Texas Democrats' Stunning Performance Since 2016
Texas Democrats have been disappointed by failing to flip the state and been dejected since. But this is wrong. What they have done is nothing less than a miracle.
With Texas House Democrats having returned to the State Capitol in Austin and thus establishing a quorum to allow for passage of the Republicans’ voter restriction law, there has been a lot of handwringing about Texas from Democrats in the national and local scene lately. People seems to be resigned to the idea that Texas is “extremely red” and will be for foreseeable future because Texas Democrats failed to make any headway during the 2020 election cycle. Throw in the fact that Democrats greatly underperformed with Latinos across the board, but especially in Texas (and Florida), and the Conventional Wisdom has basically taken the idea that Texas is unflippable for the foreseeable future as near-fact. The underperformance by Biden (and Democrats writ large) in 2020 among Hispanics was especially egregious in the traditional Democratic strongholds of the supermajority Latino counties along the Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley.
With all this taken into consideration, the attitude among national Democrats especially seems to have fully retreated from the great optimism they had shown after Beto O’Rourke’s near-miss in 2018 through the leadup to the 2020 general election. However, this is dead wrong. What Texas Democrats accomplished in the last two years alone is nothing short of miraculous, and while failing to take ground last year and losing a lot of ground in our former Democratic strongholds of the Rio Grande Valley are both disappointing, we Democrats have a lot to be proud of. Overall, the 2018 and 2020 election cycles were nothing short of absolutely astonishing for us in Texas, and we should not lose sight of that. To show all this, though, first let us consider the context of what has happened and then build up to what happened last year and talk about what the path forward for Democrats in Texas actually is and will be.
Historically, Texas is an ancestrally Democratic state (much like California being an ancestrally Republican state); it had been a bedrock of the Solid South. From the time of its statehood in 1846 until 1980, Texas voted for the Democratic presidential ticket in every single election except for the Republican national landslides of 1928, 1952, 1956, and 1972. Not only that, until the presidential election of 1984, Texas was almost always more Democratic than the nation. Also, from the time of statehood in 1846 until 2002, the Texas Legislature had a Democratic majority in at least one chamber except for the brief period of 1870-1872.
However, it is important to note that the reason Texas is ancestrally Democratic is because the Democratic Party that used to dominate Texas was the racist, Southern Democratic Party best exemplified by Woodrow Wilson and John Nance Garner. Despite that, though, after the Populist takeover of the Democratic Party in 1896, Texas became one of the leading fertile grounds for prairie (and economic) populism. Even during the Deep South’s defection to Barry Goldwater in 1964, Texas stayed loyal to its native son Lyndon Baines Johnson and gave him a resounding 27-point victory. However, through that approximately 150-year Democratic hegemony of Texas, the state (and national, for that matter) Democratic Party was sharply split in two. The Texas Democratic Party was split between its conservative wing with key figures such as John Nance Garner and John Ireland (associated with the national Democratic Party’s Southern Wing) and its liberal wing with key figures such as Lyndon Baines Johnson and Sam Rayburn (associated with the national Democratic Party’s Northern Wing).
That storied Democratic history starts to fade in the 1980s in serious fashion. As in all cases of political realignment, it started at the top of the ticket at the presidential level and filtered downward from there. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won Texas, but Texas was still more Democratic than the nation (and even more Democratic than California). Starting in 1984, Texas started voting more Republican than the nation (and California), and it has not looked back since. Despite this, Democrats held both houses of the state legislature until 1996, and the governorship went back and forth between the two parties. Even at the turn of the 21st Century, Texas was not the Republican stronghold that it has been recently. In 1996, the Texas Senate fell to Republicans by a bare majority for the first time since 1872, and Republican governor George W. Bush had been in office since 1994. However, the Texas House did not fall to Republicans until 2002, and at this point, Republicans gained a trifecta in the state. Since then, Democrats have not won a single statewide race.
