What’s at Stake in the “Most Important Election of a Lifetime”
Ben Rowen, 11:00 a.m., 11/4/24
Welcome to the Texas Monthly 2024 general election live blog! Starting tomorrow at 6 a.m. and running until we have demonstrative calls on the races—whether that be 2 a.m. Wednesday as the networks shift to showing Young Sheldon reruns or (as in 2020) 11 a.m. on Saturday right after I decide to leave my phone at home for a four-hour kayak excursion—we’ll be keeping you up to date on the results and what they mean. Follow along for live updates from Michael Hardy, Allegra Hobbs, Christopher Hooks, Forrest Wilder, and me, as well as analysis from Russell Gold, Sasha von Oldershausen, Dan Solomon, and Sandi Villarreal.
This election, as many before it, has been billed as the most important one in a lifetime. As with any presidential vote, it is indeed consequential and there’s lots to follow (more below). But the irony for Texas voters is that the 2024 general election is not even the most important election in 2024.
Typically, November races in our state have little at stake. Republicans have dominated statewide elections–including those for the U.S. Senate–for three decades, meaning that usually not much is in play on the top of the ballot. The federal and state legislative maps, meanwhile, have been so gerrymandered as to make nearly every outcome certain. If last March you sat out the primaries, in which each party’s nominees were selected, you missed the major opportunity to determine your next batch of elected officials.
But there’s still time to vote if you haven’t already and plenty to watch for if you have.
Here are the major storylines we’ll be following:
Who votes for Donald Trump.
The former president enjoys a lead here of anywhere from 7 to 11 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the most recent polls. Democrats often speak of Texas as a blue state in waiting—based on plenty of faulty demographic assumptions. But even if that were true, Harris’s current chances are about as good here as Trump’s are in Colorado and New Mexico, which no one speaks of as swing states (even if the Trump campaign made a recent stop in the latter). Don’t just take my word: the candidates aren’t treating it as a battleground either. They’ve made stops here, but they’ve served only to offer admonishments to out-of-staters about what their states could look like if the other party wins.
That said, we’ll be able to get a good read on the direction of the Texas electorate by breaking down how Trump wins here, assuming of course there isn’t a colossal upset. Even as Trump has carried the state, the Texas suburbs have shifted away from him in recent elections (much more so than the rest of the GOP slate), as the Democrats increasingly become the party of college-educated voters. Conversely, Tejanos—most prominently in South Texas but also in the state’s biggest cities—shifted rightward in 2020. Will those trends continue?
Can Ted Cruz survive Colin Allred’s challenge?
After Beto O’Rourke set a high-water mark for Democrats in the state in his 2018 race for the U.S. Senate against Cruz, Democrats grew hopeful that the long-dormant Democratic Texas was finally blooming. The national party poured resources into the state only to face-plant in 2020, when Senator John Cornyn earned more votes than any candidate in Texas history to date, en route to both crushing his Democratic challenger and winning more votes than Trump. Allred is polling close to Cruz—he’s down about 3 to 5 percentage points, depending on the survey— though there remains a healthy bloc of still-undecided voters, who tend to break toward the GOP in Texas, and the Democrat remains a heavy underdog.
If Allred pulls off a victory, we might have entered our purple-state era. If he doesn’t, we’ll be watching how Cruz’s margin compares with Trump’s for potential signals about what that portends for the GOP. Are Texans getting more Democratic, or do many just dislike the figurehead atop the ballot while still loving his partymates below him?
Will Republicans or ultra-Republicans control the Texas House?
The balance of power between the parties in the Texas House won’t change, barring a blue wave of unprecedented proportion, but the balance of power between factions of the GOP might. Ahead of the 2025 Lege session, very-right-wing-but-relatively-moderate two-term Speaker Dade Phelan will face a speakership challenge from the very-right-and-not-at-all-moderate wing of his party—a group animated by opposition to the chamber’s impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton. More than two dozen GOP candidates have pledged to oppose Phelan, end the longtime process of letting Democrats chair committees, and prevent any Democratic bills from coming to vote until the grassroots right’s policy demands are met. Democrats won’t win the House, but if they can pick off some of the Phelan opponents in the GOP caucus, they can possibly save his Speaker bid and prevent themselves from becoming furniture in the Capitol. (Right now, they are more like smart home devices: approximating sentience, occasionally able to make their voice heard and ignored, and often dysfunctional.)
