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Did Texas Trend Blue In 2022? [1]

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Date: 2022-11-12

2022 Texas Governor Election (via NYT)

On Election Night, most of us were not surprised to see Greg Abbot defeat Beto O’Rourke, but the 11% margin was definitely disappointing. Given that Trump had only won Texas by 5.4% in 2020, I personally hoped to see Beto further close that gap this year. However, these were very different national environments, with 2020 being overall a good democratic year (D+4.5% pres, D+3.1% congress) while 2022 is lightly favoring the GOP in total votes (I estimate the final House vote will be R+2.7% given outstanding CA ballots).

Here I show some quick math suggesting that Texas did continue to very slowly turn blue this year. First, here is the presidential election results relative to national vote, which clearly shows Texas getting gradually bluer:

Texas Presidential 2012 2016 2020 National D+3.9 D+2.1 D+4.5 Texas R+15.8 R+9 R+5.4 Difference R+19.7 R+11.1 R+9.9

Next, here are the results of the senate and governor races, which I’m comparing to the national congressional vote margin instead of presidential results to give an apples to apples comparison between presidential and midterm years. (Note: I decided to consider both together to account for 2018, when Abbot was a popular incumbent with an especially weak challenger that barely campaigned, while Cruz was an especially weak incumbent with an extremely strong challenger, so the average feels more indicative of where Texas really was at. If you just compare the senate or governor races alone the trend is still there but with an anomaly at 2018).

Texas Senate + Governor 2012 2014 2018 2020 2022 National D+1.2 R+5.7 D+8.6 D+3.1 R+2.7 Texas sen R+14.9 R+27.2 R+2.6 R+11 Texas Gov R+20.4 R+13.3 R+11 Avg Diff R+16.1 R+17.1 R+16.5 R+14.1 R+8.3

Averaging the senate and governor results and subtracting from the national margin, its clear that Texas continued moving left in 2022. Given that all other 2022 statewide races were decided by a very similar margin, this also isn’t just an effect from Abbot being an especially weak candidate.

Texas now appears to be only about 8 points to the right of the nation, and still heading left. In comparison to other red battleground states (IA, OH, FL, NC) only Texas has been trending left while North Carolina treads water. This is clear when comparing governor races 2018 to 2022 which conveniently had all the same GOP candidates. Only Texas got bluer relative to the national environment (The table is how many points to the right the R gov result was relative to the national congressional result).

Red battleground state Governors: relative swing from national congressional result 2018 2022 Texas R+21.9 R+8.3 Florida R+9 R+16.7 Ohio R+12.3 R+22.9 Iowa R+11.3 R+15.8

From all of this, I believe we absolutely need to invest in Texas, and probably need to give up on Florida, Ohio and Iowa (I’m still an NC believer!). There is a dwindling number of swing states and only Texas is coming our way. I won’t be surprised when Biden does better in Texas than Florida in 2024, which hasn’t happened since 1964 for a winning Democratic president! We also absolutely can beat Ted Cruz in 2024 if we again run a top-tier candidate in the now-bluer state.

Last note: It looks like Texas Hispanic voters stuck with Dems in 2022. Along the Rio Grande, we had a roughly similar result to 2020, i.e. redder than in past decades but still blue. However, border Hispanics (Texanos) are only 1.5 million out of 12 million Hispanics in the state. Many of the rest are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation immigrants, vote strongly for Democrats but still have low turnout, and live mostly in the major metros, contributing heavily to the blue lead circles in the picture above. We need to invest more and more and more in turning them out.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/12/2135626/-Did-Texas-Trend-Blue-In-2022

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