Texas
Republican victories show Texas is still far from turning blue
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Texas Republicans maintained their practically three-decade grip on state authorities on Tuesday, comfortably warding off a vigorous run to unseat Gov. Greg Abbott and dashing Democratic hopes that the state would flip purple.
Voters returned GOP incumbents to their jobs on the high of the ticket and handed the state’s dominant occasion its 14th consecutive sweep of statewide workplaces. Republicans additionally appeared poised so as to add barely to their majorities within the Texas Legislature, the place they’ve managed each chambers for 20 years, and held massive leads in all statewide judicial races.
“Tonight Texans despatched a message that they need to preserve the Lone Star State the beacon of alternative that we supplied over the previous eight years,” Abbott wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night.
The GOP’s success in Texas, even because it fell wanting expectations nationally, signaled voters’ endorsement of Abbott following a second time period marked by aggressive actions on the border and immigration, conservative positions on LGBTQ and different social points and a near-total ban on abortion. And it was one other rebuke of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke, who misplaced his third election in 4 years.
“Voters appear to be high quality with the established order,” stated Drew Landry, assistant professor of presidency at South Plains Faculty in Levelland, west of Lubbock.
If Democrats have something to point out for this election, it’s that they gained two of three congressional seats up for grabs in South Texas — denying Republicans their hopes of assertion victories in a closely Hispanic area. Hispanic residents now symbolize the biggest ethnic group in Texas, surpassing non-Hispanic white residents earlier this yr in a census estimate.
The state’s shifting demographics had given Democrats hope, as margins on the high of the ticket have shrunk lately. In Abbott’s first bid for governor in 2014, he gained by greater than 20 proportion factors. In 2018, he gained his second time period by simply over 13. And Donald Trump gained the state by lower than 6 proportion factors in 2020. Tuesday evening, that Democratic progress appeared to halt. Abbott appeared prone to win by an analogous margin as in 2018 — probably bigger.
Document-breaking midterm turnout in 2018 was largely because of O’Rourke’s run for Senate and anti-Trump mobilization amongst Democrats, and the turnout introduced them nearer to victory than in earlier cycles.
However the occasion couldn’t replicate it this time round, despite O’Rourke once more main the ticket in addition to lingering anger over the Jan. 6, 2021, revolt by Trump supporters and a extensively criticized legislation enforcement response to the Might 24 college taking pictures in Uvalde.
Democrats have all the time asserted, and polls have prompt, that larger turnout on the polls would result in Democratic victories. Mediocre turnout on Tuesday could also be one of many greatest causes that Democrats didn’t see a stronger benefit come from Texas’ latest inhabitants explosion, stated Renee Cross, senior director of the Interest College of Public Affairs on the College of Houston.
“To actually really feel the results of a demographic change, whether or not it’s younger voters or new folks coming in from maybe extra liberal states, individuals are going to must prove to vote,” Cross stated. “I’m some numbers throughout the nation and a few locations have report midterm turnout, and we simply didn’t do it in Texas. They only didn’t vote, interval.”
However the South Texas outcomes robbed Republicans of the hoped-for narrative that Hispanic voters have been abandoning Democrats in droves. The races drew former President Invoice Clinton and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, for the Democrats, whereas U.S. Home Minority Chief Kevin McCarthy, R-California, and Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican Nationwide Committee, stumped for Republicans.
“There was lots of posturing by some Republicans that they’d hit the trifecta in South Texas by taking all three seats, so Democrats have felt perhaps a tiny little bit of aid at that,” Cross stated.
U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores, a Republican who misplaced the South Texas seat she had gained in a particular election earlier this yr, blamed apathy by conservative voters in addition to independents who had closely leaned Republican in Texas polling.
“The RED WAVE didn’t occur,” Flores wrote in a fiery Tweet after her obvious defeat on Tuesday. “Republicans and Independents stayed dwelling. DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT THE RESULTS IF YOU DID NOT DO YOUR PART!”
The one South Texas congressional seat Republicans did declare, with the victory of Monica De La Cruz, was in a district drawn in 2021 to assist a Republican win.
Nonetheless, the failure of the Democrats to interrupt a 28-year shedding streak for statewide workplace reveals the occasion has an extended method to go.
Even when Republicans aren’t seeing their map increasing into new territory like South Texas, they’ll nonetheless clearly rely on rural voters to carry the road towards waves of recent and doubtlessly liberal voters transferring into Texas’ main cities, stated Landry, the West Texas school professor.
