Nothing. Texas went purple … ish. Joe Biden did better than previous Democrats, but still got beat by six points. Texas is not quite red any more. Call it magenta, or rose.
But why did it not not go purple, what with the massive turnout?
TLDR: the GOP got a boatload of new voters to turn out in the state’s big cities, suburbs, and exurbs. It wasn’t Mexican-Americans, it wasn’t rural voters.
Here are the basic numbers. Democrats turned out 5.2 million voters, up from 3.9 million in 2016. If Republican turnout had remained around the 4.5-4.7 million that it had been stuck at for most of the 21st century, then the state would have gone blue. Total turnout would have been around the 10.0 million that you would have expected from an exciting election like 2008 and the Democrats would have won.
We here at TPTM did not expect a blue victory. We expected the Democrats to up their turnout substantially, but the Republicans would nonetheless manage to get a few hundred thousand new votes and win the election with a bit over 5 million votes.
But neither scenario is what happened. GOP votes came to 5.9 million. The Democrats turned out out 1.3 million new voters (net) but the GOP almost matched that with 1.2 million new voters.
For the GOP to beat the super-high Democratic turnout they only needed 533,000 votes, not 1.2 million. They netted 356,000 new votes out of the central counties of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin. The remainder came out of the northern exurbs of Dallas (100,000 in Collin and Denton counties), the exurbs of Houston (83,000 in Fort Bend and Montgomery), and the northern exurbs of Austin (34,000 in Williamson). Add in another 37,000 in other Houston exurbs and you’ve got more than enough to win the state. The 500,000 people that the GOP got out of smaller cities and rural areas was nice but it wasn’t what won it.
It wasn’t South Texas. There aren’t enough people! The GOP gained only 88,652 votes, against 8,175 for the Democrats.
And it wasn’t Mexican-Americans! The above-right chart graphs the Latino share of the country against the percentage swing towards the Republicans. Outside of South Texas, there wasn’t much of a correlation. This looks really different from Florida, by the way, where it really was Latinos what swung it, not just Cubans. But in Texas, the swingy Latino voter is a Río Grande Valley thing, not a Texan thing.
I don’t know what the implications are for 2024. Turnout will swing back, but will it swing back more for Republicans or for Democrats? Is persuasion possible? Could Marco Rubio swing some blue voters or might Amy Klobuchar or Andrew Cuomo get some red ones? I have no idea. What I do know, though, is that the Trump campaign energized voters in the big cities and their exurbs. The GOP has to keep them turned out in 2024 and the Democrats have to keep them home.
But the Democratic Party of Texas should really not be tying itself in knots trying to figure out what happened in the Río Grande Valley. Please stop blaming the election outcome on Mexicans. There’s been enough of that going around the last five years.
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