Enthusiastic Democrats can often be heard talking about how Texas is turning purple and maybe even blue. Professional strategists have mostly scoffed at this idea — after all, Donald Trump won Texas by more than 800,000 votes in 2016. But if President Trump decides to seek a second term — and he has said many times that he intends to — he can no longer count on winning Texas’s 38 Electoral College votes.
In some respects, Trump’s problems in Texas are similar to the difficulties he faces nationally: college educated white women moving decisively to the left and the continued erosion of Republican support in fast-growing metropolitan counties.
The biggest warning signal for Trump in once bright red Texas is the clear disenchantment with hard-right conservatives that a segment of Republican voters feel. These are the conservatives most closely tied to Trump in both substance and style.
If Texas were to become a battleground state in 2020, the national political consequences would be hard to overestimate. Not only are its 38 Electoral College votes second in number only to California’s 55, but for a Democratic presidential candidate, winning Texas would, in effect, neutralize such adverse developments as, say, combined losses in Ohio and Michigan or Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Let’s bore into the details by looking first at Tarrant County (home to Fort Worth), which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 54 years.
In late October, Julie McCarty, the president of the NE Tarrant County Tea Party and a major power broker in North Texas, expressed confidence over the coming election.
“I have no worries about Tarrant County,” she told The Texas Tribune. “We are solidly red this go-round.”
On Nov. 7, the day after the election, McCarty changed her tune. According to the Tribune, she wrote to her loyalists on the Tea Party mailing list:
“We are rapidly becoming outnumbered. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I don’t like the pattern.”
In Tarrant County, not only did Beto O’Rourke beat Ted Cruz, a darling of the Tea Party movement, by a slim margin (312,477 to 308,608) but right-wing, down-ballot candidates were swept out of office.
For example, Matt Rinaldi, a state representative and a founder of the Texas Freedom Caucus, lost to Julie Johnson, who was endorsed by the LGBTQ Victory Fund and Planned Parenthood, while carrying a rating of zero from the N.R.A. Konni Burton, a state senator and a former vice president of the Tarrant Tea Party, lost to Beverly Powell, who had the backing of virtually every liberal advocacy group in the state.
Even more telling for 2020, voters showed a clear preference for more moderate Republicans running statewide than for red meat, Trump-style Republicans.
Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice, described this development in an email:
Donald Trump made the most polarizing and dogmatic conservatives in Texas much more vulnerable, with a significant number of regular Republican voters strongly associating these candidates with Trump, and as a result either voting for their Democratic rival, not voting in that race, or casting a protest vote for the Libertarian.
Less polarizing and less dogmatic conservative Republicans — Governor Greg Abbott, Glenn Hegar, the comptroller and George P. Bush, the land commissioner — won by margins (on average, 11.9 percent), that, according to Jones, “double or triple that of the more polarizing and dogmatic conservative Republicans.” Those farther to the extreme right — the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, the attorney general, Ken Paxton and Sid Miller, the agricultural commissioner, won by an average of 4.9 percent.
Jones has strong views on the Trump effect in Texas: “Donald Trump is without a question a major liability for Texas Republicans.”
Trump, according to Jones, repels
key GOP constituencies such as college educated Anglo women and Anglo millennials and post-millennials, while simultaneously providing Democrats with a banner around which to mobilize turnout, especially among Latinos and younger voters.
What about the big question: is Texas becoming Democratic? Jones’s answer:
It is premature to say that Texas is turning blue, but whereas four years ago its hue was dark red, today it is light pink. As long as President Trump is in the White House, Republicans in Texas can look forward to much tougher battles from higher quality and better funded Democratic challengers than they faced prior to 2018, as well as being required to do something that most Republican candidates have not had to do for years in Texas; actually work up a sweat in the fall.
Robert Stein, who is also a political scientist at Rice, pointed out in an email that the pro-Democratic trends in major Texas counties began well before Trump, although Trump has accelerated developments.
