RightDataUSA

Demographics and Elections Commentary tagged with Going Purple

3/29/2024: [Texas] The 2024 Senate Race Has Been Called! [RightDataUSA]


Photo credit: ABC News (from 6 years ago, so don't get excited)

Of course it's really quite far from being over, but not according to some rando with a blog which gets posted on a site called "American Thinker". Not deep thinkers apparently, but at least they are hopeful ones and they're on the right side.

The blogger references a recent Marist poll which shows Ted Cruz with a mundane 51% to 45% lead over celebrity Democrat challenger Collin Allred. As polling organizations go Marist has been reasonably accurate lately, but one poll taken 8 months before the election, which shows a 6-point lead for the good guy with nearly a 4% margin of error is hardly conclusive.

Or is it? The blogger declares that this poll "confirms that Mr. Cruz will win" and he advises the Democrats to spend their money elsewhere. They already are spending money elsewhere -- lots of it -- and do not need to concern themselves with economizing like Republicans often must do.

The poll "confirms" something? Pre-election polls predict (or try to influence) election outcomes. They do not confirm anything except perhaps that a race will either be close or a landslide or somewhere in between, and this particular race sure as hell won't be any landslide.



There is no reason to presume that a positive outcome here is guaranteed, and subsequent polls will definitely "confirm" that, however there are some good reasons to believe that Cruz will be re-elected: this is a presidential election year and Trump's presence on the ballot will help Cruz, unlike in the 2018 midterm when Cruz only narrowly defeated another Democrat celebutard; Allred is of course a media darling but he's a completely dim bulb; and it's hard to imagine so many tickets being split that Trump wins Texas but Cruz loses it.

On the other hand, nobody can doubt that Texas is a rapidly "purpling" state (going from true blue towards commie red). This is not a recent development and has been apparent for quite some time. However what is a recent development is the increased mass invasion of Democrat voters from south of the border. The impact of that is not yet baked into political outcomes, but by November it may well be.

Texas is being invaded from every direction and not just from the south, taking in refugees from all other states but particularly ones such as California, New York, Illinois, etc. which have been destroyed by a long period of thoroughly incompetent and corrupt one-party Democrat rule. Not all invaders are liberals, but the numbers strongly suggest that a majority of them are.



Below is a table which shows the number of registered voters back to 2022 along with the most recent available data for 2024 for the most populous counties in the Lone Star State. Texas does not register voters by party so there is no way to determine how many of these new voters are Democrats, though some folks have methods to derive party-orientation estimates. However these are really just guesstimates and do not necessarily have a great deal of accuracy.

The 12 counties in the table account for approximately 62% of all registered voters in the state. The good news is that the proportionate increase of new voters is the same statewide as it is in these dozen (mostly) leftward-trending counties, and that balance is important. At the present rate there will be a net gain of about three-quarters of a million voters in Texas by this November as compared to last November. That is a far greater increase than occurred between 2022 and 2023. But in a presidential election year, particularly one accompanied by an invasion, a larger number of registered voters is to be expected. Especially if the voter rolls are not periodically cleansed to get rid of ineligible and deceased voters.


County Nov. 2022 Nov. 2023 Mar. 2024 Nov. 2024* 2023-24
Increase
Bexar 1,230,662 1,231,380 1,244,216 1,279,515 3.91%
Collin 693,753 704,486 715,657 746,377 5.95%
Dallas 1,420,223 1,411,043 1,421,371 1,449,773 2.74%
Denton 606,275 621,564 630,984 656,889 5.68%
El Paso 506,554 496,767 502,700 519,016 4.48%
Fort Bend 521,611 521,416 529,558 551,949 5.86%
Harris 2,568,463 2,590,121 2,611,025 2,668,511 3.03%
Hidalgo 416,978 424,886 430,164 444,679 4.66%
Montgomery 409,759 423,577 431,434 453,041 6.96%
Tarrant 1,260,870 1,256,474 1,269,019 1,303,518 3.74%
Travis 886,480 883,569 890,646 910,108 3.00%
Williamson 415,096 420,409 425,749 440,434 4.76%
Total (12 counties) 10,936,724 10,985,692 11,102,523 11,423,810 3.99%
State total 17,672,143 17,759,273 17,948,242 18,467,907 3.99%

* Projected


The fastest-growing county on the list is the best one: Montgomery County, which for the time being retains a healthy Republican majority in all elections. It will continue to do so for many years to come, albeit with decreasing percentages. Rapid, massive growth is not always a good thing. When something grows rapidly inside a body it's called "cancer". Excessive growth in a good county or state always -- eventually -- has a cancerous effect too.