The Republican tradition in Texas has been one of near absolute dominance. In the following table and graph, we see how Texas performs in presidential elections in both absolute margins and relative to the nation (negative means more Republican) in terms of margins. Even through 80s and even as late as the 90s, Texas is still relatively competitive with respect to the nation, but starting in the mid-90s, the bottom completely falls out for Texas Democrats. Texas Democrats hit rock bottom in 2000 at the presidential level when native son George W. Bush ran for his first term where the state is a whopping 22 points more Republican than the nation. As we keep going, it is important to keep this context in mind. In Texas, Democrats are starting from not just rock bottom, they are starting from below rock bottom. Just two decades ago, Texas was more than 20 points more Republican than the nation.
Considering this, what happened in Texas for Democrats since 2016 is absolutely amazing. In 2016, Democrats led by Hillary Clinton did not even bother to invest in Texas for the general election. In all of the 2016 election cycle, Democrats (across the board) spent a grand total of $82 million in Texas. While that might seem like a lot of money, this number is an aggregate of spending by all Democrats in both primary and general elections for every race in the state from the presidential primary all the way down the state house general elections. Also consider the fact that Texas is an extremely expensive state to campaign in with a total of nineteen media markets, including two of which are among the ten largest in the nation. On the other hand, Republicans in the 2016 cycle spent $263 million.
For all intents and purposes, Democrats did not even make an effort in Texas in 2016, and they were swamped more than 3:1 in the spending for the cycle. Yet, in terms of absolute margins, Texas shifted almost seven points blue from 2012 to 2016 even as the nation shifted about two points red in that time. That means, over the course of one election cycle, without any time, energy, money, effort, or campaigning in Texas, the state shifted about nine points blue relative to the nation. These are shifts that, in this age of maximal partisan polarization, are just absolutely unheard of at the state level, especially in a state as large as Texas. The last time states this large shifted this dramatically blue was during the 1990s when the Northeast and West Coast shifted massively blue as the Republican Party became associated with the extremely unpopular then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
Fast forward to 2018, and the midterms deliver a massive D+9 blue wave cresting on the distaste and anger of urbanites, suburban liberals, moderates, and the Democratic base against an extremely unpopular incumbent Republican president. During that election, Texas’s junior US Senator Ted Cruz runs the hardest race of his life in what was supposed to not be a remotely competitive race. Cruz manages to hang on by a mere 2.6 points against El Paso Democrat Beto O’Rourke. For a long time, one of the greatest difficulties for Texas Democrats had been the lack of a strong candidate at the top of the ticket whose coattails could be ridden by down-ballot candidates to victory in their own races. With O’Rourke’s rockstar performance, Texas Democrats had such a feature for the first time since Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1980.
Even though he (barely) lost, O’Rourke’s coattails carried numerous state legislative candidates across the finish line, and Texas Democrats flipped two of thirty-one seats in the State Senate and a whopping twelve of 150 seats in the State House. The gain in the Texas House was so large that it broke the nearly two decade long Republican supermajority in that chamber despite the extreme Republican gerrymander of that chamber. These seats were all in the unexpectedly competitive ancestrally Republican suburbs of the Texas Triangle outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Houston, and the San Antonio-Austin Corridor. O’Rourke’s coattails even extended to contests for the US House where Democrats unexpectedly won two suburban congressional districts: the 7th outside Houston and the 32nd outside the DFW Metroplex. Given how gerrymandered the maps in Texas are, none of these seats should have been remotely competitive, let alone have flipped – even in the massive D+9 blue wave of 2018.