Stein uses graphics compiled by The Texas Tribune to make his point. In each major county, partisan voting patterns show Republicans on a steady downward path.
The Decline of the Texas Republican Vote Is Real
Republicans’ margins of victory (and defeat) in three regions, in percentage points. The 2000-16 margins are for presidential and governor’s races; 2018 margins are for the United States Senate race.
Dallas-Fort Worth region
TARRANT COUNTY
(INCLUDES FORT WORTH)
COLLIN COUNTY
(DALLAS SUBURBS)
+50
+40
+30
+20
+10
+6.2
0
–0.6
’00
’04
’08
’12
’16
’18
’00
’04
’08
’12
’16
’18
Austin region
HAYS COUNTY
(AUSTIN SUBURBS)
WILLIAMSON COUNTY
(AUSTIN SUBURBS)
+40
+30
+20
+10
0
–2.8
–10
–15.3
’00
’04
’08
’12
’16
’18
’00
’04
’08
’12
’16
’18
Houston region
HARRIS COUNTY
(INCLUDES HOUSTON)
FORT BEND COUNTY
(HOUSTON SUBURBS)
+20
+10
0
–10
–12
–16.5
’00
’04
’08
’12
’16
’18
’00
’04
’08
’12
’16
’18
Dallas-Fort Worth region
TARRANT COUNTY (INCLUDES FORT WORTH)
COLLIN COUNTY (DALLAS SUBURBS)
+50
+40
+30
+20
+10
+6.2
0
–0.6
’00
’02
’04
’06
’08
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
’00
’02
’04
’06
’08
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
Austin region
HAYS COUNTY (AUSTIN SUBURBS)
WILLIAMSON COUNTY (AUSTIN SUBURBS)
+40
+30
+20
+10
0
–2.8
–10
–15.3
’00
’02
’04
’06
’08
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
’00
’02
’04
’06
’08
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
Houston region
HARRIS COUNTY (INCLUDES HOUSTON)
FORT BEND COUNTY (HOUSTON SUBURBS)
+20
+10
0
–10
–12
–16.5
’00
’02
’04
’06
’08
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
’00
’02
’04
’06
’08
’10
’12
’14
’16
’18
The New York Times | Analysis of Texas Secretary of State data and charts by Darla Cameron, Chris Essig and Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune
Richard Murray, a political scientist at the University of Houston, is bullish on Democratic prospects. The midterms demonstrated that
the metro v. rest-of-state gap widened hugely in Texas, with the big cities going overwhelmingly Democratic while suburban counties outside Austin, Houston, and Dallas/Ft Worth moved toward the Democrats. But non-metro counties stayed very Republican with very high turnout, enabling Cruz to eke out a narrow win.
That trend is likely to continue, Murray argued in an email:
We had 8.3 million voters in 2018 (up from just 4.7 million in 2014). That should go over 10 million in 2020, giving statewide Democrats a good chance of carrying the state for president and winning the U.S. senate seat.
Not only will Democrats be competitive in 2020 but the party has, in Murray’s view, “a 50 percent-plus chance of taking the Texas House of Representatives, with major implications for the 2021 redistricting process.”
Texas continues to change demographically, and, over time, the shifts should work to the advantage of Democrats.
The census reports that from 2000 to 2017 the percentage of white, non-Hispanic Texans, the core of Republican support, fell from 52.4 to 42.0 percent of the population.
Over the same period, the black population grew modestly, from 12.0 to 12.7 percent; Asian-Americans from 3.1 to 5.0 percent and, most important, Hispanics, whose support Democrats are banking on, grew from 32.0 to 39.4 percent.
The Pew Research Center found that Hispanics in Texas voted for O’Rourke over Cruz 64-35. Historically, Hispanic turnout rates have been low. But in 2018, the Dallas Morning News reported, Hispanic turnout increased over 2014 by large percentages in heavily Latino counties: Dallas County (an 86 percent increase); Hidalgo (a 105 percent increase), Cameron County (a 115 percent increase); El Paso County, O’Rourke’s home base (a 168 percent increase).