Montgomery County has already absorbed too much detritus from adjacent Harris County (Houston) among other places, and its demographics are showing the strain. Its election results are beginning to show deterioration too; it's still very subtle at this time, but Montgomery County unquestionably has reached its peak.

This doesn't mean that the county has gone insane and will begin electing Democrats anytime soon, just that its rightward motion has stopped and has begun to reverse. Montgomery County's future probably looks very much like Fort Bend County's present.

It's an inviolable law of demographics that bad people always follow (and then drive out) the good people from desirable areas, until those areas are no longer desirable. Fortunately new good areas naturally arise, even farther away from the urban center. The cycle continues as, over time, the new areas are ruined as well.



Like Montgomery County (except at a faster rate), the entire state of Texas has been "purpling", as anyone who actually takes the time to look can easily attest to. To see a bigger picture, we'll pull back and focus on metro areas rather than individual counties. The four metro areas which dominate the Texas landscape are:

  • Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington: 7,943,685 population as of 2022
  • Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land: 7,340,118
  • San Antonio-New Braunfels: 2,655,342
  • Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown: 2,421,115


These four areas accounted for 7,856,153 votes in the 2020 presidential election, which was 69.4% of all votes cast in the state of Texas. Trump got 3,670,374 of those votes (46.7%) and Biden received 4,056,573 (51.6%).

The rest of the state outside these four urban and suburban areas gave Trump a massive 64.0% to 34.7% win.

Here is the data for the 2016 presidential election:

Big-4 Metros Rest of State
Trump2,900,298 (47.6%)1,784,749 (61.5%)
Hillary2,870,422 (47.1%)1,007,446 (34.7%)
Total6,089,982 2,903,184


Between 2016 and 2020 Trump went from narrowly winning the Big-4 (by 0.5%) to being demolished by 4.9%. The areas in Texas which are being invaded the heaviest -- not just via Mexico -- are the ones moving to the left the quickest. Furthermore, these urban/suburban areas increased their share of the state vote by nearly 2% (from 67.7% up to 69.4%) in 2020. Apparently turnout was relatively higher in these demographically-decaying areas than it was in the rest of Texas, or perhaps it was just easier in these urban localities for Democrat vote-counters to "find" more absentee/mail-in ballots in precincts they controlled. Either way.

In the rest of Texas, Trump increased his winning margin from 26.8% to 29.3%. This dovetails with the assertion that Hispanics moved significantly towards Trump (but not necessarily all other Republicans) between 2016 and 2020.

That assertion is only half-true, however. Rural Hispanics in Texas and in some other states did in fact move sharply to the right, a development which the tribe of media controllers has desperately suppressed in its (lack of) reporting since 2020. Urban and suburban Hispanics in Texas and elsewhere have shown no such rightward trend, or if they have it has been mostly inconsequential.

In Texas as of 2022 there were 7,437,831 urban/suburban Hispanics in the four major metro areas out of a total of 12,068,549 Hispanics in the state -- over 61% reside in the metros. Yet they are "underrepresented" there. Texas as a whole was about 40% Hispanic, but the figure in the Big-4 was only 36.5%. In the entire rest of the state, Hispanics account for almost 50% (47.9% to be exact) of the population.

Their swing to the right, even if just a temporary Trump-related phenomenon, is nice but the impact is muted by the far greater number of non-rural Hispanics who are still refusing to leave the Democrat plantation.

The following tables illustrate the recent leftward lurch in the major metropolitan areas of Texas:

Metro Dallas-Fort Worth:

2020 Joe Biden (D) 1,535,525 49.8% Donald Trump* (R) 1,495,550 48.5%
2016 Donald Trump (R) 1,218,897 50.5% Hillary Clinton (D) 1,066,312 44.2%

Metro Houston:

2020 Joe Biden (D) 1,330,116 49.8% Donald Trump* (R) 1,302,436 48.8%
2016 Donald Trump (R) 1,012,507 48.3% Hillary Clinton (D) 991,171 47.3%

Metro San Antonio:

2020 Joe Biden (D) 529,607 50.8% Donald Trump* (R) 495,195 47.5%
2016 Donald Trump (R) 380,665 47.8% Hillary Clinton (D) 371,623 46.7%

Metro Austin:

2020 Joe Biden (D) 661,325 62.3% Donald Trump* (R) 377,293 35.5%
2016 Hillary Clinton (D) 441,316 56.1% Donald Trump (R) 288,229 36.7%


Texas has voted GOP for president in every election since 1980. However as measured by its Republican presidential voting percentage as compared to the rest of the United States, it could be considered as truly "solid" blue (note proper color usage) from 1996 through 2012, based on voting around 10 points (or more) greater than the average for the GOP candidate in the country as a whole.

