Election day is under a month away and the big race here in Texas is the governorship — perennial candidate (for something) Beto O’Rourke against the incumbent Greg Abbott. I haven’t always been a keen observer of politics but for the longest time it has always seemed like Texas has been on the verge of ‘going purple’. In other words, Democrats are making headway in one of the reddest of red states in America.
But how true is that, really? Democrats haven’t won statewide office in about 30 years and the state has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1976 (https://www.270towin.com/states/Texas). It does seem easy to write off Texas as an automatic win for Republicans, but let’s take a closer look anyway. I’m going to be using data from the MIT Election Science and Data Lab (https://electionlab.mit.edu/) and looking at county level election results.
To start with, I’m going to look at some basic demographic data by Texas county and the share of votes for Democratic and Republican candidates in presidential elections (2000–2020). There’s obviously more factors to consider when looking at who votes for Democrats or Republicans than just race, but it could be a helpful guide to get started.
The graphs above indicate that, at least in Texas, the whiter a county’s residents are the more likely that the majority of that county’s vote share will go to the Republican candidate, at least during presidential elections for the last 20 years.
Texas is a massive state with several large cities (Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio) but much of the state is made up of smaller cities and rural areas. When elections analysis typically shows a map of any state, the area immediately surrounding major cities are blue for Democrats and the rest of the state is some shade of red for Republicans. The Texas counties these major cities are in are Tarrant, Harris, Travis and Bexar counties, respectively.
The graph above shows that the Democratic vote share in these major counties has been steadily increasing since 2000. Interestingly, Democratic vote share in these 4 counties were all below 50% in the 2000 presidential election and while Democrats have been making gains in all of these counties, Democratic vote share didn’t reach above 50% in 3 of the counties until the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
Travis County, where the city of Austin, the seat of Texas’ Republican government is located, definitely leads the rest of Texas counties in Democratic vote share. Austin has long had a history of being a very liberal city and the dichotomy between a Republican-led statewide government being located in a city whose slogan is ‘Keep Austin weird’ has always struck me as humorous. But it’s also a clear sign how strong a hold Republicans have on areas outside of Texas’ metropolitan areas. And while Democrats clearly have an advantage in cities, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done outside of these traditional strongholds if Democrats want to start making more significant dents in Republican support across the state.