In one single election cycle, because of his hard work and dedication, O’Rourke singlehandedly rebuilt the entire Texas Democratic Party and created its infrastructure from scratch by visiting and developing a Democratic network in all 254 counties of the state, especially in the newly competitive suburbs of the Texas Triangle and border cities. With all this momentum, Texas – and national – Democrats began to consider the possibilities. For a long time, political observers have been thinking that the “sleeping giant” of Latino Texas would wake up and finally turn the state into competitive electoral turf, but it had never happened. As such, it was the case that people just stopped even dreaming of it. Democrats wrote off Texas after even Barack Obama was only able to get within twelve points in the state. Texas remained elusive to Democrats, but when they finally stopped dreaming about it and stopped trying, Texas shocked them in 2016 by suddenly becoming competitive. Even despite this, though, Democrats did not take it seriously, and Beto O’Rourke was completely on his own. National Democrats, even in 2018, did not spend their cash in Texas, and they refused to deploy DNC staff and resources into the state. O’Rourke built everything related to the Texas Democratic Party’s electioneering infrastructure by himself with the salutary donations of small-dollar contributors around the country (and in Texas).
After the 2018 surprise, national Democrats began to reevaluate Texas, and there began to be conversations about what could actually happen. In 2016, Texas had been closer than Iowa, a traditionally blue leaning swing state, and as national Democrats began to evaluate the scene in 2019, their ears perked up. Going into the 2020 redistricting cycle, amazingly enough, the Texas House was actually within reach for Democrats; they only had to flip nine seats to win the majority. Even more astonishingly, there were nine state house districts that voted for Beto O’Rourke in 2018 even though they voted for the Republican for the Texas House – just the right number needed to win the majority, and another eleven had been extremely close at either the US Senate or State House level. At this point, Texas Democrats began talking a big game. They made all the noise in the world and fuss about how they were determined to finish what they started (unintentionally) in 2018 and flip the Texas House, win up to a whopping nine additional congressional districts, oust senior US Senator John Cornyn, and deliver the state’s thirty-eight electoral votes for the eventual Democratic nominee.
There is something extremely important to note here. All this noise was coming from Texas Democrats, not national Democrats. While national Democrats were happy and amazed to see what had transpired in the state in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, they were not ready to fall prey to the elusiveness of Texas. Especially in a presidential election cycle, national Democrats were focused on one thing and one thing only: ousting Donald J. Trump from the White House. Given the extremely close nature of elections at the presidential level since 1992, national Democrats largely did not care to even make a play for “reach states”. The 2016 election map gave them the path back to the White House: rebuild the Blue Wall by winning back the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Beyond that, national Democrats were focused on winning back Florida and North Carolina, both of which had voted for Obama at least once, and they were intent on holding the blue battlegrounds that had stuck with them in 2016: Nevada, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Virginia, and Colorado. Beyond these, the only “reach state” that national Democrats were interested in actually making a play for was Arizona, which had elected Democratic US Senator Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. Looking beyond that, national Democrats believed that their map could at most be extended to Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa in a potential landslide-election scenario; Texas was not even among the points of discussion.
National Democrats did not make a secret of this. Then-chairman of the DNC Tom Perez repeatedly made clear in early and through 2019 that Texas was not a state Democrats were planning on making a play for no matter who came out of the primary process as the Democratic nominee. They were only interested in winning back the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; competing in the traditional swing states of Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, and Florida; and if things went well, making a play for Arizona. They were not interested in trying to win states that had an extreme Republican history and which had shunned Democrats in their last two near-landslides of 1996 and 2008; if Texas (and Georgia) were not willing to break, or even come close to breaking, for the Democratic nominee in such dominating national Democratic victories as 1996 and 2008, they saw no reason to believe that things were going to be any different in what was shaping up to be another extremely close election in 2020. This drove Texas Democrats crazy.
No Democrat had made a serious play for Texas at the presidential level since the 1970s, and investment down-ballot had dried up at the turn of the 21st Century. Until 2018, Texas Democrats had lived in a sense of dejected acceptance of this fact, and they learned to just live with the fact that national Democrats saw no reason to invest in Texas in any meaningful manner. In fact, especially after the Texas House fell in 2002, Texas Democrats essentially stopped asking national Democrats for significant investment because they knew as well that there really was not any opportunity for national Democrats to be gained. Rather, every penny spent by national Democrats in Texas on a losing race was a penny that was not spent in potentially winnable races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, etc. After the 2018 show of force, though, Texas Democrats sincerely thought that they had changed the paradigm and that national Democrats would finally be willing to actually invest in their races. They spent all of 2019 and 2020 lobbying – really, begging – national Democrats to send something – anything – to the state. National Democrats did not budge.