“As massive because the cities are and the way Democratic that they’re, Texas Democrats nonetheless don’t have a method to get previous that pink wall of rural West Texas,” he stated. “Rural Texas nonetheless guidelines the day. I used to be seeing some very, very shut numbers earlier than lots of the agricultural counties reported [election returns], and as soon as they did, it simply blew the door open for Abbott and [Lt. Gov. Dan] Patrick and all of the others.”
Democrats had hoped this season’s political fervor over abortion rights, the lethal blackout in the course of the 2021 snowstorm, gun violence and the financial system would assist them overcome a generation-long shedding streak in Texas’ halls of energy.
Texas led the nation in proscribing abortion rights even earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket eliminated the constitutional proper to it final summer time by overturning Roe v. Wade. Abbott started busing undocumented immigrants to different states final spring and has steered $4.4 billion towards his Operation Lone Star mission alongside the Texas-Mexico border — strikes that drove Democrats to accuse him of spending taxpayer cash on political stunts.
A whole bunch of Texans died and tens of millions extra misplaced energy for days when the state’s electrical grid crashed throughout a snowstorm in 2021. Democrats blamed Republican-appointed regulators for failing to organize the grid for disasters.
The taking pictures of 19 kids and two adults at a Uvalde elementary college in Might touched off criticism of Republicans’ help of gun rights and gave Democrats hope that voters would agree the GOP had failed Texas kids by repeatedly refusing through the years to restrict entry to firearms.
However Republicans have been buoyed by a backlash over excessive costs on the fuel pump and grocery shops, opposition to President Joe Biden’s immigration insurance policies and fights over rising crime — significantly in rural Texas, the place the GOP gained its strongest margins of the evening, Landry stated.
“These issues are what obtained lots of these voters excited,” Landry stated. “Abbott did a very good job of tying O’Rourke with Biden and the border disaster and them being on the identical web page, and voters purchased it.”
By the tip of the evening, the state Democratic Social gathering had acknowledged in a press launch that “this was a troublesome cycle.” However in a joint assertion, occasion officers urged their supporters to “get again on this combat” beginning Wednesday.
“We refuse to throw within the towel and quit on a state as outstanding, freedom-loving, lovely, numerous, industrious, and trailblazing as Texas,” they stated.
Disclosure: College of Houston has been a monetary supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan information group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Monetary supporters play no function within the Tribune’s journalism. Discover a full checklist of them right here.
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Texas
Texas Democrats underperformed yet again. Now what?
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Texas Democrats are starting to sound like the little boy who cried “battleground state,” after yet another election cycle where they shouted from the rooftops that Texas should be viewed as capable of going blue and then drastically underperformed expectations.
President-elect Donald Trump won Texas by 14 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday — a surprisingly wide margin that bested his 2020 and 2016 performances in the state. Texas has for decades reliably gone for the Republican presidential nominee, but Democrats have been heartened that for the past several election cycles, the margin had been steadily narrowing.
The party’s Senate candidate, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas, out performed Harris but still lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz by 9 percentage points, according to unofficial results published by The Associated Press. That’s more than three times the margin that Beto O’Rourke lost to Cruz six years ago, and a wider loss margin than a majority of polls put the race in recent months. It also came after Senate Democrats and other national party officials visited Texas and invested in Allred’s race, citing him as one of the best chances to flip a seat in the upper chamber to protect their majority — which they lost on Tuesday.
The minority party also lost ground in the Legislature where Republicans now control 88 seats in the House and 20 in the Senate. And in South Texas, Republicans made historic gains in the predominantly Hispanic region that has reliably supported Democrats, and they lost their challenge to retake a South Texas congressional seat the GOP had won in 2022.
“This to me is a complete disaster. They underperformed everywhere,” said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio. “They are disorganized. They are a party in the wilderness.”
State Democrats have been especially hopeful since 2018 — after they rode a blue wave down the ballot off of O’Rourke’s history-making Senate run. That year they flipped Texas House districts, local government seats and state appellate courts. Republicans still controlled the Legislature and occupied every statewide office, but Democrats saw that year as the beginning of a new era.
It led to high hopes in 2020, when Democrats fell far short of their goal of flipping the Texas House blue. And then again in 2022, when O’Rourke ran for governor and lost by double-digit margins to Gov. Greg Abbott. That was a midterm election where Republicans underperformed nationwide — everywhere, that is, except for Texas and Florida.
Republicans on Tuesday night relished running up the score against their political foes. Gov. Greg Abbott’s top political adviser pointed at a potentially larger problem for Democrats going forward: How will they get donors to continue funding their campaigns after losing again?
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“So do you think national Democratic donors will ever believe these Texas Democrat grifters again?” Dave Carney said on social media.
Soul searching
Democratic operatives were left licking their wounds Wednesday morning on numerous debriefing calls to figure out what had gone wrong Tuesday.
