Texas will be Blue by 2032 - and the GOP is to Blame

Topic: Elections

I must admit, I laughed hard when I first heard about the organization “Battleground Texas,” formed about a decade ago with the goal of making Texas competitive, then ultimately, turning it “blue.”  It got even more hilarious when Texas became five points more Republican in 2012 presidentially, and Republicans won all statewide offices in the 2014 midterms by three touchdowns.

It was easy enough to shrug off a meager 9 percent margin of victory for President Trump in 2016, especially since a substantial Ted Cruz grudge plagued the primary process, the Hispanic working class hadn’t yet experienced an America First economy, and the first Trump candidacy couldn’t boast any previous conservative, or even Republican, credentials.  Then came the 2018 midterms, and a laughingstock from El Paso attacking the suburban areas of Texas with such precision skill that a Senate race came down to three measly points.

Texas is indeed going to become a blue state, most likely by 2032, and it will be the doing of feckless Republican “leadership,” not the hordes of Californian transplants that are regularly ostracized and blamed for something they clearly are not doing if you understand that Donald Trump piled up historic Republican vote gains in the suburban moderate counties that have historically been instrumental in cancelling out the Democrat metros.

Texas Republicans, after decades of spiking the football, and with Rick Perry calling Texas the “political burial ground” of the Democrat Party, are now running scared and playing prevent defense.  It took one close call in 2018 and a third-world election in 2020 to unravel the stoic demeanor of conservatives in a state once thought impossible to flip back to the Democrats (in case you didn’t know, Texas was once part of the solid South politically, and didn’t become a Republican mainstay presidentially until 1980).

I view elections as a game of poker.  Whoever has the tallest stack of chips, all chips considered equal, wins.  Therefore, I count votes of margin rather than getting buried in percentages.  The final percentage statewide shows the winner, but the respective heights of the poker chip stacks at the county levels, spread out over 254 counties in the case of Texas, determine the outcome.  The Democrats in Texas have very few air pockets in the state that are worth any substantial margin.  Beginning in 2016, Harris (metro Houston), Bexar (metro San Antonio), Travis (metro Austin), and Dallas Counties opened huge margins of victory, and continue to this day as the four counties that must be maxed out by any means necessary if Texas is to be competitive, or flip.  A Miami-style collapse in any one of those counties will deprive the entire party of a chance to flip Texas in an upset election.

2012 Election

Obama gained 695,000 votes over John Kerry’s 2004 total in Texas, but still lost the state to John McCain, who lost votes from Bush’s 2004 total, by more than double digits.  As one of the least popular incumbents in history, Obama lost nearly four million votes nationally in re-election, including nearly a quarter million in Texas.  Romney had a very modest gain in votes but won the state by nearly 17 percent.  The map below shows the four current Democrat “machines” in blue, and adjacent colors associated with the counties needed to “cancel out” the Democrat margin of victory in those blue counties.

For example, Obama won Harris County by just 971 votes.  Romney carried tiny Waller County by 2,730 votes, meaning the Republican Party held in reserve the substantial margins found in Montgomery, Brazoria, Fort Bend, and Galveston Counties without having to use any of those counties to cancel out one of America’s biggest metros.   Dallas County, with a margin of nearly 110,000 votes in favor of Obama, was cancelled out by Collin and Kaufman counties.  Bexar County’s margin for Obama was cancelled by two small counties, and Travis County took a dozen mostly small counties, requiring the sacrifice of just two large GOP counties (Williamson and Bell) to cover up the state’s leftist bastion.

The result is a Texas-sized landslide, with no substantial Republican gains.

2016 Election

There are plenty of valid excuses as to why Donald Trump only won Texas by 9 percent in 2016, and they are outlined at the beginning of this article.  Clinton gained over a half-million new votes from Obama’s 2012 total, but considering Obama’s serious dive in 2012, a Democrat gain of fewer than 400,000 votes in eight years is not particularly alarming.

Harris County went to hell in 2016, with Trump losing over 40,000 votes, and Clinton gaining 120,000.  It required the GOP to sacrifice Montgomery and Brazoria counties to cover up the massive margin in Harris, which “mastered” voter registration from 2012-16, with nearly a quarter-million new voters on the rolls.  Dallas County went hard against Trump and required Denton, Rockwall, and Ellis Counties, among major GOP counties, to blot out (Trump lost the major four DFW metro counties to Clinton as a result).

Bexar County bled out to the surrounding countryside and required Comal and Kendall Counties to appease the phantom voter gods.  Travis County continued to expand its influence into the Hill Country and Central Texas, sucking up many more small counties, plus McLennan County (metro Waco).