Even with the chance to have a seat at the table for the 2020 redistricting cycle in the nation’s second biggest state that was, at the time, expected to have a total of thirty-nine congressional seats after the reapportionment, national Democrats did not bite. This left Texas Democrats on their own yet again. The amount of frustration felt by Texas Democrats at this cannot be overstated, but with the national Democrats not budging, they turned to helping themselves. In his epic Senate run, Beto O’Rourke had raised around $85 million from small dollar contributors around the country. With O’Rourke now mounting a quixotic bid for the presidency, Texas Democrats tried to gin up enthusiasm and donations on their own. They were not able to come close to what O’Rourke was able to do, and their operations were appropriately trimmed. Without O’Rourke or another Texas Democratic all-star around to drive the push for donations, Texas Democrats were simply unable to mount the serious electoral offense that they had been talking such a big game about.
On the other hand, though, Texas and national Republicans all but had heart attacks after the 2018 performances. Not only had O’Rourke come within striking distance of taking out the runner-up for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, other than Governor Greg Abbott’s landslide thirteen-point election, Texas Republicans had several close calls. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick only won by five points after wining by nineteen in 2014. Attorney General Ken Paxton only won by five points after wining by twenty-one in 2014. Comptroller of Public Accounts Glenn Hegar only won by ten points after winning by twenty-one in 2014. Commission of the General Land Office George P. Bush only won by eleven points after wining by twenty-six in 2014. Commission of Agriculture Sid Miller only won by five points after winning by twenty-one in 2014. Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick only won by nine points after winning by twenty-one in 2014. For the three Texas Supreme Court seats that were up, all of the incumbent candidates only won by seven points after Republicans won every single such seat by more than twenty points in 2014. Even Greg Abbott’s landslide thirteen-point victory for the governorship was a significant underperformance from 2014 where he won by twenty points.
Republicans around the country were in crisis mode after the 2018 Texas elections. The reason for this is that without Texas, there is simply no way for Republicans to win nationwide. If they lose Texas, they’ve lost everything. For example, in 2016, if Hillary Clinton had just flipped Texas, she would have won the election even with Trump winning Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Florida. Even more drastically, in 2012, if Obama won Texas while Romney won California, Obama would have won; hell, even if Romney had won California, Oregon, Washington, Iowa, and Ohio while losing Texas, Obama would have won. In 2024, if the Democratic nominee holds all the states Biden won while losing California but winning Texas, the Democrat will win; in fact, if the Republican nominee wins both California and Pennsylvania but loses Texas, the Democrat will win. Simply put, without Texas, there is no path to electoral victory for Republicans even if California becomes a Republican state, and Republicans know this.
As such, after the 2018 near-misses, Republicans sprang into action. While national Democrats refused to even wink at Texas in terms of investment or otherwise, national Republicans were the exact opposite. Once the dust settled after the 2018 elections, national Republicans pledged $200 million to Texas Republicans so that Texas Republicans could invest in voter outreach, voter registration, canvassing, etc. Over the course of 2019 and the first half of 2020, national Republicans pumped in $200 million to expand the electioneering infrastructure of Texas Republicans. This $200 million was entirely separate from the funds that they would invest in actual campaigning for the primary and general elections. Texas Republicans used this cash infusion to essentially replicate what O’Rourke had done in 2018; they went to all 254 counties and canvassed every single potential conservative and/or Republican voter and made sure that they were both registered to and intended to vote in the 2020 primary and general elections.
