Texas Is Undoubtedly a Swing State

For the longest time, Texas has been a solid Republican stronghold. It has always voted for the Republican presidential candidate since 1976, and as recently as 2012, it voted for the Republican by a safe margin (Mitt Romney won the state by a whopping 16 points that year). Ever since then, though, the state has been moving gradually toward the left. There is little doubt that the results of the 2020 election in Texas show that the state is a swing state.

As I mentioned before the election, due to demographic shifts, the once-safe Republican stronghold is diminishing. With overwhelmingly liberal cities like Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and El Paso (all these cities overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden) seeing exponential growth in recent years, as well as these liberal-minded people moving into the suburbs (Fort Worth flipped blue for the first time in many years this cycle), we are seeing the Lone Star State gradually shifting to the left.

Texas is crucial to the GOP as California is for the Democrats. Now, for the longest time, the state overwhelmingly backed Republicans. Even in the overwhelmingly Democratic wave year of 2008, where Barack Obama won an astounding victory of 365 electoral votes (and even flipping the solidly Republican Indiana), he was unable to whittle down the margin here—he lost by 12 percent to Republican John McCain. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney handily won the state by 16 percent over Obama. And prior to 2008, the state was extremely red: a Democrat had never won over 45 percent of the vote share since Jimmy Carter’s win here in 1976.

In 2016, however, Texas was one of only a few states (including Georgia and Arizona, both of which flipped blue this year) that moved to the left relative to the rest of the country, backing Donald Trump by “only” nine percent over Hillary Clinton. With Democrat Beto O’Rourke within three percent of winning over Republican Ted Cruz’s U.S. Senate seat here in 2018, the state was now on the Democrats’ radar.

This year, Joe Biden lost the state by just 5.8 percent, which is a three-point shift from 2016. Had he not lost Latino support (especially in the Rio Grande Valley, which saw some majority-Latino counties shift 30 to 40 points to the right), the margin could’ve been within two to three percent. Though the U.S. Senate race didn’t go too well here (Democrat M.J. Hegar lost to Republican John Cornyn by 9.6 percent), that may have just been due to the fact that Hegar isn’t well known at all in the state.

Note that if the state continues to shift by three points every election cycle, the state will be Democratic by 2028 latest.

This 5.8 percent margin is very significant. It is a closer margin than 41 other states, and was notably closer than the states of Iowa and Ohio, both of which voted for Trump by eight points but are considered swing states. It was only about two points more Republican than Florida, possibly one of the nation’s longest-standing swing states.

Joe Biden managed to flip three counties—Tarrant (Fort Worth) and Hays and Williamson Counties (Austin suburbs)—which had not been won by Democrats for decades and had a combined population of three million people. As mentioned above, though Trump managed to flip a number of majority-Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley (eight to be exact), all these counties combined only have a population of 200,000.

As seen, even though the Rio Grande Valley saw huge rightward shifts, large urban counties, with a large population, shifted to the left even more, allowing the state to move farther to the left compared to 2016.

It is not so much a question now as to whether Texas will flip, but rather, when it will flip. When the urban population is enough to counteract heavily Republican rural voters, the state will flip. When Texas inevitably shifts—it will mean that Democrats could conceivably win with just the 11 most populous states (all of which have been won by a Democrat since 2008 at least once) in the Electoral College. Though a whole other topic by itself, you can be sure that if this happens, the Republicans will be fighting to get rid of the Electoral College.

It isn’t inconceivable that in a decade or two, Texas could become another Virginia or Colorado. Should this happen, the Republican Party, at least in its current form, would struggle badly to win another election.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, Texas to them is like what California is to the Democrats. But only one of them is safe. And it isn’t Texas.

Check out the 2020 election coverage page for more on the election.