS ANGELES — With less than one week to go, this year’s most sought-after group of voters is also the hardest to predict: Latinos.

For months pundits have speculated about whether notoriously low-turnout Latinos — traditionally Democratic, presumably angry at President Trump and eager to rebuke his Republican Party — would “show up” this cycle.

Everyone agrees that their impact could be enormous; of the 23 Republican-held House districts that Hillary Clinton carried two years ago, 11 have populations that are at least 20 percent Latino — enough, in theory, to push Democrats across the finish line.

View photos Desteny Martinez, 18, votes for the first time in Norwalk, Calif., on Oct. 24. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) More

“With whites you already know they’ll be voting at a decent rate, even if you wring that towel for every last drop,” explains Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions and a professor of political science and Chicano studies at UCLA. “But with Latinos there’s such a huge drop-off between presidential elections and midterms that the upside can be really huge — if a campaign reaches out and gets it right.”

Where people disagree is over whether Democrats have gotten it right in time for 2018.

As election season winds down, the trending answer seems to be “no.” Last Friday, the New York Times ran an episode of its popular podcast “The Daily” — title: “The Voters Both Parties Are Ignoring” — in which national correspondent Jose A. Del Real pointed out that according to the 2016 exit polls, Trump actually did slightly better among Latino voters than his predecessor Mitt Romney, despite all the predictions about how they would rise up in response to Trump’s nativist policies and rhetoric. How could Democrats expect a better result this time, Del Real continued, when a recent Latino Decisions survey showed that nearly 60 percent of Latinos have yet to be contacted by a campaign?

The following day, influential political demographer Ruy Teixeira wrote a column for the Guardian headlined “Democrats hope Latino voters will help them win. Don’t count on it.”

View photos Katie Hill, who’s running for Congress in California’s 25th District, and Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin at their phone banking headquarters in Stevenson Ranch, Calif., on Oct. 18. (Photo: Matt Harbicht/AP Images for Human Rights Campaign) More

“The mere existence of Hispanic voters is not a magic elixir for the Democratic Party,” Teixeira said. “Latinos are simply too scattered geographically and too variable in their voting patterns for that. And, crucially, for Latinos to deliver the support Democrats need, the party will not only have to contact them, but inspire them to get to the polls.”

Both Del Real and Teixeira made good points. But during a midterm it’s important to remember that what’s happening on a national level isn’t the whole story. In reality, control of Congress will be decided across a few dozen districts where Democratic candidates and committees are campaigning in very targeted ways. Zoom in on that map and a different picture begins to emerge, especially when it comes to Latinos.

Consider California, where most of the 11 heavily Hispanic Clinton districts Democrats hope to flip are located. In California’s 25th District, on the northern, exurban edge of Los Angeles County, Democrat Katie Hill is trying to unseat Republican incumbent Steve Knight. To the south, in the four districts that overlap Orange County, Democrats Harley Rouda (CA-48), Katie Porter (CA-45), Mike Levin (CA-49) and Gil Cisneros (CA-39) are mounting strong challenges to Republican incumbents Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48) and Mimi Walters (CA-45), as well as the GOP candidates running to replace retiring Republican Reps. Darrell Issa (CA-49) and Ed Royce (CA-39). These districts range from 18.4 percent Latino (CA-45) to 35.3 percent Latino (CA-25) — yet in the last midterm, 2014, Latinos accounted for less than 11 percent of the electorate there, on average.