Texas - 2024 Election Compendium

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

Texas 2024 Presidential Election Review

Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.

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Outcome

Trump +13.7% (+1,558,347)

My Prediction

Trump by minimum of 8.0%

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Preface

I have written extensively about Texas presidential politics, not just because it has 40 electoral votes and is absolutely vital to the long-term survival of the America First agenda, but because when I entered the political fray four years ago, I called Texas home. I have since moved on but haven’t forgotten anything I’ve learned about all 254 counties and their various leans, percentages, and intricate details.

Texas is the Trump state that surprised me the most in terms of the size of margin. I am not surprised Trump won Iowa by double digits, proving Ann Selzer a fool and dragging Wisconsin along with it - pleased yes; surprised, no. I am outright shocked at the performance Trump put on in the Lone Star State, which without a reversal, was on course to fulfill every Democrat fantasy and turn blue by 2032. Let it also be noted that Trump’s performance, which exceeded everyone’s expectations, is responsible for Ted Cruz not winning another clunker inside five points.

I have locked horns with many Texas political observers who tried to convince me Trump wasn’t popular there, and that is why he won his first two races by single digits – first by 9 points even, then a measly 5.6% in 2020, the closest presidential race since Bob Dole carried it by 4.9% in 1996. For the record, I have widely panned that 2020 outcome as openly reeking of major manipulation, and this year’s results seem to confirm that was indeed the case. Those fraudulent ballots certainly stemmed from the more than one million ineligible registrations cleared from Texas’s voter rolls, which was announced just before the 2024 election.

I have spent the past decade listening to Democrats talking themselves into believing Blue Texas was destiny, suffered Beto O’Rourke for two statewide elections and a presidential primary, and am pleased that two decades of attempted subversion have been scuttled now that the Latino working class finally figured out the Democrat Party is all hat, no cattle. My earliest 2024 analysis on Texas, which leaned heavily pessimistic, found no way Trump would lose the state, even if margin progression for Democrats continued moving left; however, the potential margins were uncomfortably close and certainly chummed the water for future cycles. I had Texas at +7-10% for Trump throughout most of the cycle as I noticed no one was seriously polling it, and no one was campaigning hard there (especially Biden or Harris). I settled on Trump by a minimum of 8 points and was surprised to see the state vote slightly to the right of Florida, which I did not think would happen for the first time since 1988 given the Sunshine State’s hardcore Republican trajectory evident by party registration in all 67 counties.

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Analysis

· 236 of 254 (92.9%) counties shifted rightward in results by percentage margin. Harris’s gains by percentage margin qualify as statistical noise in roughly 15 counties with incredibly large GOP margins (such as those shifting left in the Texas Panhandle), and she has minor to modest percentage gains in suburban counties Waller, Johnson, Kaufman, and Ellis.

· Trump’s gains in heavily Hispanic counties are astounding, as indicated by the map above in South Texas. El Paso County shifted 20.1%, Maverick 27.9%, Webb 25.4%, Starr 21.0%, Hidalgo 19.9%, and Cameron 19.0% rightward. Those shifts were written about in great detail here and are captured in shocking detail below:

· In winning Hispanic South Texas, Trump flipped the following counties:

Starr – first GOP presidential win ever with current county boundaries

Duval – first GOP presidential win ever with current county boundaries

Webb County – first GOP presidential win since 1912

Maverick County – first GOP presidential win since 1928

Hidalgo County – first GOP presidential win since 1972

Willacy County – first GOP presidential win since 1972

Cameron County – first GOP presidential win since 2004

· Trump also flipped Culberson County in far west Texas, Williamson County at the north end of the Austin metro, and most importantly, Tarrant County, one of the largest urban Republican counties in America, which contains metro Fort Worth. Trump should have carried Williamson and Tarrant in a fair 2020 election. Trump was within 231 votes of flipping Brooks County, 131 in Jim Hogg, and 112 in Dimmit. Overall, Harris carried just 12 counties.

· Among the 12 counties Harris carried is what I refer to as the “Democrat Big Four,” four counties that Democrats must max out with overwhelming margins to have a shot at flipping Texas, which would concurrently rely on eroded suburban GOP margins and the minority vote continuing on with strong Democrat margins. The Big Four are Bexar (metro San Antonio), Dallas (metro Dallas), Harris (metro Houston), and Travis (metro Austin) counties. Here is how the margins have swung in the three Trump races in Texas:

· As shown above, Harris lost substantial margin in these four counties (-346,757); what seemingly corroborates my assessment that these four counties were packed with cheating in 2020 is the fact that this gain in overall margin for Trump was achieved by him adding just 75,935 to his ballt count in total. Harris lost 270,822 of Biden’s ballot count in just these four counties, despite tremendous population growth. Here is how the state’s remaining 250 counties worked in relation to the four: