After Ted Cruz and Francis O’Rourke, Will Texas be Turning Blue?

The question about whether Texas is turning blue has been greatly debated. Many seem to think it is inevitable, especially because of our growing Hispanic population. But I’m not so sure that is the case.

To learn more about this, and I did a quick dive into the 2018 election returns. Let me start off by saying I know very little about elections or demographics. But as I started looking at the numbers a few things stood out for me.

A total of 8,326,216 Texans—or people who claimed they were Texans, or people who were Texans but claimed to be another Texan—voted in the Texas U.S. Senate race. That was the highest number of votes cast for any race.

Ted Cruz received 4.241 million votes; Francis O’Rourke received 4.02 million, the most a Democrat has ever received in Texas. He beat Hillary’s 3.88 million from 2016. Obama held the record before that with 3.53 million in 2008.

The biggest vote getter this year was Gov. Abbott with 4.64 million. Lupe Valdez received 3.52 million votes. Four years ago, the total vote in the Abbott/Wendy Davis race was only 4.72 million.

Interestingly, Ted Cruz received almost the same amount of votes as Dan Patrick (4.242 million) and topped Ken Paxton, whose 4.17 million fake-criminal-trial-influenced vote total came in at the bottom of all Republican statewides. Glenn Hegar and George P. Bush came in between those numbers at 4.36 million and 4.42 million votes, respectively. And the other statewides were in that range too.

So we’ve established a baseline for Republicans in the state at 4.17 million—no Democrat received that many votes. And there seem to be about 470,000 swing voters in play that can go either way.

On the Democrat side, Lupe came in at the bottom of the statewide vote at 3.52 million, with Francis at the top 500,000 votes ahead of her. Interestingly, all of the statewide judicial candidates came in about 3.7 million, with one, Steven Kirkland, just ahead of that at 3.8. It might be that there are about 200,000 Democrats/independents who will vote Republican from time to time, but not in judicial races, where abortion and other social issues might be on the docket. Just a guess.

So at this point there seems to be between 470,000 and 500,000 Texas swing voters who will vote Republican or Democrat depending on the candidates. However, these voters are not enough to put any of the Democrats over the top, at least not yet. Additionally it seems as if that the most conservative Republican candidates, i.e., the candidates that are most vilified in the liberal press, are the ones who are the most vulnerable to the swing vote, with Cruz, Patrick, and Paxton at the bottom end of the Republican vote.

If we go back to the 2016 presidential election these numbers seem to hold pretty well. With a higher turnout, 8.97 million—compared to this year’s 8.33 million, President Trump received 4.69 million votes, compared to Hillary’s 3.88 million.

One thing to note, though, is that a lot of Texas Republicans did not vote for Trump. Gary Johnson received 283,492 votes and Evan McMullin got 42,366. Gary Johnson received only 88,580 votes in 2012, so it is almost certain that about 237,000 of those votes would have gone for the Republican if it had been someone other than Trump. And a lot of those will likely go for Trump in 2020.

So we’ve got a range of Republican voters in Texas from about 4.24 to 4.93 million votes. The range for the D’s is from about 3.52 to 4.02 million. We’ve already established that there were about 500k swing voters in play this election, with potentially a few more based on the 2016 election. So what does this mean for Texas’ future electoral makeup?

My conclusion is that Texas is not in danger of going blue in 2020. It is highly unlikely that a Democrat could win the presidential vote or any of the statewide judicial races then. The gap is just too great between the potential Republican and Democrat vote. There just aren’t enough Democrat voters in Texas to win in 2020.

But what about future years? Is the blue wave still coming?

To answer that, let’s look at the vote and turnout numbers from the last few presidential elections:

Year	Race	Republican	Democrat	Voting Age  Turnout %
2016	Trump/Clinton*	4,885,581	3,877,868	46.45
2012	Romney/Obama	4,569,843	3,308,124	43.73
2008	McCain/Obama	4,479,328	3,528,633	45.55
2004	Bush/Kerry	4,526,917	2,832,704	46.11
2000	Bush/Gore	3,799,639	2,433,746	44.25

Note: because of the unusual nature of the Trump vote in 2016, I gave all but 83k of the Johnson/McMullin to the Republicans in 2016. This seems to fit because Supreme Court Justice Evan Guzman pulled in 4,884,441 votes in that election.

Here’s what those numbers look like on a chart:

That doesn’t look like a Texas on the verge of turning blue.

Let’s take another look at it, using the closest margin of victory in each mid-term election since 2002 (leaving out the 2006 gubernatorial race than included Carole Keeton Rylander):

Of course, the 2018 race is the Cruz/O’Rourke race. And though it is the tightest of the bunch, it isn’t all that much closer than the 2002 and 2006 closest races. And I’d suggest that there are special circumstance around this race: Cruz was damaged goods after going to the convention and not endorsing Trump then bending under pressure to endorse him later. Plus, the Democrats hate him almost as much as they hate Trump and poured more money into Texas than we’ve ever seen before.

Not that we won’t see some special circumstance coming in the future. And I do think it is possible that a Democrat might knock off a Republican at some point under some unforeseen special circumstances. But don’t panic if that happens: I just can’t see Texas turning blue through at least the 2022 midterms.

This holds true even considering all the voter turnout efforts on the left. Yes, they are getting new registrants. And I am sure some new voters too. But as we see in the table above, there is no discernable upward trend in voter turnout. So it doesn’t seem to me that the Democrats are succeeding in getting more of the folks who think like them but don’t vote to both register and go out to the polls.

After 2022, it is harder to tell what will happen. But still, these trends we see here don’t show me that we are inevitably turning blue any time in the foreseeable future. Particularly as I consider what Texas has to offer to new arrivals.

I still hold that immigrants to Texas, whether they be illegal immigrants, legal immigrants of various ethnic backgrounds, immigrants from the Northeast, and even immigrants from California are not like immigrants going to a lot of other states. They come here to work. They come here for opportunity, They come here for liberty. They may not be able to articulate all this. They may not identify as conservative. Or Republican. But they want a lot of the same things that liberty-minded Texans want. And if we can keep things going the way they are, and especially if we can improve them—which, of course, is why we are all here, I don’t see why our new neighbors won’t over time come to see themselves more and more as conservatives—or whatever we might call the liberty-minded in the future. And, who knows, their developing conservatism might even rub off on a bunch of our elected Republican officeholders who might one day themselves become conservatives!