There is a perception, not limited to Democrats eager for good news, that Texas will be "in play" in the 2020 presidential election. I'm agnostic on the question, partly on account of the ambiguity of "in play." A Democrat could win Texas, I suppose, but most likely that would mean the Democrat also won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and therefore, by a comfortable margin, the White House. In other words, Texas isn't going to be the state that puts the Democrat over the top. It's just a coincidence that 232 (Hillary Clinton's electoral votes) + 38 (Texas's electoral votes) = 270 (number of electoral votes needed to win).
Just for the fun of it, though, a few facts and figures and summaries of the analyses of analyzers.
I mentioned recently that in the 2012 presidential election Obama lost Texas by 1.2 million votes, and that four years later Clinton, while running behind Obama in the country as a whole, lost Texas by only 800,000. The mathematically inclined might conclude that if the trend persists the state will be in play—in 2024. The 2018 midterm elections, however, provided some more data points to ponder. On the one hand, no Democrat won a statewide race in Texas in 2018—in that regard, the Rs are batting a thousand since 1994. On the other hand, Republican margins in 2018 were reduced. In the highest profile race, incumbent US Senator Ted Cruz defeated his challenger, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, by 215,000 votes, or about 2.5%.
Those trying to understand what's happening are not necessarily searching high and low. It's pretty obvious. The Democrats are making substantial gains in the suburban parts of America, and, since Texas is a very suburban state, it's swinging in their direction. Here, for example, is Sean Trende, a pretty sober elections analyst at the conservative website RealClearPolitics. The gist of it, if you don't want to click, is that rural west Texas is vast and overwhelmingly Republican but also mostly empty and not gaining in population. A higher and higher percentage of the statewide vote comes out of the giant metros of Houston, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, San Antonio, and Austin. The most Democratic parts of the state are the parts that are growing, and they are becoming more Democratic.
The 2018 US House races in Texas tend to confirm Trende's analysis. There are 36 congressional districts in Texas, and, going into the midterms, the partisan alignment was 25-11 in favor of the Republicans. The Democrats then held all eleven of their seats and flipped two of the Republicans' 25. The 7th and 32nd congressional districts were the two that flipped. The former is in the Houston suburbs and the latter is in the Dallas suburbs. Meanwhile, six other Republican incumbents won but by less than 5% of the vote. These races were in the 10th district (suburban Austin), the 21st (which extends eastward from the northern suburbs of San Antonio to Austin), the 22nd (suburban Houston), the 23rd (which extends northerly from the Mexican border to south suburban San Antonio), the 24th (suburbs between Dallas and Fort Worth), and the 31st (suburban and exurban Austin). How long can Republicans hold these six seats? I'm sure I don't know, but a lot of people think it's significant that, in the past few weeks, three of the Republican incumbents have announced they are retiring and will not seek reelection in 2020. Suppose the Democrats were to win the three open-seat races, two of the other three, and hold on to their other seats but without making any additional gains either. The congressional delegation from Texas would then be evenly split, eighteen Democrats and eighteen Republicans.
The map at the top of this post shows, by county, the result of the Cruz versus O'Rourke Senate race last year. Look in particular at Tarrant County. It's the very pale blue one that's home to Fort Worth. It doesn't look like much on the map but it's the fifteenth most populous county in the US (third most populous in Texas). In 2012, Romney defeated Obama in Tarrant County by 57 to 41 percent. In 2016, Trump's margin in the county slipped to 52-43. Tarrant is pale blue on the above map because, in last year's Senate election, O'Rourke outpolled Cruz in the county by 49.9-49.2. An interactive version of the map, on which you can view county vote totals by hovering over them, is here.
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