Texas goes from 38 electoral votes to 40 in the next Presidential election. Republicans know they cannot win a national election without winning Texas, that's why they are trying their damnedest to subvert democracy in the Lone Star state. The GOP can probably keep Texas from going blue in 2024 and beyond, but not forever. The facts:
1. The results speak for themselves: In the George W. Bush days, the Republican ticket carried Texas by more than 20 points. Last year, Trump beat Biden there by only 5.6%.
2. Changing population demographics spell doom for Republicans. That is, unless they can figure out a way to get non-white Texans to vote Republican while the party becomes ever more white supremacist.
Nearly half of Texans under 18 are Latinx and 95 percent of them are U.S. citizens. And Latinx Texans vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
Now you've probably heard about a shift to the GOP in Texas among Latinx Texas voters in 2020. Trump did improve his performance in some Latinx areas of Texas over the 2016 vote, leading excited conservatives to write articles with titles like, Why Democrats Are Losing Texas Latinos. But the idea of some larger shift among Texan Latinx voters in an illusion: In 2016, they voted for Clinton over Trump 61% to 34%, while in 2020 they supported Biden over Trump by the virtually unchanged margin of 62% to 37%.
3. Democrats are making huge inroads among educated, white urban/suburban voters that have traditionally supported Republicans. From Alex Samuels and Geoffrey Skelley of fivethirtyeight.com:
"(A)bout two-thirds of Texas’s population lives in one of the state’s four
huge metropolitan areas — Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and
Austin. If you combine all the votes there, Democrats improved their
margin by more than 5 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, carrying
these areas 52 percent to 47 percent in November. This shift is
significant because even though Texas’s border counties moved sharply to
the right in 2020 — Starr County, for instance, swung a staggering 55
points toward Republicans — Democrats’ gains in those four big cities
and their suburbs added almost five times as many votes as Republicans’
gains in 28 counties along or near Texas’s border with Mexico."
"But Democratic losses in the border areas may not frustrate their
efforts to eventually turn Texas blue, primarily because the state’s
four most populous metropolitan areas have trended Democratic over the
past four years. These opposing trends potentially form a favorable
tradeoff for Democrats because a lot more voters live in and around
Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin than in the border
regions." "(T)hose four big cities and their
surroundings contributed nearly 70 percent of Texas’s 2020 presidential
vote total, and all of them shifted left."
4. Blue Texas is outgrowing red Texas by huge margins. Here are the 10 counties with the biggest gains in voter registration since 2014:
Harris: 502,929. Biden won 55.94% of the vote in 2020
Bexar: 276,554. Biden won 58.20% of the vote in 2020
Tarrant: 255,477. Biden won 49.31% of the vote in 2020
Travis: 229,882. Biden won 71.14% of the vote in 2020
Dallas: 221,640. Biden won 64.89% of the vote in 2020
Collin: 201,879. Trump won 51.26% of the vote in 2020
Denton: 187,075. Trump won 53.23% of the vote in 2020
Fort Bend: 153,592. Biden won 54.57% of the vote in 2020
Williamson: 138,033. Biden won 49.56% of the vote in 2020
Montgomery: 118,618. Trump won 71.22% of the vote in 2020
Good night, and good luck.