There were silver linings – even with a loss of moderates, the Cruz grudge, and with the Billy Bush tape breaking just before the start of early voting, Trump won Tarrant County by 9 percent, carried Collin and Denton with ease, won Williamson and Hays Counties, and didn’t get blown out in the Rio Grande Valley.  The Rural parts of the state turned an extremely dark shade of crimson.  Surely, 2016 would turn out to be a blip.

2020 Election

            If I am to stay consistent with gambling references in this article, I could compare 2020 to a game of Blackjack.  The dealer’s “up” card for Trump is a gain of 1.2 million votes in Texas (just shy of six million total), 12 times larger than his vote gain in 2016, in which he won the state comfortably and still blew out margins in the suburban counties that are instrumental for keeping Texas “Republican” red.  In Blackjack, I would be doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down that Texas would be a 15-point GOP blowout, minimum, especially when I found out that Trump flipped several counties in South Texas that had been blue for decades, including Zapata County (last time Republican, 1920), and added tens of thousands of new GOP votes in the major Democrat metro counties.  If a Republican in Texas is keeping pace with George W. Bush’s Hispanic performance, and piles up record votes in suburban moderate strongholds, there is no way the underdog party is going to keep pace, let alone close the gap.

Instead, Joe Biden doubled Obama’s record gain from 2008, adding nearly 1.4 million new votes from Hillary Clinton’s total.  Biden finished almost 600,000 votes higher than Trump’s winning total from 2016.  Texas was indeed supposed to be a Biden state, designed to deflate any legitimate argument that the rightful winner of the 2020 election was Donald Trump (after all, how can a Republican win the presidency without Texas?)

The damage is severe.  Scan the map below for yourself.  Trump ran so strong with working class Hispanics that Harris County required just one additional large GOP county (Galveston) to cover over, though there was tremendous fraud in the county, where the Democrats took advantage of a very foolish three weeks of early voting to organize drive-through voting lanes.

Dallas County’s margin eliminated everything around the metroplex.  Tarrant County, Republican since 1968, and all but once since 1952, flipped to Biden despite a record GOP gain in a Republican stronghold, vanquishing its protective margin used to cancel out Dallas County’s since 2008.  Bexar County has expanded far into the countryside of South Texas, but most alarmingly, Travis County’s influence has now expanded to oil country, where the middle-tier Republican strongholds are used to cancel out the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso County.  In just eight years, Travis County has zoomed from a 93,000 vote Democrat margin to 275,000. 

What is Next?

I have been screaming for 2020 election remediation in Texas since November 2020.  In the summer of 2021, Representative Steve Toth presented legislation calling for full forensic audits in the 13 largest counties in the state, which included Republican and Democrat counties alike.  President Trump backed this bill and received verbal support from Governor Abbott regarding this bill.  Of course, that support never came, and the bill died, and now many believe the lack of action on the third-world 2020 election in Texas is to avoid uncovering mechanisms used to keep incumbents in power.

Romney won the state by 1.262 million votes.  Trump carried it by 807,000 votes in 2016, but then set GOP vote gain records to carry it by just 631,000 votes in 2016.  At the rate of expansion for Democrat metros, driven by the inaction of Republican officials to clean voter rolls and apply the law, it is highly likely that Florida will be carried by more votes and a higher percentage of the vote by the GOP nominee in 2024 than Texas will be.  I expect the GOP margin in Texas to be below 450,000 votes, and for the following counties to be sacrificed to cancel out the four growing metros:

Lubbock (margin 38,000)

Smith (39,000)
Nueces (4,000)

Randall (38,000)
Jefferson (2,000)
Midland (33,000)
Grayson (30,000)
Ector (22,000)
Gregg (18,000)

This will leave Texarkana (Bowie County), Lufkin (Angelina), Wichita Falls (Wichita), and Amarillo (Randall/Potter) as the major bulwark sponges against Democrat expansion in 2028 and beyond.  88 percent of the vote in Texas is urban or suburban.  Do the math.  The state is not trending blue organically, as evidenced by meteoric Republican vote gains in suburban strongholds and with minorities.  It is trending because Democrats are bending the rules, registering incredible amounts of duplicate and phantom voters, abusing early voting procedures, and using media narratives about population growth from blue states to justify final election outcomes.

If you think you’re going to move to Texas and land in a more urbanized version of Wyoming, think again. They are coming (successfully) to mess with Texas, will come for every symbol of freedom, and will succeed in establishing a blue Texas, just as they have done in Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia, and are in process of doing in Arizona, unless action is taken right now.  The Republican Party, and their feckless aides like Steve Munisteri, are to blame.  No matter how many times Dan Patrick, who has been in possession of my work since December 2020, has said he will never let Texas fall, fall she will unless things are corrected.

So goes Texas, so goes the nation.

SK