There is a room with three doors. Each bears a label: “Latino Vote,” “Purpling Suburbs,” and “Big City Turnout.” This November, Texas Democrats opened these three doors, and behind all they discovered a Cerberus from Greek mythology with the heads of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Greg Abbott. Then the monster ate them.
That pretty much sums it up, so feel free to stop reading now. But, if you insist, I’ll elaborate.
On November 5, past and future President Trump carried Texas by 14 percentage points. That is the best Republican performance in the state’s top-vote-getting race since 2014, the rout that brought Governor Abbott into power. Put another way, Kamala Harris’ performance was the worst for a Democratic presidential hopeful in the state since Barack Obama’s in 2012, and she even fell short of Obama’s ’08 margin. Put a third way, Texas Democrats have been set back a decade.
Yes, failed U.S. Senate candidate Colin Allred did outperform Harris in his bid to unseat Republican Ted Cruz, but a nine-point margin is not anything to build on, especially when Democrat Beto O’Rourke had come within three of unseating Cruz six years prior.
Things weren’t supposed to go like this. As the moon pulls the tides, demographic change was going to steadily lead Texas into the Democratic column, creating an existential crisis for Republicans at the state and national levels. Just ask former presidential frontrunner Jeb Bush: “Four years from now, Texas is going to be a so-called blue state,” foretold the junior Bush brother—in 2012.
Sometime in 2004, a year after Republicans completed their takeover of the state government, Texas became a so-called majority-minority state, as Anglos lost the majority status they’d held for the prior century and a half. Eighteen years later, in 2022, Hispanics edged out Anglos to become the plurality of Texans, en route to a likely majority in the coming decades. You didn’t need to be Nostradamus to see that, since Latinos vote Democratic, Team Blue was on the ascent.
Meanwhile, the state shook off some of its lower-case democratic apathy (the result, in no small part, of a long history of voter suppression). From the 1970s through the ’90s, Texas’ voter registration rates were abysmal, hovering around only 60-some percent of the voting-age population. Since about the turn of this century, these numbers have improved significantly, with this year’s rate at 85 percent. Similarly, the state’s shameful turnout rates have climbed. In 2020, a higher share of Texas’ voting-age population cast ballots than in any other year in the five decades of data made available by the Secretary of State. That year also saw the highest turnout of registered voters since 1992.
Increased registration and turnout, naturally, was going to unleash the electoral power of the state’s changing demographics—awakening what we used to call “the sleeping giant.”
But, friends, something has happened on the way to heaven.
Early 2024 exit polling (grab whatever size grain of salt you feel is appropriate), shows Trump winning the Latino vote in Texas by 11 points—a 28-point swing from exit polling in 2020 and a 44-point swing from 2016. In the Rio Grande Valley, the 4-county region of 1.4 million overwhelmingly Latino residents at Texas’ southern tip, Trump beat Harris by about 5 points. Just four years ago, Joe Biden carried the region by 15, about half the margin by which Hillary Clinton won it in 2016. In Bexar County, home to San Antonio—the state’s largest majority-Latino city—the top-ballot Dem advantage fell from 18 points in 2020 to 10 this year. Further analysis will clarify this picture, but the upshot is clear: Trump made historic gains among Hispanic Texans.
The reasons for this sea change will require untangling in the months and years to come. For example, while the complex racial identity of Tejanos may play a crucial role, it could also be that Trump’s cross-racial appeal to men, the non-college educated, and (apparently) the young, holds the greater explanatory power. (The Latino shift was not isolated to Texas but nationwide.)
What’s clear, though, is that this change constitutes a three-alarm fire for Texas Democrats—unless they can compensate through one of their other strategies, which this November’s result suggests they cannot.
In the Trump era, Lone Star Dems began placing more of their hopes in suburbs that were suddenly shifting from red to purple. This is most often glossed as white suburban women recoiling from Trump himself. In 2020, Biden narrowed the margin in Collin County—the state’s most populous suburban county and part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro—down to four points, a bright spot in a rough year for Texas Dems. This year, Trump carried Collin by 11. In Fort Bend County, outside Houston, the Democratic edge shrank from 11 to one in the same elections. In Austin-area Williamson County, a narrow Biden win in 2020 has yielded to a 3-point Trump victory now. (For good measure, Trump erased Democratic gains in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, too.)
The early exit polls show Texas women splitting down the middle between Harris and Trump, both an improvement for Republicans and a sign that the post-Roe strategy deployed by Harris (and Allred) was apparently drowned out.
That leaves just one of the Democrats’ hypothetical paths to progress: growing turnout in the state’s swelling and increasingly blue cities. Or, in a word: Houston.
Between 2016 and 2018, Dems seemed to seize firm control of Harris County (i.e. Houston), the nation’s third-most populous county at 5 million residents, as their top margins grew and they largely swept Republicans from office. This was a step long understood as essential to flipping the state. “As Houston goes, so goes Texas,” wrote my old boss for the Texas Observer in 2013. That statement may indeed hold, but Houston is going backward. This year, Kamala Harris carried Harris County by five points, less than half Biden’s 2020 margin. And, down-ballot, the GOP snagged an astonishing 10 judgeships and nearly seized the district and county attorney seats. Turnout among registered voters in the county was nine points lower than in 2020. Statewide, that decline was around six.
Meanwhile, in a final demographic curveball, exit polls show Harris and Trump dead-even among Texans aged 18-29, a sickening surprise for Dems if borne out.
In legislative races, the trend of marginal gains by the GOP, backed by long-term strategic planning and the governor’s warchest, paired with underperformance by Democrats continued—as team blue fumbled away a state Senate seat and two state House seats, a marginal decline that will grease the wheels for reactionary policy next year.
In 2020 and 2022, despite Democrats falling short of predictions, one could find silver linings: Biden’s margin was a step forward, and the following midterm didn’t go as badly in South Texas as feared. This time around, there is no bright spot and nothing clearly pointing the party in any particular direction.
I won’t suggest a solution in this piece. After all, I’d thought Harris would be our next president, so you shouldn’t listen to me even if I did. But I’ll offer two thoughts.
At the Senate level, it’s possible that no candidate could have fared much better than Allred in an election where the entire country moved toward Trump. On the other hand, it’s a bit hard to imagine a candidate with $80 million dollars, and no disastrous scandals, doing any worse than Allred did. What Beto O’Rourke had in spades in 2018, and Allred lacked entirely, was genuine grassroots enthusiasm. O’Rourke cultivated this through his personal charm and his relentlessly energetic campaigning. He convinced people to support him, not Democrats in a generic sense, and it never felt like he was birthed in a campaign consultant’s lab. Maybe the Monday morning naysayers were wrong, and he was onto something after all.
And at the presidential level, there was, not so long ago, a candidate who demonstrated an outsized appeal to young and Latino voters in particular. He actually won every populous Texas border county in the 2020 Democratic primary, and he damn near won the state despite a full-court press from party apparatchiks to stop him. His name, of course, was Bernie Sanders.
Maybe, one day, Texans will get to vote on a candidate—perhaps a Latino/a—who can campaign something like O’Rourke on economic and healthcare policies resembling Sanders’. Maybe we’d all find ourselves, again, surprised.
But, here I am, spilling ink. It’s dark times ahead, y’all—and I can hear Cerberus growling.