For the actual campaigning for all races, Republicans ended up spending and additional $502 million. The Democrats spent $225 million. Again, Republicans had a more than 2:1 advantage just in electioneering. However, this does not include the $200 million that Republicans had separately put towards electioneering and infrastructure building. With that, that means Republicans once again had a more than 3:1 spending advantage. Republicans spent over $700 million in Texas in the 2020 election cycle in order to keep the state red. Something else to note of significance here is that even the $225 million spent by Democrats masks the fact that a lot of this was actually spent in the primary season – not the general election since Texas was a Super Tuesday state caught in the midst of an unexpectedly competitive primary between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren after the first three states had not yielded a truly decisive frontrunner.
To put that in context, in the general election campaign for the presidential race, the Biden campaign (and the DNC) made next to no investment. Biden did not visit the state even once after the primaries ended, and he only sent Kamala Harris and Jill Biden once each to hold rallies. He himself did not visit the state even once during the general election campaign even though he repeatedly campaigned in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, and Florida. As for tangible investments in the Texas race, the extent of Joe Biden’s action here was a mere $6.3 million ad buy in the Austin media market to run a 30 second ad for just four weeks during the October COVID-19 surge in the state to say, “I’m thinking about and praying for you”. In a state where Republicans had spent more than $700 million in the 2020 election cycle, Joe Biden spent a grand total of $6.3 million – more than a 100:1 advantage for Republicans. Texas Democrats had been begging both the DNC and the Biden campaign to send resources down to Texas for two years, but national Democrats did not budge. It was not that they were unable to compete with the $700 million investment in Texas by Republicans; rather, they actively refused to do so even when they had the money.
And what did Republicans get for the $702 million they spent in Texas in the 2020 election cycle? They won the popular vote the Texas House by a mere eleven points and came within 23,000 votes across nine districts from losing their majority. They actually lost a seat in the Texas Senate. They won the popular vote for the US House’s Texas delegation by a mere nine points and came within 68,000 votes of losing a majority of the delegation. They reelected US Senator John Cornyn by a margin of less than ten points when he had won by twenty-seven points in 2014. And the grand prize of them all: They delivered Texas’ thirty-eight electoral college votes to Republican President Donald J. Trump by a whopping 5.6 points, the closest a Democrat has come to winning the state since 1996 and the first time since 1976 that the state had been competitive in a meaningful two-person race for the White House. The Republican Party spent $702 million for these results. They spent more than 70% of a billion dollars to win the state by less than six points.
Not only that, but the gains which Democrats made down-ballot in 2018 also held. Despite the massive rural and exurban backlash that showed up with Trump at the top of the ballot last year, Texas Democrats, in the face of over $700 million of money thrown up against them, held both of the congressional seats that they had unexpectedly won in 2018, held all twelve Texas House seats that they had gained in 2018 (they actually had a one-to-one swap with Republicans where the Republicans won one Harris County seat outside Houston while Democrats won one Harris County seat, resulting in no net change), and they gained a seat in the Texas Senate. Despite all the massive push by Republicans, Texas Democrats did not lose any ground which they had gained in 2018. Despite the unforeseen Republican enthusiasm with Trump at the top of the ticket, Texas Democrats did not lose any of the ground that they had gained in 2018. In fact, they actually gained ground from 2018 to 2020 because they flipped a Texas Senate seat! Again, they did all this in the face of over $700 million being thrown against them by Republicans with next to no substantial support from the institutional Democratic Party. Now imagine what might have happened if the DNC and the Biden campaign had actually tried to win Texas. Forget spending $700 million; even if national Democrats had spent an additional $100 million in Texas in the 2020 election cycle, it is feasible that we would be talking about Blue Texas today.
Truly, what Texas Democrats accomplished last year was nothing short of absolutely amazing, and they – and we Democrats writ large – should be extremely proud of what was accomplished. In any other situation, holding the ground we had unexpectedly gained in a massive wave election in the nation’s largest red state in a more “normal” partisanship election would be a cause for throwing a party, yet last year, Texas Democrats not only held their ground, they actually gained ground in the Texas Senate. That is, to quote then-Vice President Joe Biden, “a big fucking deal”. While we are all disappointed that Texas did not flip blue, that we did not win the Texas House, that we did not defeat John Cornyn, and that we lost ground among Hispanics of the Rio Grande Valley, there is so much Texas Democrats must be proud of.