Statewide, O’Rourke lost to Cruz by 219,427 votes, or 2.6 percent out of 8.3 million votes cast.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, is also optimistic about Democratic prospects in Texas. Rottinghaus wrote in an email:
The migration of Texas’s big urban counties from red and purple to blue means Texas is a two party state for the first time in almost 30 years. Demographic changes, tremendous energy from voters, and a surge of resources will keep Texas competitive for decades.
Trump, Rottinghaus argued,
was a net negative, driving a wedge between college educated, women, and independent voters. As long as Trump is on the ballot in fact or in spirit, Texas will be a competitive two party state.
Christopher Hooks, a freelance journalist based in Austin who often writes for the Texas Observer, has produced two nuanced analyses of the state of play in Texas politics, one in the Observer, the other in the Atlantic.
In the Nov. 7 Observer, Hooks wrote:
Something happened this year that has not happened before — Republican-leaning voters studied specific down-ballot races and broke ranks. That’s a terrible omen for Republicans, who spent the month before the election begging voters to vote straight-ticket R. Once voters get in the habit of splitting their ballot, they’re more likely to do so in the future.
Hooks reported a conversation he had with O’Rourke last July in “a crummy hotel bar” in Lubbock, Tex. when O’Rourke talked not only about winning, but also
about the effect he hoped his race would have on the people around him. He would go to places Democrats don’t go, engage people in a politics that was collaborative, spontaneous and felt good, and hope that it gave them tools and encouragement to keep going after he was done. The success of that project was dependent on O’Rourke doing well enough, and proving the haters wrong. He did. Only time will tell what the race left behind. But according to his own terms — and let’s use a damn cuss here, in tribute to the man — it looks like he knocked it out of the … park.
In the Atlantic, Hooks cautioned that it was too early in the process of partisan transition to suggest that Texas is on the verge of turning blue, but that the Nov. 6 results “just might be the beginning of the end” of Republican dominance.
Hooks compared O’Rourke’s losing bid to that of John Tower — one of the first Republicans to break the pre-1965 Democratic stranglehold on Texas — who lost in his first attempt to win a Texas Senate seat in 1960 but went on to win in a 1961 special election.
Tower’s victory demonstrated to Texas Republicans that their ambitions were not hopeless, “that the party could bide its time, be smart, and pick off races when it could,” Hooks wrote. “That might just be — with a very strong emphasis on might — what happened to Texas Democrats in 2018.”
Despite his caution, Hooks appeared to be convinced that the 2018 election marked a turning point:
Something very strange happened here this year. Like Tower’s bid, the full payoff may not come for many years. But the state party now has what the Republican Party then needed more than anything else: A reason to start building in earnest. That’s not much, doubtless. But it just might be enough.
Perhaps the most trenchant insights concerning Texas politics were offered by a prominent Republican, Joseph Straus, who is retiring after serving 10 years as Speaker of the state House of Representatives. Despite a lifetime career in Republican politics, in a postelection interview with the Texas Tribune, Straus described his own distaste for some of the leaders of the party’s right wing.
He acknowledged that he split his ticket “more than I ever have before” and cited the
infectious enthusiasm (in the O’Rourke campaign) which was brighter than what a lot of his opponents were offering.
Trump, who campaigned extensively for Cruz, demonstrated “borderline racism” at times, Straus said. Some of Trump’s “rhetoric is extremely divisive” and
It’s dark. It’s not unifying. It’s not factual in many cases, and I think that’s the wrong direction for the leader of any party.
For her part, Julie McCarty, the Tea Party stalwart in North Texas, remains firm in her commitment. She wrote her supporters:
I am called to fight for freedom and righteousness, and that is all I know to do. We continue to educate and push back as long as we have the chance … and we do still have the chance because even though we had some squeakers and some tough losses, TEXAS IS STILL A RED STATE.
Straus was more considered in his assessment of Texas politics: “The Republican Party and the state of Texas are moving in opposite directions.”
I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Thursday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall
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