Blue Horizons: The Democrat's Roadmap To Conquering Texas

Unpacking the trends driving Texas toward a Democratic future.

Where is Texas going politically?

Texas is the second largest state in the country, and it also awards the second largest electoral votes for president and has the second largest number of seats in the house. This means that Texas is a lucrative prize politically. For the last two decades, Texas has been safely Republican, so politically, it has been somewhat on the back burner compared to highly competitive states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada…etc. However, this may be starting to change.

In this article, I will be taking a deep dive into the trends powering Texas’ leftward trend in recent years, making the state go from Romney+15 to Trump+9 to Trump+5, along with Ted Cruz’s narrow 2.6-point win in 2018. Texas has been rapidly changing, giving Democrats real hope that they can flip the state.

The Texas Triangle.

The Texas Triangle is home to over 2/3rds of Texans. As a result, the region makes the most significant political impact on Texas. It has also seen the most significant leftward trends. These trends aren’t unique to Texas; shifts left among urban areas have been powered by highly educated suburban regions across the country, helping flip states for Democrats, such as Arizona and Georgia.

Dallas-Fort Worth.

The leftward trend is the most apparent among all the metros. DFW went from netting Bush hundreds of thousands of votes to voting for Biden by double digits. This leftward trend was the most dramatic in suburban and highly educated Collin County, where it went from Bush+50 to Romney+31 to Trump+4, a gargantuan shift of 46 points!

The shifts in DFW have netted Democrats a congressional district and seven state house seats since 2000, and more are likely soon to come as ten state house seats are less than Trump+10 in the DFW area. However, Democrats have not capitalized adequately on these gains and let very winnable seats slip from them.

The 24th congressional district is an excellent example of this; 2018 and 2020 were extremely close. However, Democrats narrowly lost the seat twice despite Beto and Biden winning it at the top of the ticket.

On the state house level, this is apparent as well with seats such as HD-108 in North Central Dallas, where Morgan Meyer won by the skin of his teeth in 2018 by only about 220 votes and then again narrowly winning in 2020 by 1.5 points despite Beto and Biden both winning the seat by double digits on the same ballot.

Now, both HD-108 and TX-24 have been gerrymandered to be Trump seats, although HD-108 is only Trump+1, and Meyer saw his margins continue to slip in 2022, which shows that he is very vulnerable to a strong Democratic opponent. The same happened in 2024, with Beth Van Duyne in TX-24 performing worse than her 2020 margins but only winning due to being gerrymandered into a district 16 points redder than the old TX-24. Ticket splitting has rapidly declined in recent years, but it is still a considerable burden on Democrats.

Austin.

Austin has always been a traditionally very liberal city, and it was always known as the blueberry swimming in tomato soup as it was so politically different from the rest of Texas. However, that old saying is no longer true as it has been joined by the other three big metros as large democratic vote netters. Austin itself has gotten much bluer than it used to be, and out of the metros, it has seen the largest leftward shift, going from Bush+13 in 2000 to Obama+14 in 2012 to Biden+36 in 2020! Austin has also netted Democrats an additional Congressional district and many state house seats as historically GOP-dominated areas such as Williamson and Hays counties rapidly become bluer.

The leftward shift in Austin is no surprise when you look at its incredibly high college education rates, with 54% of people in Travis County being college-educated, which is the highest in the state! Austin has also been the home of a tech industry boom that has attracted a lot of young and highly educated professionals to the city, which has earned it the title of the fastest-growing metro in the state in both population *and* GDP, an impressive feat in one of the fastest growing states in the country. Austin seems likely to continue to deliver Democrats larger margins.

San Antonio. My home city.

The San Antonio urban area is larger than its neighbor Austin by about 200,000 people, but Austin cast about 75,000 more votes than San Antonio did. This is where we start to talk about turnout. Turnout is the ultimate hurdle for Democrats in Texas.

Hispanic voters here simply do not vote at very high rates, and that causes the state to be artificially redder than it really should be. If all registered voters had voted, Biden would have likely narrowly won Texas, and Ted Cruz would no longer be our senator!

Turnout is a lifesaver for Republicans in Texas, and they have made attempts to suppress the vote. A good example is how Brazos County Republicans removed the voting center off of the Texas A&M campus in 2022 after the students there backed Biden by over 20 points, and it cratered turnout there. However, voter suppression in most cases is not effective at all. In many cases, it has the opposite effect of increasing voter turnout.

A lot of the turnout problem in Texas is due to voter apathy. People here feel that their vote won’t matter because most people here are not aware that Texas is no longer safely Republican and Trump only won TX by 5. If you ask your average person who doesn’t closely follow politics how much they think Trump won Texas, you’ll get a lot of answers above 15 points. As a result, demographic groups that are already low-propensity voters don’t vote because they are under the assumption that their vote won’t matter anyway.