Also, for all the noise about flipping the Texas House to have a say in the 2020 Texas redistricting cycle, the reality is that even if Democrats had managed to flip the Texas House, it would not have mattered. The way redistricting works in Texas is two-fold. In the first step, the State Legislature has the initial chance to draw and enact the maps, subject to a gubernatorial veto, for the Texas House, Texas Senate, and US House delegations. Right now, because Republicans hold the majorities in the Texas House and the Texas Senate while also holding the governor’s mansion, they have unilateral control of redistricting. Democrats had hoped that by winning the Texas House, they could force a stalemate that would inevitably throw the congressional redistricting into the federal courts where they thought they might have a better chance of getting a fairer map. They could similarly force a deadlock on the enactment of maps for both the Texas House and Texas Senate as well. However, the flaw with this relates to the second step of redistricting in Texas.
If the Legislature fails to enact a congressional redistricting map, it would most likely be thrown into the federal courts. However, redistricting for the State House and State Senate falls to a five-member committee composed of the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the Texas House, the Attorney General, the State Comptroller, and the Commissioner of the General Land office. Even if Democrats had won the majority in the Texas House, though, the Democratic House Speaker would have been outnumbered 4-1 by Republicans, and they would simply outvote him/her and force a newly gerrymandered map for the State House and State Senate to be enacted. Inevitably, the 2022 midterms would return the Republicans to the majority in the State House because of these new maps, and Texas Republicans would be able to pass a new congressional redistricting map even if they had been forced to either compromise with Democrats to enact one on the first try or were handed down one by the federal courts.
In fact, this is exactly what happened after the 2000 Census. Prior to the 2000 Census, Republicans controlled all but one member of the redistricting committee; Democrats controlled the Texas House majority due to decades of gerrymandered maps in their favor, which caused the Democratic Speaker to sit on the committee. Since Democrats controlled the Texas House while Republicans controlled the Texas Senate and the governorship, they forced a deadlock and threw the congressional redistricting into the federal courts, and the state legislative redistricting fell to the committee.
On the congressional side, the federal courts set about to redistrict the state after it gained four seats in this latest census. However, the federal courts in Texas are extremely conservative, both politically and judicially. Because of this, the federal courts in Texas are usually very reluctant to interfere with the state legislative process, and this was still the case. As such, the court essentially did not change the congressional map in any substance. They made some adjustments to the existing congressional district boundaries (which itself was based off a Democratic gerrymander dating back generations) and added the four new districts where the population had grown the fastest. Since the map was essentially unchanged, this still produced a Democratic majority of the US House’s Texas delegation – as had been the case for almost 150 years up until that point.
On the state legislative side, the redistricting committee set to work and passed extreme Republican gerrymanders of both the Texas House and Texas Senate. The 2002 midterms were held, and given both the pro-Republican gerrymanders and the post-9/11 Rally-Around-The-Flag effect boosting national Republicans led by President George W. Bush, Texas Republicans took control of both chambers of the state legislature for the first time since 1872. At the urging of Tom DeLay, Texas Republicans used their new trifecta, the first one in almost 150 years, to promptly redraw the congressional map. They passed a new law overriding the congressional map that had been drawn by the federal courts, which itself was based off a Democratic gerrymander passed down for generations. As soon as the 2004 elections were held, Republicans promptly took the majority of the US House delegation from Texas without significant effort. Democrats tried to prevent the passage of the new congressional map by quorum busting, but that did not work. They also tried suing the state to prevent enactment of the unprecedented 2003 mid-decade redistricting of the state, but the US Supreme Court, in an extremely characteristic move that restricted voting rights, refused to block the map in LULAC v. Perry.
