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Texas used to be an R+30 state and now it's an R+8, with '18 bringing it to an R+2.
Harris County used to be the beating heart of the state party going back to the 1960s when Pappa Bush took over the organization. In '22, a Republican wave year with millions sunk into the county and Abbott jamming his thumb on the scale, Dems still swept every local race. Republicans retreated from multiple winnable swing districts - TX 7 and TX 29 - by packing them with Dems rather than splitting them up, resulting in a meager R+1 for the state as a whole in what should have been a GOP landslide. The surrounding suburbs were also stubbornly blue - from Tom DeLay's old stomping ground of Sugar Land to Katy, Texas and Clear Lake. Dallas keeps flipping blue. The Austin blueberry keeps growing larger. And the enormous South Texas Hispanic population is still uncommitted to either party.
More recently - just three weeks ago - the Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a Texas Senate seat in deep-red Tarrant County by a decisive 14-point margin. This is a district Donald Trump won by more than 17 points in 2024.
You can poo-poo the idea that Texas will go Blue in 2026. And there's plenty of historical evidence to suggest you'll be right. But the idea that Texas isn't in play is absurd. The Republican majority in Texas is being kept afloat in large part by the 2006 off-year gerrymandering (and repeated off-year re-gerrymandering) initiated under Rick Perry and repeated in the face of thinner and thinner margins. They have spread their voter base thin and run an increasingly unpopular mix of state level candidates for far too long.
And, as the state pivots towards a profitable investment in renewable energy and battery technology, even the old O&G bullwark is slipping. This has been a miserable year for historical GOP mega-donors. The state's big investments in bitcoin mining have flopped. The Hispanic population (a historical tipping point demographic that has leaned Republican since Bush was governor) has been targeted by ICE raids for the last six months poisoning them to the Republican brand.
Tons of headwind in a state that's an absolute must-win for Republicans. Dems would be stupid not to try and flip it.
People also forget Texas had a Democratic governor in the 90s, which is what caused republicans to start playing dirty.
And part of the Republican panic about demographic shifts making their party unelectable was Texas.
Texas being a battleground state for Republicans could doom the party to generational minority status.