The Texas Tribune headline early Wednesday morning says it all: “Texas Democrats’ Hopes Fall Short Once Again.” Texas voters spoke loud and clear with their ballots: They still like Republicans, at the presidential level, the Senate level, the House of Representatives level, and on down to state and local elections. While Texas was never going to flip completely blue in 2020, even if Democrats couldn’t win statewide, many local experts believed Democrats could flip key down-ballot races, especially in the statehouse. This was not the case.
“This year proved another disappointment for Texas Democrats, who underperformed the high expectations they had set for themselves, particularly in a hotly contested battle for dominance in the Texas House,” Emma Platoff wrote in the Texas Tribune. Texas Democrats hoped to flip the statehouse — Texas Republicans have held the trifecta of power (statehouse, state senate, and the governor’s seat) for 17 years. They didn’t even come close.
With some statehouse races still left to be called, Texas Republicans have a 69 to 55 lead over Democrats. And with one race still undecided, Texas Republicans have won 22 of Texas’s 36 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In my recent Washington Examiner magazine cover story “The Battle for Texas,” local political experts predicted that Texas Democrat’s best-case scenario was voters, driven by anti-Trump fervor, would flip a few local seats from Republican to Democrat. At worst, they thought races would be tight, signaling a future purple wave. Political science professor Brian W. Smith of St. Edward’s University in Austin told me: “A purple Texas is much more likely. The state is increasingly diverse, and national trends are favoring the Democrats this election cycle. This will flip seats at all legislative levels, and, depending on the size of the wave, could have Texas vote Democratic at the presidential level for the first time since the last century.” But even that didn’t happen.
In fact, the opposite happened. In 2016, President Trump got 52.2% of the Texas vote. With 96% of votes counted, Trump has won 52.3% of Texas in 2020. There were even some huge Trump gains in parts of the state — for example, he flipped Zapata County. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump there by 32.9 percentage points, and Beto O’Rourke beat Ted Cruz there by 25.7 percentage points. But Trump is winning the county by 5 points.
Key down-ballot races also remained in the GOP’s favor, despite media reports like Politico’s Oct. 30 story, “Inside the Democrats’ New Plan to Flip Texas.” Republican Tony Gonzales won the election to the U.S. House in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District. Gonzales was featured in Dan Crenshaw’s viral “Texas Reloaded” ad.
In the 21st District, incumbent Republican Rep. Chip Roy kept his seat, despite having lost ground in the beginning. In 2018, Roy won by just 50% to 48%. In 2020, he’s ahead by 5 percentage points. Republican Beth Van Duyne has declared victory in a tight race for the 24th Congressional District, although the race hasn’t officially been called by the Associated Press, and Democrat Candace Valenzuela has declined to concede yet. As of this writing, 5,000 votes separate the two, or about 1.3 percentage points.
As Platoff wrote in the Texas Tribune, “Texas Democrats said 2020 would be the year, given record voter turnout, a once-in-a-century pandemic that grew out of control under Republican leadership and a highly controversial president.” But any way you slice it, Democrats’ dreams just didn’t come to pass in Texas.
It remains to be seen why this is the case. Some Democrats, and even Republicans, predicted anti-Trump bias would lead the state to lean closer to Democrats, perhaps just to see a shift in policy. So far, it looks like conservative policies, Republican politics, and the man leading the GOP are as popular in Texas as they ever were.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a Texas-based journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