Ironically, two of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats are seats held by Republican Phelan allies in the Dallas burbs. If Dems knock them off, it might turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory if it costs Phelan his support within his caucus.
The South Texas battleground.
If you live in one of 35 of the 38 congressional districts in the state—anywhere outside of South Texas—your representative in the 199th Congress was decided in the primary. But those remaining three districts are important for determining control of the U.S. House, and it’s worth following along even if you don’t live there:
TX-15: After Trump’s overperformance in the Rio Grande Valley in the 2020 presidential election, GOP mapmakers tried to carve a Republican congressional district into South Texas in 2021. They were successful: In 2022, Republican Monica De La Cruz became the first Republican elected to a full congressional term (NB: see below for why “full” is needed as a modifier) in the Rio Grande Valley since Reconstruction when she defeated Democrat Michelle Vallejo. They face off again in the Fifteenth, which runs from McAllen to the San Antonio suburbs, in a race De La Cruz is likely to win.
TX-34: In 2022, Democrat Filemon Vela retired from Congress early, and Democrats struggled to find a candidate to run in a special election to replace him. Mayra Flores, a Republican who was born in Mexico and whose family immigrated to the Valley and picked cotton to support themselves, vied for the seat as a staunch border hawk. She won the partial term, becoming the first Republican to represent the Valley since Reconstruction, but lost to Democrat Vicente Gonzalez later that year in a bid for a full term. Gonzalez remains a favorite in their rematch in the Thirty-Fourth, which stretches from Brownsville nearly all the way to Corpus Christi.
TX-28: Democrats would not lose the Laredo-anchored Twenty-Eighth in a normal year, but their candidate, Henry Cuellar, has made this year anything but normal. Across the country Democrats have run mostly as the upholders of law and order against the party of Donald Trump, a felon, and as defenders of abortion rights. This places Cuellar in an odd spot: In April, he was charged by the Department of Justice on counts of bribery and money laundering, and he is the last anti–abortion rights Democrat in the House. His campaign has gone quiet, seemingly flipping an old maxim on its head: If you have nothing mean to say about your opponents that couldn’t be said about you, say nothing. Nonetheless he remains a heavy favorite over Navy vet Jay Furman.
What Do We Know So Far?
You’ll have to follow along tomorrow for analysis of all those races—as well as those for the Railroad Commission (the oil and gas regulatory group and the most misleadingly named body in a bureaucracy full of euphemisms such as the “sunset commission”), the Texas Supreme Court, and the Court of Criminal Appeals—but the two-week early voting period does provide some clues as to what direction Texas will go. Nearly nine million Texans have already voted. Because the state does not have registration by party and the ballots are, of course, secret, the best way to tell an early voter’s preference is by looking at what primaries they have voted in in the past. Let’s take a look.
Right now, 1.2 million more Republican primary voters and those in their households have voted than have Democratic primary voters and those in their households, according to political consultant Ross Hunt. After the early voting period in 2020, that gap was about 850,000. It’s possible Democratic voters will flood the polls tomorrow, but the shortfall these numbers imply means they have to make up significant ground to be competitive.
Now What?
If you are one of the nine million or so registered Texans who haven’t voted already, right now you are among the state’s largest political faction. (In every recent election, the number of nonvoters has dwarfed the number of voters for the winning political party.) But you don’t have to be. Click here to find out where your polling place is. Remember to bring a photo ID and check here to confirm you have an acceptable one.
There are innumerable rationalizations for not voting. In 2022, ahead of another election spoken of as the most important in Texas history, I wanted to get a sense of why so many in our state don’t go to the polls. In Pecos, a West Texas oil town in one of the state’s lowest-turnout counties, I chatted with a clerk at a dollar store. As she rang up a soda, she told me that she, like so many others, wouldn’t bother to cast a ballot that year. By way of explanation, she recited the expression “one vote can make a difference.” When I bemusedly asked why, then, she wouldn’t be exercising her power, she bashfully told me that she didn’t trust herself with it.
It should go without saying that this is a silly way to think of a civic duty. If you’ve yet to make up your mind on who to vote for, you have a day and change to do so, and I refer you to our corpus of political coverage. Your ballot—contrary to the concern of the Pecos cashier—almost certainly won’t be a deciding one, but you should still vote as if it will be.
Follow along here for live analysis and coverage of Texas elections and results. We’ll start adding to this story at 6 a.m. on Election Day. Until then!