2020 Donald Trump* (R) 5,890,347 52.0% Joe Biden (D) 5,259,126 46.4%
2016 Donald Trump (R) 4,685,047 52.1% Hillary Clinton (D) 3,877,868 43.1%
2012 Mitt Romney (R) 4,569,843 57.1% Barack Obama* (D) 3,308,124 41.4%
2008 John McCain (R) 4,479,328 55.4% Barack Obama (D) 3,528,633 43.6%
2004 George W. Bush* (R) 4,526,917 61.1% John Kerry (D) 2,832,704 38.2%
2000 George W. Bush (R) 3,799,639 59.3% Albert Gore, Jr. (D) 2,433,746 38.0%
1996 Robert Dole (R) 2,736,167 48.8% Bill Clinton* (D) 2,459,683 43.8%
1992 George Bush* (R) 2,496,071 40.6% Bill Clinton (D) 2,281,815 37.1%
1988 George Bush (R) 3,036,829 56.0% Michael Dukakis (D) 2,352,748 43.3%
1984 Ronald Reagan* (R) 3,433,428 63.6% Walter Mondale (D) 1,949,276 36.1%
1980 Ronald Reagan (R) 2,510,705 55.3% Jimmy Carter* (D) 1,881,147 41.4%


As of 2016 and 2020, the relative voting percentage for the GOP in presidential elections in Texas is back to where it was in the 1980's when it first flipped from Democrat to Republican. In 2020 that percentage actually declined relative to the U.S., despite the fact that rural Hispanics in Texas voted for the Party of Trump in record numbers. As of 2020 and even 2022, it's worth repeating that the dramatic Hispanic trend to the right has been very limited geographically; urban and suburban Hispanics -- in Texas or anywhere else -- are trending that direction only very slightly, if they are even moving rightward at all.



Back to the future: Cruz should win the 2024 Senate election in Texas by about 5 points (plus or -- yes, possibly -- minus) and Trump should win by a little more than Cruz does. It's extremely unlikely that either one, especially Cruz, will get a 10-point margin like Greg Abbott (10.7% margin in 2022) or John Cornyn (9.6% margin in 2020) got last time they ran.

It's no secret that the Rats are definitely going to lose the West Virginia Senate seat and might lose Ohio and/or Montana. Some pipe dreamers would add other states to that list. But even just flipping WV makes it a 50-50 Senate. A Trump win gives the Republicans control with the vice-president breaking the tie, depending of course on whether any liberal Republican Senate incumbents decide to bolt from the party.

To digress briefly, we predicted back in 2022 that Sen. Lisa Murkowski would do exactly that if it had been necessary to deprive the Republicans of a Senate majority (it wasn't necessary, as things turned out) but now it appears that our prediction might come true a couple of years later. Don't rule out Sen. Susan Collins doing the same thing if it appears that President Trump would have a Senate that is under Republican control (oh noes!). Both of these dried-up old RINO hags are fully aware that they are in their final Senate terms and will never have to face the voters again.

So 50-50 is the most realistic partisan breakdown in the Senate for 2025 as things stand now: the GOP goes +1 and maybe gets one or two more if things go unusually well in November. Texas is the one state where Democrats have any chance whatsoever of picking up a seat in the Senate. Does anyone really believe they aren't going to pull out all the stops to try to achieve that?

The latest FEC reports still show the Democrat empty suit with more money to spend than the incumbent Republican. Cruz has raised a ton -- but has spent just about all of it (on what?). He'll get more, but he'll never catch Allred in terms of cash-on-hand unless he hoards all he's got and never spends it. It's not unusual at all for a Democrat to have more money to work with than a Republican. It is unusual for an incumbent Senator to trail in the financial department.

The customary advantages that Democrats enjoy in all major statewide races (financial support, and across-the-board support from the "mainstream" media) still probably won't add up to a defeat for Ted Cruz this time around, but this mindless blogger chatter about some poll "confirming" that he "will" definitely win in November is extremely premature.

Tags:

2024 Senate Texas Going Purple Ted Cruz