RightDataUSA

Demographics and Elections Commentary tagged with Texas

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


1/21/2024: 14 House Democrats Vote To Denounce Biden Admin's Open-Borders Policies [Daily Wire]


Photo credit: Getty Images

The vote earlier this week involved "Denouncing the Biden administration's open-borders policies, condemning the national security and public safety crisis along the southwest border, and urging President Biden to end his administration's open-borders policies." Here is a link to the text of the resolution: House Resolution 957.

For those who've forgotten their high school Civics class (or "Social Studies", as the course has been known since being dumbed-down and geared mostly towards liberal propaganda) a House resolution like this one is not binding on anyone, is not a bill, does not go to the President for his signature and can not become a law.

It is merely all for show, which was the whole point.

Republicans thought they were soooo smart here (stupid people often believe they are smart; it's part of what makes them so stupid) and figured they would put 200+ America-hating representatives with a (D) after their names on record during an election year as supporting Dementia Joe's open border policies and his other border-related crimes. A brilliant political maneuver, eh?

Nope. Lucy pulled the football away and the party of Charlie Browns landed on its ass again. This stunt may actually wind up costing them seats in the House in November, by failing to capture several currently Democrat-held districts which were ripe for the taking.



Since there is no substance whatsoever to this resolution, it's all about the propaganda value.

Numerous articles popped up immediately in the liberal media, with titles which contain words like "denounce" and "rebuke" with regard to the Biden administration. The titles sound as if they're documenting some huge legislative setback for the White House and imply that stopping the invasion now has bipartisan support and progress is going to be made.

Hardly. The real story -- the only story -- in these articles concerns praise for the 14 courageous Democrat souls who openly rebuffed their party leaders in the House and stood up to be counted on the side of Mom, Apple Pie and America.

We've written about tactical voting on several occasions here. That occurs when certain Democrat plantation slaves who represent marginal districts in the House of Representatives are permitted to briefly leave the plantation. There is no defiance of authority, there is no courage and there certainly is no sincerity in those tightly choreographed and controlled performances.

These 14 leftists did not march into the office of House minority leader Hakeem Homeboy and register any pleas or issue any demands; they were simply told how they would be allowed to vote on this resolution. The only reason that more Rats were not allowed to openly support this charade was that the puppetmasters did not wish to dilute the "courage" angle in the media; it takes no courage to be part of a mob.

Democrat leaders selected a handful of members who needed to shore up their shaky support at home. A different group of vulnerable Democrats will get its chance to fake to the center during a risk-free vote on some other day.

So what the oh-so-clever Republican majority actually ended up accomplishing here was to give certain potentially endangered Democrats a golden opportunity to grandstand without having to put even one dime's worth of money where their mouths are. Now the obedient liberal media lapdogs portray them as heroes for their courageous inconsequential votes. You can't buy that kind of positive coverage, but the liberal media -- with Republican assistance in this case -- can give it to you for free.

Let's see how these 14 vote when it truly counts for something like the upcoming impeachment attempt of the smarmy incompetent (or just corrupt) Biden administration official pictured at the top of this commentary. There won't be any defections then, just a 100% united Democrat party marching in perfect goosestep as usual.



Here is a table which displays data pertaining to the districts of these valiant heroes. It reveals the reason for this sudden deviation from Democrat orthodoxy.

DistrictCook PVI2022 Margin
Colin AllredTX-32D+1430.8%
Yadira CaraveoCO-8even0.7%
Angie CraigMN-2D+15.3%
Henry CuellarTX-28D+313.4%
Don DavisNC-1D+24.8%
Jared GoldenME-2R+66.2%
Vicente GonzalezTX-34D+98.5%
Greg LandsmanOH-1D+25.6%
Susie LeeNV-3D+14.0%
Jared MoskowitzFL-23D+54.8%
Wiley NickelNC-13R+23.2%
Mary PeltolaAK At-LargeR+810.0%
Marie Gluesenkamp PerezWA-3R+50.8%
Eric SorensenIL-17D+24.0%


You may have noticed that one of these things is not like the others. We'll come back to that.

The districts represented by the Fearless Fourteen are marginal or even Republican-leaning, and 8 of the 14 are represented by freshmen whose prospects for re-election this year are (or were) tenuous.

Some notes about this motley crew:
  • Nickel is not running for re-election in North Carolina because the GOP was finally granted its legal right to redistrict the state (which partisan Democrat judges had illegally thwarted in 2022 after mandating a Democrat gerrymander in 2020) and his district is probably more like R+8 now which would have made him a certain loser.

  • Peltola won via Rigged Choice Voting in Alaska and because of an irrevocable fracture between the Palin supporters and Palin haters in the Alaska Republican party. Rigged Choice Voting remains and so does the Stupid Party. Early indications are that they are not any smarter than they were in 2022, and they're going to split the vote again and let the ditzy Democrat win another undeserved term.

  • MGP won in Washington only because the GOPe refused to support conservative MAGA candidate Joe Kent after he defeated a Trump-hating impeachment RINO (incumbent Jaime Herrera-Beutler) in the primary. Kent is defiantly running again in 2024.



The one Democrat on the above chart who is not from any marginal district is ex-pro football player Colin Allred, who played linebacker for four years with the Tennessee Titans and stood on the sidelines most of the time, starting a total of 2 games. CNN nonetheless refers to him as an "NFL star" because of course they do. The link is good for a laugh.