The US Supreme Court has shown nothing but disdain for voting rights and equal representation, and as such, even if Democrats had won the Texas House in 2020 and forced the congressional redistricting into the federal courts, they would have, first of all, been forced to live with a map drawn by the federal courts almost certain to be based off and preserving of the existing Republican gerrymanders, and after they inevitably lost the Texas House majority in the 2022 midterms, they would have been forced to swallow another mid-decade redistricting. Honestly, in that regard, it is actually a good thing that Texas Democrats did not win the Texas House. This way, they can spend the next decade actually building from the ground up, and electoral success is always more stable and durable when it comes from the grassroots. Their goal over the next few election cycles is to take back the governorship in either 2026 or 2030 because barring extraordinary circumstances, Greg Abbott will win re-election next year. In that process, they can also work to take over the remaining seats on the redistricting committee. If they win the seats of Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and either the State Comptroller or the Commissioner of the General Land Office, they will be able to have the upper hand in redistricting for the 2030 cycle.
All of these seats are winnable for Texas Democrats, and barring the governorship, they just barely missed out on all of them in 2018. There is no reason to despair; there is only reason to get out there and do the hard work. As I have already talked about, the fact that Texas Democrats are in such a position now is itself a testament to their electoral prowess. Despite their disappointment, what they have achieved in the last five years is nothing short of phenomenal. The Texas Democratic Party released an autopsy where they analyzed what happened in the 2020 election cycle and why they failed to achieve the goals that they had set out for themselves. It is actually a fascinating read. I do not necessarily agree with all of their conclusions, but they make some significant points to consider and detail a plan of action to turn the state “sustainably” blue by the 2028 presidential election after having already won it in 2024. They also talk about how despite some worrying signs, Texas Democrats have not actually lost Hispanics due to “vote switching”, but rather, turnout differential caused Republican Hispanics to show up to the polls greater than Democratic Hispanics, which necessarily caused it to seem like Hispanics had shifted red when such a shift had not actually happened. They also argue that the pandemic-induced cessation of in-person canvassing hurt Texas Democrats a lot, and if they had been on the ground knocking on doors and having face-to-face conversations in the Rio Grande Valley, they expect to have won similar numbers of votes and similar margins as prior.
Personally, I believe some of this to be true and am also skeptical of somethings. I can completely believe that the lack of in-person canvassing was a detriment to Democratic chances last year in Texas. As a notoriously low turnout state, the best way to get people to the polls in Texas is to talk to them face-to-face and convince them in-person that their vote both matters and counts. That is extremely difficult to do via phone or internet. Throw in the fact that a lot of these rural communities in the Rio Grande Valley have poor telecommunications infrastructure, and this point of contention is completely believable. However, I do not buy that in-person canvassing will erase a nearly six-point deficit among Texas Democrats. At most, I can believe that it will reduce the margin to three points. Beyond that, more has to be done. I am also skeptical that 2024 is actually the year that Texas turns blue at the presidential level. Texas has been going through a significant blue shift, and a straight-line extrapolation of margins relative to the nation would suggest that the state becomes perfectly EVEN in 2032. On the other hand, a straight-line extrapolation of raw margins (not relative to the nation) would suggest that Texas becomes EVEN in 2028. However, my skepticism is also due to the fact that Democrats just have not actually tried to win Texas yet. They have let the state change its politics solely through organic action.
Since 2004, four states have shifted around seventeen points blue: Colorado, Virginia, Georgia, and Texas. In Colorado, the Jared Polis and Pat Stryker-led Business Roundtable worked very hard over the course of a decade starting in 2002 to flip the state blue; they invested tens of millions of dollars (Adam Schrager’s and Rob Witwer’s book The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado gives a great history of how Colorado Democrats came to dominate the state over the court of the 2000s decade). In Virginia, Democrats have been on the upswing since John Kerry won Fairfax County in 2004, and Mark Warner has spent the last two decades singularly pursuing a political transformation of the state from his first run to the US Senate and then governor; he spent two decades investing a great amount of his personal wealth to flip the state blue. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams spent the 2010s decade begging and pleading with national Democratic donors around the country to help her flip the state blue, and when they did not bother to help her, she did it herself. She personally invested her time, energy, effort, and money to shift the seemingly intractably red state towards blue. In all three of these cases, the state shifted blue due to extreme and serious effort by Democrats. This is also true for the blue shift of Nevada (accomplished by Harry Reid and the vaunted Reid Machine), Arizona (pushed by Mexican-Americans in the aftermath of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s anti-immigrant actions in the early 2010s), and North Carolina (shifting due to the effort of the Reverend Dr. William Barber II after the 2010 Tea Party wave). In all of these cases, while demographics (both minority and suburban liberals) have driven the states blue, there had been serious, conscious, and tangible effort by Democrats to turn them blue.