Among the issues they identified: a national red wave that delivered massive wins for Trump as well as GOP control of the U.S. Senate; a lack of infrastructure and coordination between federal and local campaigns across the state that left Democrats underperforming at every level; and a refusal to acknowledge the increasing realignment of parts of the electorate that were previously the core of the Democratic base, namely working class voters and Latinos.
Ali Zaidi, a Democratic political operative who ran Mike Collier’s campaign for lieutenant governor in 2022 said many in the party are rooted in a “pre-2012” belief that an increasingly diverse Texas would lead automatically to Democratic gains. But many voters of color this cycle cast their ballots for Republicans, like Latinos in South Texas.
Zaidi said Democrats need to either adjust how they connect with Latino voters in the state or look for votes in other places.
“Campaigns are not magical things that change how people feel about the world,” he said, adding that campaigns need to meet people where they are. “If an electorate is no longer a reliable electorate for you the answer as a campaign is to find a new electorate that works for you.”
Several Democrats said the catastrophic election, not only in the state but around the country, should compel the party to do some serious soul searching on what their message should be. Matt Angle, a veteran Texas Democratic operative and director of the Lone Star Project, expressed frustration that the party focused more on what drove the base than kitchen-table issues that were actually on the minds of many voters, such as the economy.
“One of the things that annoys me a lot of times about Democrats as progressives [is] that they say we need to decide what we stand for, and we need to then go push that on voters,” Angle said. But “we need to find out where voters are and meet them where they are.”
Chad Wilbanks, a Republican strategist and former Texas GOP executive director, said the Democratic party is out of touch with the state because they care more about “political correctness” than what voters are telling them.
“They have lost the battle of ideas,” he said. “In Texas, we want a secure border, we want to feel safe in our homes and in our schools. That’s important. [And] inflation plays a major role.”
But even if Democrats were to coalesce behind a persuasive message, the state party faces the challenge of not having the long-term infrastructure to support their candidates running for statewide office. Years of neglect in the decades since the party lost control has left much of its functions outsourced to outside groups, including activist organizations and super PACs, Angle said.
Without a leader Angle said there needed to be an “alpha” elected official to lead the effort as Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen did when he was in office, to coordinate the disparate efforts working to elect Democrats. Allred began to fill that role during the campaign, heading the first Senate-led coordinated campaign in Texas in decades, which consolidated resources up and down the ticket.
The Texas Majority PAC, which is backed by billionaire George Soros, was among the groups that also tried to fill in this cycle and help coordinate Democratic efforts. The group spent more than $600,000 in Cameron County and $700,000 in Hidalgo County – both of which are located in the Rio Grande Valley and were flipped by Trump at the top of the ticket in a stunning upset.
Katherine Fischer, the group’s deputy executive director, said Tuesday’s results were “devastating” and not the results Democrats had wanted. But she found a silver lining in the party’s ability to hold on to the seat of U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, in Hidalgo County, through coordination with the congressman’s campaign and the local party operations.
Fischer said her group will pick apart the election and issue a report but given the margin of victory for Republicans, it’s hard to pinpoint what Democrats could have done to change the outcomes.
“You lose by 10 or 15 points or something shifts by 20 points, [and] there’s no amount of strategy that can combat that,” Fischer said. “There’s some major issues within the Democrat party writ large that we need to reckon with like how voters perceive the Democratic party and how that perception has come to differ so wildly from reality and what we do to recover that.”
Fischer said her group always envisioned its project being one dependent on multiple cycles. The PAC is focused on continuing to build out sorely needed Democratic infrastructure for years to come, she said, acknowledging there are no easy answers from this cycle.
Democrats in Texas often bemoan the lack of investment from the top of the ticket in the state, which is largely written off as unwinnable by national groups. Tides changed this cycle, as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Majority PAC invested over $15 million in Allred’s Senate race as election day approached. National Democratic groups also invested over $1 million in protecting Vicente’s congressional seat.
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, said it’s not enough to plead for a massive influx of cash at the last minute.
“Texas needs long-term paid organizing efforts like in other battleground states, where we communicate those everyday, working people issues to disaffected voters, and I think it gives us a lot to learn from this election,” Casar said. “Because a strategy where we’re just trying to persuade a small number of voters on television cannot compete with the kind of on-the-ground organizing efforts that Republicans have put in.”
Luke Warford, a former strategist for the Texas Democrats who now runs a fund to create party infrastructure, said the party needs to invest in candidate recruitment, staff training, communications and how to successfully target voters — all things the Texas GOP excel at.
“If we do that and still lose, then we need to go back to the drawing board,” he said.
