TEXAS
Basic Election Facts
2024 Electoral Votes: 40
Population (2020 Census): 29,145,505 (+3,999,944 since 2010)
Likely Population at 2024 Election: 31,000,000
-
Partisanship
Governor Party: Republican
State House Majority: Republican
State House Majority: Republican
U.S. House Delegation: 25 Republicans, 13 Democrats
U.S. Senate Delegation: 2 Republicans
-
Ethnic Demographics (2020 census)
White: 39.8%
Latino: 40.2%
Black: 12.8%
Other: 7.2%
-
Presidential History since 1932
Times Republican: 14
Last: Donald Trump, 2020, +5.6%
Times Democrat: 9
Last: Jimmy Carter, 1976, +3.2%
-
Presidential Election Characteristics
Captain K's Corner is a reader-supported publication. We are making our way through the states that will decide the outcome of the 2024 election - while all previous Electoral College forecasts have been free, this full post is open for paid subscribers. Please consider supporting my work as a paying member to this journal.
· Texas has backed every Republican presidential nominee since 1980 and hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. Both chambers of the state legislature have been in Republican hands for more than two decades despite Texas being a minority-majority state.
· Nearly 90% of the vote in Texas is from urban and suburban areas. Out of 254 counties, Joe Biden won just 22. Only four – Dallas, Travis (metro Austin), Harris (metro Houston), and Bexar (metro San Antonio) – gave him a margin of more than 100,000 ballots.
· Presidential elections in Texas, especially with George W. Bush as the GOP nominee, often produced blowouts largely due to lopsided suburban margins blotting out narrower urban margins than are found today. A double coalition shift is underway in Texas, with moderate, affluent Bush-aligned ex-Republicans crossing over to Democrats, but working-class minorities (especially Hispanics) crossing over to Republicans (especially Trump). The latter has dampened the hopes Democrats have had for decades of flipping the state, although it is substantially less Republican that it was even 12 years ago.
Looking Back
I have taken a lot of heat for believing Texas had one of the most fraudulent election results in the 2020 race. For perspective, no Democrat presidential nominee had ever cleared the 4 million vote threshold, and Joe Biden finished at 5,259,126, all while Donald Trump set a single-cycle record gain and finished up at nearly 5.9 million votes. Biden came in 574,079 votes higher than Trump’s winning total in 2016, while no Republican had gained that many votes (574,079) in one cycle since Bush’s leap from 2000 to 2004. Conclusion – Trump was supposed to lose Texas, and with it, any mandate to challenge a corrupt 2020 presidential installment of Joe Biden.
Trump’s gains with working class Hispanics saved him from a down-to-the-wire margin, even though the 5.6% he won by was closer than any presidential race since 1996. Trump piled on tons of net new votes in the major metros, especially Houston, and won longstanding Democrat counties in South and West Texas, including tiny Zapata County, which hadn’t been won by a Republican nominee since 1920. Running counter to this progress were many bad optics, such as longtime GOP strongholds with massive Trump incumbent gains in Williamson, Hays, and Tarrant Counties flipping to Biden, and uncomfortably close margins in Collin and Denton Counties, two suburban DFW Counties that themselves had been enough to not only blot out Dallas County, but carry the Metroplex itself, for more than a decade since Dallas flipped to Obama. Ultimately, Texas drifted 3.4% left of its 2016 margin of 9% for Trump, which itself triggered alarm bells that were only dulled by the fact that he won the presidency. For the second election in a row, Texas voted left of Iowa and Ohio.
This geared my brain to believe Texas was, and probably still is, on a trajectory to turn “blue” by 2032. Here is how much damage the urban corruption of the big four Democrat “blue” counties (Harris, Dallas, Travis, Bexar) has done in terms of how many counties are required to cancel their margins out:
Without a sharp change of pace, which should have happened with Trump’s record vote gains in 2020, it will be up to the most far-flung reaches of the Texas frontier to squeak past the booming growth in the state’s urban centers, which seems to be growing with conservative out-of-staters but moderating the existing population. Trump should have won Texas by a greater margin than he did in 2016, perhaps by 14% and nearly 1.5 million votes.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Captain K's Corner to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.