That is not true for Texas. Even as Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars to shift Colorado, Virginia, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina blue even outside the election seasons, they have not spent a penny to do so in Texas. Yet Texas has shifted blue at the same rate as Colorado, Virginia, and Georgia, and it shifted blue faster than Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. While all these states had a conscious effort by Democrats to shift them blue, Texas has shifted at the same rate as the fastest shifting of them entirely organically. Democrats have not tried to shift Texas, yet Texas has shifted massively towards them. If Democrats maintain this lack of investment in Texas and continue to wait for the state to shift the remaining six points to them organically, that will not be enough to win the state by 2024 as the Texas Democrats’ autopsy boldly declares. Is it feasible to see Texas flip blue in 2024? Absolutely. But it will require a lot of work and a lot of investment by national and state Democrats to see it done. Is it likely to flip blue in 2024 if Democrats do not invest there? Absolutely not. Is it likely to flip blue even if Democrats do invest there? I’m skeptical. I believe 2024 is the election where Texas will actually be competitive such that Democrats should make a serious play for (instead of just a $6.3 million token ad buy in Austin).
Despite that, though, I still believe Democrats will lose Texas at the presidential level in 2024; I just do not see a path. The way Democrats win in Texas is shifting the suburbs of the Texas Triangle uniformly blue by another ten to twelve points at least and shifting the Rio Grande Valley’s counties back towards Democrats by at least five points each from their 2020 Trump over-performances. Is this possible? Yes. Collin and Denton Counties shifted twelve points blue from 2016 to 2020, so expecting them to shift another ten points blue from now to 2024 does not seem to be too much of a stretch. However, if we put in the work and make a play for Texas in 2024, there is a real chance that we can flip the state blue in 2028. The good news is that all of this is doable. The suburbs have been marching blue for a long, long time, and that march has only been accelerated in the last few years. As for the Latino vote, there seems to be something extremely unique about Donald Trump. When he was on the ballot in 2020, he was able to make marginal improvements in the Latino vote for Republicans, but the second he was off the ballot in the Georgia Senate runoffs and the New Mexico 1st Congressional District Special Election a few months ago, the Latino vote reverted to its natural Democratic partisanship.
Winning Texas for Democrats is not just a feasibility; it is an inevitability. The only question is whether Democrats should make a significant investment to do it now or wait for the state to continue its organic shift towards them as the current “Big Three Democratic Strongholds” (California, New York, and Illinois) organically shifted blue in the 1990s. I want to see Democrats start making the investments in shifting Texas blue now because the earlier we put in the energy and effort, the quicker it is going to happen. Even more importantly, if we start working on shifting the state now, we can control the Texas redistricting process for the 2030 cycle. If we want to do that, our work starts now. The Texas Democratic Party’s autopsy provides a pathway to flip state. For all the disappointments we have felt this past cycle, we have a lot – a lot – more to be proud of than disappointed about our progress in Texas. What we have already accomplished in just five short years is nothing short of a miracle. Now, we just have to finish the job because Texas is ours for the taking if we want it badly enough and work hard enough to take it. Let’s make Dan Patrick cry on the night of November 3, 2026 when his beloved Red Texas becomes as blue as the ocean. Let’s get to work.
(Source for images: “The Election Shuffler” at Elections Daily)