From Nate Cohn in the NYT:
Rep. James Talarico
After a decade of big talk from Democrats about Texas, it’s understandable that people could harbor some doubt about flipping the nation’s largest red state. Judging by presidential election results, Democrats barely made any progress at all: President Trump won Texas by almost 14 percentage points in 2024.
But beneath the state’s stable Republican voting record, extraordinary demographic shifts have put Texas Republicans in a much more vulnerable position. To an extent few would have imagined a decade ago, Texas’ status as a reliably Republican state now depends on elevated levels of support among Hispanic voters.
In the latest national polls, Mr. Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters have vanished — and the Republican grip on Texas is in danger as a result. The latest New York Times/Siena poll is representative: It shows Democrats ahead by 30 points, 54 percent to 24 percent, among Hispanic registered voters nationwide. That’s better than Joe Biden’s margin in 2020 and getting close to Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016.
The signs of Democratic strength aren’t limited to the polls. Since 2024, Democrats have run well ahead of Kamala Harris’s showing in heavily Hispanic areas in special elections — including in Texas — and in the regularly scheduled elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
Alone, major Democratic gains among Hispanic voters would be enough to make Texas a plausible battleground in November. Now consider the party’s expected gains among other demographic groups — including white voters — in this national political environment, and suddenly the conditions would seem to be in place for a Democratic breakthrough.
To illustrate, consider this hypothetical: What would have happened in 2024 if Ms. Harris had fared as well as Mrs. Clinton did among Hispanic voters in 2016?
If she had, Texas would have been about tied. That’s right, tied. There are more sophisticated ways to reach this conclusion, but you can see for yourself just by plugging the results by race from the 2016 exit poll into the 2024 exit poll. You get a contest within one point.
How could this be? It’s been easy to overlook, but Democrats have made significant gains among Texas’ white voters during the Trump era. For comparison, the gains are basically equivalent to those Democrats made among white voters in Georgia, which drove that state toward the left over the same period.
The Democratic gains among white Texas voters would have been enough to make Texas competitive in 2024, if everything else had stayed constant.
[…]
While Texas Republicans have occasionally had a few close calls, this year’s contest is already different, at least by the measure of the polls. Back in 2018, Beto O’Rourke never led a poll collected by RealClearPolitics against Ted Cruz.
This time, Mr. Paxton hasn’t led a general election poll against Mr. Talarico since January.
Couple of things here. First, I did not realize that the 2024 election would have been that different had Kamala Harris achieved Hillary Clinton-levels of Latino support. That kind of blew my mind. Latinos, including those who voted for Trump in 2024, have massively soured on him, and the polls reflect that. I don’t expect to bounce back quite that far with them, but seeing that statistic did a lot to bolster the belief that big things are possible this year. And maybe not just for James Talarico. Remember how the big re-redistricting effort was built on 2024 election data, and the assumption that Latino voters were now really Republicans? Not looking so hot for them now, is it?
I see this analysis as a companion to both the Talarico almost-post-runoff poll and also the UnidoUS poll, which stressed the opportunities Democrats have now with Latino voters but which (for obvious reasons in the latter case) didn’t talk about other folks. I’ve said on many occasions that you can’t explain what happened in 2018 in Texas without understanding that a ton of former Mitt Romney voters had flipped to Democrats, which not only turned over two Congressional and multiple State House seats, but also almost put Beto O’Rourke in the Senate. We grew turnout by a lot in 2018 over previous non-Presidential years, but we also won a lot of experienced voters. I believe in the potential to do even more of that this year.
Finally, I’m glad to see Nate Cohn acknowledge another thing I’ve been saying lately, which is that Talarico has consistently led or been tied in the general election polls, which is something Beto did not do in 2018. Indeed, going by the numbers I still have on my sidebar, Beto trailed by an average of about 5.3 points over a fifteen-poll span from April to mid-September. (I stopped tracking them on the sidebar after that, I don’t remember exactly why.) I’d have to go and add it all up now, but that sounds like about the average margin that Gina Hinojosa is trailing Greg Abbott by in the current batch of polls. Beto outperformed those numbers then. Maybe Gina and others can do that now.
What exactly has the Democratic Party here in Harris County done for the Americans, who happen to have Spanish last names? Why would they bother to come out to vote if your place on the totem pole remains at the bottom, regardless of what party is on top?
To use Maldonado as an example, did white progressives support him? Is that why he nearly got 30% of the vote?
One not-so-minor point that Cohn is missing: the demographic shift has a long history in Texas. You can go back to 2002 for the easiest example. The “Dream Team” of Ron Kirk, Tony Sanchez, and John Sharp were dreamed about as making *something* happen – from just the mere election of Sharp or all three.
I tend to see the current wave toward us Dems as more of a reaction to the current occupant in the White House. While I look forward to seeing the 2028 Presidential contenders making more-than-Tarmac visits to Texas, my concern is that the 2026 wave can fade away (at least a little) by then.
Twenty media markets in Texas are still expensive to play in, not to mention all of the other non-free forms of media and communication that exist now. I know we’ll see a lot of that in the big, “triangle” counties. Just hope there’s enough to go around for the others.
Good luck getting all those Hispanic would-be voters to become actual ones. This IS Tex-ass the non-voting state.
(With no Green in the race, I intend to undervote until/unless Talarico has a clear and explicit statement on Gaza, at minimum.)