![]() A mystery in both regions, to be solved on Election Day, is whether Trump’s support from Hispanic voters has grown or declined since 2016 polling is all over the map. West Texas, the least populous of these regions, has become more Democratic, and so has the Rio Grande Valley, which Republicans saw only recently as places where they could pick up votes. To explain why Texas is being contested at all, we’ve broken it into seven political “states.” Houston and its exurbs have moved away from Republicans in the past few years, adding tens of thousands of Democratic voters as White suburbanites and immigrants turn against the president. Democrats, who went to court immediately to challenge this, saw it as evidence that Republicans are nervous.īy signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Greg Abbott mandated that each of Texas’s 254 counties maintain just one drop box for mail ballots, to “maintain the integrity of our election.” Rural Loving County, with just 169 residents, would have as many drop-off points as Houston’s Harris County, with more than 4.7 million residents. Republican state legislators have nixed the state’s old straight-ticket option, after 2018’s Democratic surge led to massive down-ballot wins in urban counties.Īnd just this week, Republican Gov. ![]() Of the 15 states where Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has run TV ads, only Texas requires voters to have a medical reason to request an absentee ballot, unless they’re 65 or older. Those voters have elected a Republican Party that’s made voting tougher, under pandemic conditions, than in any 2020 swing state. Unlike Arizona, where defeat in the suburbs can close off the GOP’s path to a majority, Texas has millions of rural, White, conservative voters who are alienated from the modern Democratic Party and can overwhelm it with high turnout. But 57 percent of the total statewide vote came from outside those counties. Clinton carried four of Texas’s five most populous counties, containing the cities of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio, and where a total of 3,809,602 votes were cast. Republicans held on to their statewide offices, despite further suburban attrition, thanks to high turnout in conservative East and North Texas and middling Democratic turnout with Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley. If Democrats can get lower-propensity voters in the Rio Grande Valley and the big metro areas to turn out, I’m convinced we’d get over the hump.” ![]() “All the dynamics are coming to fruition to make this a swing state. ![]() “The suburbs are abandoning Donald Trump,” said Julián Castro, a Texan and the former secretary of housing and urban development under Obama who has been raising money and campaigning for down-ballot Democrats since ending his presidential bid. Two years later, Democrats picked up two House seats, sliced away at the GOP’s state legislative majority and came within five points of winning several statewide races, including the one for Cruz’s seat. It got closer because of Trump’s weakness in the state’s fast-growing cities and suburbs, which optimistic Republicans saw as a fluke. Ted Cruz of Texas to win the Republican nomination, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here by nine points - a smaller margin than any Republican nominee since Bob Dole. One year later, Republicans dominated every statewide race - as they had for 20 years - and made inroads with Hispanic voters. Republicans started to warn about it in 2013, when Obama campaign veterans created a group to find and empower hundreds of thousands of non-White Texans who didn’t vote. Johnson to carry Texas’s biggest urban counties. ![]() Modern Texas as a swing state? Democrats started to dream it after 2008, when Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B. ![]()
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