I chose the San Antonio section to talk about this because San Antonio is the most Hispanic large metro area in the state and, as a result, has the worst turnout in the state among the large metros, so it most acutely affects San Antonio with inner city areas having turnout as low as 30% in some precincts. However, that has not stopped San Antonio from rapidly trending left. Suburban northern San Antonio has shot left in recent years, and as a result, Bexar County netted Biden 140,000 votes compared to Bush netting 30,000 votes from Bexar 20 years prior.

Houston.

Houston has been simultaneously an incredible gift and the source of many headaches for Texas Democrats. Houston is gigantic, so it nets an equally enormous amount of votes for Democrats. However, Houston is the capital of the oil industry in the United States, and as a result, it is the most conservative metro in the state. Houston has shifted left quite a bit over the last two decades, going from Bush+15.7 in 2000 to Romney+6.1 in 2012 and Biden+8.7 in 2020. Suburban Houston trends have been very kind to Democrats, shifting upwards of 20-30 points left since 2000 in most areas. 

Despite Suburban Houston shifting just like the suburban areas of the other metro areas, Houston has also seen its inner-city urban areas be very swingy. Houston had the smallest swing left out of any metros in 2020, D+2 compared to D+8 in DFW, D+5 in San Antonio, and D+7 in Austin. This was mainly due to Biden losing a lot of ground in inner-city Houston compared to Hillary Clinton 4 years prior, especially in predominantly Hispanic areas where Biden was performing upwards of 20-25 points worse than Clinton in some precincts. However, he matched Obama’s 2012 numbers and exceeded Obama’s 2008 landslide numbers in inner-city Houston. So it is unclear if it was just 2016 being an outlier due to Trump’s rhetoric on immigration or his incumbency or if this is a long-term trend.

2024 will likely reveal that even though inner city areas trended to the right in 2020, the Houston area trended leftward regardless.

The challenges facing democrats in flipping Texas.

So far, I have been talking about primarily good news for Democrats, and to be fair, most of Texas trends recently are good news for Democrats, but make no mistake, some things are working in Republicans’ favor.

The big one is rural areas. Rural voters make up about 1/6th of the Texas electorate and have traditionally been a very Republican demographic. Rural Texas backed Trump by a gargantuan 52 points in 2020 and netted him 1.2 Million votes, which is double Trump’s margin of victory in Texas. Texas rural areas are also trending rightward, going from Bush+35 in 2000 to Romney+47 in 2012 to Trump+52 in 2020.

That rural trend seems to be slowing down due to many rural areas getting so red that they cannot get any redder cause there are just no more democrats to flip; this is apparent in counties such as Roberts County, which is the reddest in the country, it backed Trump by 94 points. However, Republicans have found a new source of rural voters to flip: one of the most historically reliably democratic groups, South Texas Hispanics. They had a very intense rightward shift in 2020, despite that Democrats in 2022 clawed back some support with Hispanics along the border. Still, it is unclear if Biden will be able to keep those gains in 2024 or if he will continue to crater with Hispanics there, which could cost Democrats up to three congressional districts, three house seats, and a state senate seat that they could very well win if they hold up well with rural Hispanics.

On the topic of the border, the source of the vast majority of the votes from the border comes from the urban areas around Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, and El Paso. These areas recently have posed quite a challenge to Democrats. For a long time, these areas were the base for Texas Democrats as it was the only area that voted reliably Democratic in every election. They netted Hillary Clinton nearly 200,000 votes in 2016. However, the democratic dominance over the border came crashing down in 2020 as Biden saw an 18-point shift rightward across the entire border region from just four years prior, with some counties, such as Starr and Maverick, swinging 46 and 55 points right, respectively.

The few parts of the border that held up a little better were the urban areas, with Hidalgo and Cameron counties swinging only 17 and 13 points right. Even then, that was a devastating blow, and it halved Biden’s vote margin in those counties from Clinton’s 2016 numbers. However, looking at the long-term numbers over the last 20 years, Biden performed better than Gore and Kerry, and Obama and Clinton’s numbers seem more like outliers than the normal partisan lean of the region.

El Paso is the other bright spot for Democrats along the border. This is likely because it has a much higher college education rate than the rest of the border region. It has seen a decent leftward trend from 2000, going from Gore+18 in 2000 to Obama+32 in 2012 to Biden+35 in 2020. Biden also increased his net votes from El Paso County to 93,795, up from Clinton’s 90,942 votes she netted. Despite these few parts of the border holding up okay for democrats, this trend was a massive blow to Texas Democrats in 2020 as Hispanics make up a considerable portion of the electorate, and this trend wasn’t just seen along the border. It was seen amongst Hispanics across the state.

Final Thoughts.

In conclusion, Democrats have an incredible opportunity to flip Texas sometime this decade. 2024 is possible, but the hurdles Democrats face with Hispanic and Rural voters seem very difficult to overcome. Texas is definitely a state to watch out for, even though it is currently still in the republican column. That is something that could change a lot sooner than most would think. Texas flipping would be an absolute disaster for Republicans, and it would shatter a lot of stereotypes about Texas that are no longer true about most of us who live here.

Editer’s note: I met James on Twitter, where he always shares political data and Texas maps. His analysis gives me so much hope. I hope it gives you hope, too.

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