Fischer said Democrats needed to be honest with donors about the election’s results but also communicate a long-term plan.
“I hope donors who gave to the Allred campaign or to any other project in Texas understand their dollars were not wasted and most states don’t flip over night,” she said. “They don’t flip in one cycle or two cycles, it takes time.”
Texas Democrats aren’t counting themselves out yet. They plan to be back in the spotlight in 2026 when Sen. John Cornyn’s seat is up for reelection, along with statewide elected seats like governor. “If history is right, Trump will have done enough to upset enough people,” Angle said. “You know we shouldn’t look forward with dread. We need to have real clear eyes and really accurately assess what happened this election, but to be hopeful moving forward.”
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Texas
2024 Presidential Election: How Texas voted by county
Donald Trump won Texas early in the night on his path to winning the presidency.
Analysts gave little hope of Texas turning blue in the presidential race on Election Night, and they were right.
According to unofficial vote totals, Trump earned 56.3% of the vote in Texas. His opponent, Kamala Harris, won 42.4%.
Harris won just 12 of Texas’ 254 counties, including Harris, Dallas, Travis and Bexar counties.
Trump flipped many of south Texas counties that he lost in his 2020 race against Joe Biden.
AP estimates show Trump won 57.7% of Starr County in South Texas, along the border.
He is the first Republican presidential candidate to win the heavily-Hispanic county since 1892.
Trump lost Starr County to Hillary Clinton by 60 points in 2016.
Texas has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Texas
Ted Cruz wins third Senate term, defeats Democrat Colin Allred in Texas
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was reelected on Tuesday, defeating U.S. Rep. Colin Allred in this burgeoning state that was thrust to the center of the 2024 election in battles over immigration and abortion.
This outcome marks a setback for Texas Democrats, who have now gone three decades without a statewide victory—the longest losing streak for any party in the nation.
Sen. Ted Cruz, 53, clinched a third term in office after a high-stakes and costly reelection campaign, in contrast to his nail-biting victory over Beto O’Rourke six years ago. This time, Cruz appealed to his party to take his race seriously and reshaped his image to Texas voters, presenting himself as a pragmatic legislator focused on getting things done—an effort to pivot from his past reputation as an uncompromising firebrand with aspirations beyond Texas.
How Did Cruz Gain His Texas Victory?
Though votes were still being counted early Wednesday, Cruz held a comfortable lead over challenger Colin Allred, appearing close to a double-digit advantage—an impressive jump from his narrow win over Beto O’Rourke by less than three percentage points six years ago. Cruz’s victory not only secured his seat but also contributed to Republicans regaining control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in four years.
Cruz addressed his supporters Tuesday night at his watch party in Houston by first walking out to the song “Eye of the Tiger.”
“I want to say to all of those who didn’t support me, you have my word I will fight for you, your jobs, your safety and for your constitutional rights,” he said.
Cruz Law and Order Agenda for Texas
On the campaign trail, Cruz emphasized a strong stance on law and order. In a notable moment, he appeared on stage flanked by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a prominent Democrat and the chief prosecutor of Texas’ largest county.
Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker, sought to become Texas’ first Black senator by running a moderate campaign. He maintained a measured distance from Vice President Kamala Harris and progressive factions, instead highlighting endorsements from Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney. Allred positioned himself as a staunch advocate for abortion rights in a state known for its stringent bans.
What is Allred’s Message to Cruz?
In his concession speech at his watch party in Dallas, Allred said he called Cruz and congratulated him on his victory.
“It shouldn’t be remarkable to have to admit defeat,” he said. “You can’t just be a patriot when your side wins. Tonight we didn’t win, but we will continue to be patriots.”
Colin Allred’s campaign faced early criticism from some Democrats who were dissatisfied with his strategy. They expressed frustration over his decision to avoid scheduling numerous large rallies and his limited investment in smaller regions of Texas, including cities along the Texas-Mexico border.
Cruz, however, performed notably better against Allred than he did against O’Rourke six years earlier, showing particular strength in predominantly Hispanic counties along the U.S.-Mexico border.
What Led to the Cruz Victory in Texas?
Insights drawn from the AP VoteCast survey that included over 4,500 voters in Texas, showed that the economy and jobs were foremost concerns among Texas voters, with 40 percent identifying it as the nation’s top issue. Immigration was cited by 20 percent of voters as the most pressing matter, while 10 percent pointed to abortion as their primary concern.
Cruz, a former presidential candidate in 2016, first joined the Senate after serving as Texas’ solicitor general. In 2020, he expanded his reach with a popular podcast, Verdict, where he voiced strong support for then-President Donald Trump during his impeachment, solidifying his influence within conservative circles.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press
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