2024 Leaner Deep Dive and Forecast: Texas (40 Electoral Votes)

Topic: 2024 Election Forecast

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

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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

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Ethnic Demographics (2020 census)

White: 39.8%

Latino: 40.2%

Black: 12.8%

Other: 7.2%

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Presidential History since 1932

Times Republican: 14

Last: Donald Trump, 2020, +5.6%

Times Democrat: 9

Last: Jimmy Carter, 1976, +3.2%

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Presidential Election Characteristics

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·      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.

Taking Texas would ruin the America First coalition, because it would require Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, and New Hampshire to replace it 1:1, and then would leave us in a huge lurch to find the 40 votes that fell out (read: impossible with current election rigging) to gain an Electoral College majority.  The legislature is a disaster with a much narrower majority than should be expected, and it did all it could to upend the most significant state-level political figure who opposes election fraud, Ken Paxton, in abusing its power last year.  Texas may be Republican, but its elected officials (most of them, anyway) aren’t very much in the way of American First, and they are still trapped in the iron grip of the Bush dynasty and its Uniparty ways.  These Republicans are largely responsible for the reckless and rapid urbanization of Texas that has made it nearly impossible to accommodate such tremendous population growth.

Looking Forward

The good news is, despite the not so bright trends pointed out above (some fraudulent and some legitimate), there isn’t much of a “Texas is going to flip narrative” going on this year.  Democrats had blood in the water for the U.S. Senate race between Colin Allred and Ted Cruz a few months ago, and I don’t hear much about that either, even though Cruz is perhaps the most careless Republican in Washington when it comes to making unforced errors and making everyone hate his guts.

This election is a great opportunity for Republicans to put William Travis’s line in the sand and say “no more” to the drip-drip-drip of Democrat advancement in the state.  Trump victories in the Rio Grande Valley or an upset in a moderate Democrat mega-county like Harris or Bexar, in addition to flipping back Tarrant County, would be a major deflator and perhaps set the “turn Texas blue” agenda back an entire decade.  To the contrary, another limping effort and clunker of an electoral victory (it is not fair to refer to 2020 as a clunker given Trump’s gains, but I am referring to perceived certified margins) will continue to encourage Democrat spending, insane social behavior, and rapid acceleration and buildup of urban areas that are destroying the quality of life in what is essentially become a pile of concrete containing 9 of every 10 votes cast statewide.

Election integrity groups in the state and outside of it have done great work in exposing shortcomings in the state’s election system, from Taking Back Texas’s exposure of various countywide election maladministration and ballot secrecy violations, to the revelation of HAVV insanity creating a potential pathway for illegal registrations, and to what appears to be pressure-induced maintenance of state voter rolls compelled by watchdogs like Kris Jurski.

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Assessment

July 1, 2024

Polling and Modeling

·      538 expects Trump to carry Texas with 77% likelihood as of the time of this writing, and by an average of 6.1%.

·      The Economist forecast is much more bullish, pegging Trump with a 92% likelihood to carry Texas, and by a margin of 9.8%.

·      Poll – June – U.T. Tyler – Trump +6%

·      Poll – June – YouGov – Trump +9%

·      Poll – April – YouGov - Trump +9%

·      Poll – April – Texas Lyceum – Trump +10%

·      Poll – April – Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation – Trump +12%

Party Registration Data

Texas does not register voters by party, but this may be changing soon thanks to issues with Bush Republicans like Dade Phelan flooding GOP primaries with Democrats voters to hold on to political life.

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Keshel Forecast

July 1, 2024

Trump +7-10%

Candidate and media behavior lead me to the assessment that Trump will carry Texas in the high single digits, or perhaps even squeak beyond 10 points if everything aligns for him.  Nearly 90% of the electorate is urban or suburban, so the Lone Star State is not the Wyoming frontier some people believe it to be, and it still has many relics of the Bush past that plague the populist movement, especially in former GOP mega-strongholds like Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, Williamson, and Tarrant Counties, which were essential for pumping up massive statewide margins.

All relevant polls show a Trump lead of at least 6%, which is in line with 538’s low-end estimate, up to the low double digits.  Most of these polls show Trump about dead even, and even ahead, with the Hispanic vote, which is much more conservative than the national share thanks to multi-generational families and higher income, and if he is even or ahead with them, Texas will be a walk in the park, with some real surprises for county flips possible.

Recently, I envisioned a worst-case scenario in Texas with Biden eating up the same numbers in margin as he did in 2020’s horrific election:

In this scenario, if Trump expands his margins in the green counties (counties in which he won by more votes than in 2016 or lost by fewer), and Biden makes the same margin gains (unlikely due to Hispanic share of the vote), Trump will still win Texas by almost a half-million votes, and between 4 and 5 points.

In a scenario with Trump winning in this fashion, Trump would fail to flip Tarrant County, run a thin margin in Denton County, lose Collin County, and watch Dallas and Travis counties run into Denver territory in terms of Democrat margins, even with surprise flips in Hispanic Texas.

In a scenario with Trump exceeding his high-end polling, in a low-to-mid double digits win, Trump would likely flip the following counties:

Tarrant (Republican in all but one election since 1952 until ripped off in 2020)

Williamson (narrow flip thanks to Austinization)

Duval (first Republican win ever)

Culberson

Starr (first Republican win ever)

Maverick (first Republican win since 1928)

Willacy (first Republican win since 1972)

Cameron

Hidalgo

Jim Hogg (first Republican win ever)

Brooks (first Republican win ever)

A big enough win will bring Bexar and Harris Counties close, and potentially make for shockingly tight finishes in Webb (Laredo) and El Paso Counties.  In conclusion, I see no scenario in which Trump is even with Hispanic voters, given how conservative white voters are, that Texas would be Georgia’d in 2024, and Biden’s lack of interest, and the lack of Democrat trash talk about Texas with no polls to back it up, tells me they don’t have the votes to get it done in 2024.  Still, Republicans cannot sleep on Texas moving forward, and major election reforms must occur to counter to rapid urbanization of the state if it is to remain in the America First fold.

Trump should win the state in the high single digits, with a happy surprise over 10% if the cheat relaxes, and may approach 7 million votes if his Hispanic surge is what I suspect it could be.  Texas is one of two essential holds from the 2020 certified Trump slate if he is to return to the White House.

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