Allred first won election to the House in the anti-Trump annihilation of 2018 when the Rats gained a few dozen seats in Congress. They gained two of those seats in Texas, in similar suburban districts (one near Houston, and Allred's district near Dallas) which were in the process of going into the toilet demographically. Republican redistricters in 2022 abandoned any hope of gaining back either of these deteriorating areas and conceded them to the Democrats for at least the remainder of this decade. The GOP reluctantly fielded a candidate but didn't spend a single dollar against Allred in '22.

Allred didn't vote for HRes 957 on principle (oh, please) nor was he concerned about his re-election chances because he isn't even running for re-election.

Instead he's Beto O'Rourke 2.0 -- the 2024 celebrity Democrat challenger to Ted Cruz for a Senate seat and the new darling of the Hollywood left and other wealthy lunatics. Allred's voting record in Congress is impeccably liberal, rare fakes (like this one) to the center notwithstanding, and he has the full support of the Democrat Money Machine.

Ted Cruz has faced and defeated unqualified liberal dilettantes before, and he is no stranger to fundraising either. He has raised -- but already spent -- millions of dollars in this election cycle. The Democrat cash registers have hardly opened yet, however Allred has more cash on hand than Cruz.

Whatever Cruz has spent $35,000,000 on so far (and that was just through September), it's not working. A poll from earlier this week shows Cruz up only 42% to 40% over his empty-suit opponent. That same poll shows accurate-looking results in the presidential matchup (Trump over Biden by 8 to 10 points, but under 50% overall) so intelligent people cannot easily shrug it off and the emotionally frail ignore it at their own risk.

Trump is certain to win Texas if he is the nominee, likely with over 50% but surely nothing remotely approaching a landslide. Cruz should receive help from Trump's coattails to drag him across the finish line; he may very well need that help.

The Rats won't be spending much in the Lone Star State on the presidential race because they can't win one of those races here (yet) and more pertinently because they don't need to win it. However they will be going all-in on the Senate election, and more data to back up that fact will be available shortly when the FEC releases its 2023 year-end campaign data.

Tags:

U.S. House 2024 Senate Texas Ted Cruz vs. "NFL star" GOP saves endangered baby Rats


7/11/2023: Mayra Flores Launches Comeback Bid in Texas [Breitbart]


Photo credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

You'll remember Flores from June of 2022 when she scored a historic upset victory in a heavily-Mexican south Texas district (CD-34) which had never before been won by anything other than a Democrat. The old version of the 34th district in which Flores won that 4-way special election 13 months ago was pretty much a tossup and had trended slightly to the right as of 2020. Special elections are always prone to fluke outcomes due to low turnout, but the flukes usually favor the left. This one didn't.

When a Democrat wins a fluke special election, the party normally goes all-in to see that the fluke outcome becomes the "new normal" outcome and they quite often succeed; examples abound in recent decades. A Republican who registers a win like that is rare enough and holding the seat for more than a few months is even rarer, so what happened in TX-34 last November was anything but a shock when Flores lost to a well-funded Democrat by 7½ points.

As to the facts about this area, the current version of the 34th district in which Flores lost the general election in November of 2022 was moved about 5 points to the left -- by Republicans -- in redistricting. That's why Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, who was the incumbent in the adjacent 15th district, packed up his carpetbag and slithered over to the new 34th. The new 15th district was moved 2 or 3 points to the right and the GOP did pick that one up last November and hopefully will be able to hold it in the future.

Texas has no party registration but the current 34th is probably somewhere around 2 to 1, or worse, in favor of Democrats. Some of those D's occasionally vote R (slightly more so now than in the past); most do not.

Tags:

Mayra Flores Texas U.S. House Historic upset Redistricting


2/1/2023: These are the states Americans are moving to [The Hill]


Photo credit: iStock

Nothing unexpected here -- people are moving to the usual destinations (Texas, Florida, the rest of the Sun Belt) and fleeing from pathological liberal areas, especially California which has had net domestic outmigration for three decades now and led the nation again in escapees in 2022.

We often hear anecdotal BS -- worth about as much as trying to predict election outcomes from yard signs, or the opinions of a person's tiny circle of friends -- along the lines of "My new neighbor who just moved here from [California, New York, Illinois, or whatever liberal state] is a true conservative! I was shocked!" -- but it's really nothing more than selection bias. If you live in a decent area, then chances are that many of the new neighbors you get are decent people too.

Texas is a prime target for Californication although liberals from other states clearly target it as well. Texans who live in good communities may marvel at how conservative the recent immigrants from liberal states are, but if you go somewhere like Austin (notice all the California license plates?) and ask those natives what they think of the massive influx of new arrivals, they'll surely tell you how fantastic it is that so many new like-minded liberals are arriving in Texas daily and transforming the state from blue (proper color usage) to purple.

Who is right? Well, lets see:

Texas election results

At the presidential level, in the early 2000s the state was 10-12% more Republican than the national average even when there wasn't a Bush on the ticket. In 2016 and 2020 Texas was only 5 or 6% more Republican than the national average. The same declining pattern applies to other statewide elections in Texas, so it's not just a "Trump effect" -- and that's even with rural Hispanics supposedly moving toward the GOP.

So who is causing the decline? Blacks? Nah, they're already as far left as possible. Urban Hispanics? Ditto. The answer, to a significant extent, is White invaders -- from states like California. It's been an open question for years as to how long before Texas flips to the dark side. Within a few years we'll be looking back, surprised it held out as long as it did. Obviously, without Texas there is no viable "path to 270" for any GOP presidential candidate.

Tags:

Demographics Voting with their feet Texas Californication