Will Donald Trump Hold Texas in 2024? A Captain's 254-County Overview

Topic: Elections

I have written extensively in these pages about the future of the Electoral College, breaking down the blue wall brick by brick, rehashing the 2020 quasi-election over and over, and prognosticating the future of elections, which may not matter a single day beyond November 5, 2024, perhaps our last opportunity in this currentFourth Turning to turn the tide with a strong chief executive at the helm.

My article examining the four pathways for President Trump to reach 270 electoral votes, published last March, remains a valid reflection of my assessment today, nine months out from the big day.  Trump will have 176 electoral votes all but guaranteed going in, and Joe Biden (or any Democrat nominee) will be sitting on 191 from states and districts that will not require a single visit to remit those electors in the blue column.  These numbers are practically reversed thanks to census engineering, which I’ve also proven in these pages, and all but 14 states are rock solid “red” or “blue” thanks to a variety of factors, some real, and others not so much.

The election will be decided in the middle column of the graphic above.  Of those 171 electoral votes, 59 of them are assigned to states Trump carried in 2020, even above substantial election fraud (for example, Biden had nearly 600,000 more certified votes in Texas than Trump carried the state with in 2016).  North Carolina simply ran out of mail-in ballots to be counted, which forced Georgia into the “steal” column.  You may recall that Georgia was in Trump’s hands at the end of election night by more than 7 points and 300,000 votes in margin until the evening’s counting came to a sudden halt.

I do not think Alaska will fall from GOP wagon this election, which would be the first such spill since 1964, but Ranked Choice Voting (on the ballot there this fall), Automatic Voter Registration, and expanded mail-in balloting, combined with a small population dominated by a major metro, puts Alaska on the watch list by 2032, if not earlier.  North Carolina, thanks to its artificially low 1.3% Trump margin in 2020 (despite 93 of 100 counties showing a Republican registration trend leading into that election) and northeastern transplants contributing to serious population density in the major metros, still appears to be the most likely state that may get ripped off in 2024 if not tenaciously fought for, but this article is about the king of Republican states, and the one the party and the America First movement can’t live without:

Texas.

Once again, countless millions are being funneled into Texas in an effort to chip away at Republican statewide dominance, which has been given an extension thanks to the surge of minority voters to America First candidates.  I stand by my two-year old piece about Texas’s trend toward Democrat hell by 2032, which can only be ignored by the most obtuse thinkers. 

Consider:

2012 Romney +15.8%

2016 Trump +9.0%

2020 Trump +5.6%

Granted, election fraud in Texas likely prevented Trump from winning the state by at least 14.0%, but Trump won Texas by 10.2% less than Romney did just eight years before.  If one applies that trend outward through 2028, Texas sits at 4.6% in favor of Democrats, or about as blue as Colorado was for a decade before the insanity took it fully overboard.  That must be reversed.

Reversing the decline in Texas, perpetrated in earnest by four big blue bubbles (Bexar, Harris, Dallas, and Travis Counties) and assisted along by six mostly red, mostly suburban counties, will take heavy lifting over the rest of the decade and beyond.  The 50-meter target, or our most immediate goal, is to make sure Texas’s 40 electoral votes go to Donald Trump in 2024, come hell or high water, whether by 1,000 votes or 900,000.

Can Donald Trump hold Texas, or is Texas at risk of being Georgia’d?

 Georgia was won by Donald Trump by a 5.1% margin of victory in 2016, which is nearly identical to Trump’s certified margin in Texas in 2020 (5.6%).  I believe Trump carried Georgia by 7.5%, minimum, in 2020, and Texas by 14.0%, but it is now clear through the inaction of Republican legislatures and Secretaries of State nationwide that Trump’s path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be through a fraud-ridden swamp, another quasi-election from hell.  There will be no victory party, without getting over 270, but before 270, Team Trump must reach the base camp of 235 electoral votes.  That requires holding Alaska, North Carolina, and Texas.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department designates seven Texas Natural Regions based on physical geography that make it easy for analysts like me to present the following wall of data in an organized fashion.

Trump won counties in green by more votes in 2020 than in 2016, or lost them by fewer; Trump won counties in pink by fewer votes in 2020 than in 2016, or lost them by more.