Democrats claim Texas is turning blue

OPINION:

It’s no secret that President Biden and Democrats opened the southern border to sway the 2024 election. When you let someone just walk into America and get a free place to live, free health care and free money, you’ve pretty much made a Democrat for life.

What was more of a secret — a badly disguised one — was that Mr. Biden and his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, tried hard to send those new Democratic voters to red states — on buses, planes, even burros if necessary. And there were a lot of new Democrats: Since January 2021, when Mr. Biden came to office, about 8 million people crossed our border with Mexico illegally.

Which brings us to Texas. In the final week of the presidential campaign, the vice president jetted off to the Lone Star State for what was touted as a major campaign event. The lapdog media did what the lapdog media do: They mused, “Is Texas in play?”

Ms. Harris blathered on about abortion at a rally with megastars Beyonce (who was reportedly paid $10 million just to show up — and not sing) and Willie Nelson. “Texas, what we’re experiencing here is a health care crisis, and Donald Trump is the architect of it,” she shouted.

But on Election Day, it was another blowout in Texas. Mr. Trump won 56.2% of the vote; Ms. Harris won just 42.4%. She lost the popular vote by nearly 1.6 million votes of the roughly 11 million ballots cast. And she won just a dozen of the state’s 254 counties.

Texas, it turns out, was not in play.

So how did Mr. Trump — who all campaign had been vowing to close the southern border and forcibly deport illegal aliens — do it? He pulled 55% of Hispanic voters in the state and won 14 of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, doubling his 2020 performance in the majority-Hispanic region.

Consider this: In Texas, Mr. Trump won 55% of the Hispanic vote to Ms. Harris’ 44%. In 2020, President Biden pulled 59% of the vote, while Mr. Trump got just 36%.

Mr. Trump won Starr County, which is 97% Hispanic, marking the first time Republicans had won there since 1896. And though he lost El Paso County, one of the border’s most populous, he narrowed the margin in a way not seen in decades. His gains in border counties represented the biggest leap for a Republican presidential candidate in at least 30 years.

Republicans saw a 28% gain among Hispanics in Texas from 2020 to 2024.

“If this particular partisan split that was evident in the presidential race becomes the new status quo, it is going to buttress Republican dominance in the state and set Democrats back in their star-crossed efforts to make the state more competitive,” Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, told the Longview News-Journal.

Pundits keep talking about Texas turning blue, the same way they talked about Virginia for decades. For the Old Dominion, they were right. It was purple for a while, but then it turned blue. The last time Virginia voted for a Republican presidential candidate was 20 years ago.

Hispanics have played a big part in turning Virginia. In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the national Hispanic population had grown by 23% since the last census. The Hispanic population in Virginia, however, grew significantly faster: 44% over 10 years. Since then, it has grown by 200,000 more.

Now, it’s blue and unlikely to change back any time soon.

But what happened in Texas mirrored a move nationwide, with Hispanics flowing in droves to the Republican Party. The liberal Associated Press was so alarmed that it said of the realignment, “if it sticks, could change American politics.”

“Texas and Florida are already reliably Republican, but more Hispanics turning away from Democrats in future presidential races could further dent the party’s ’blue wall’ of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that had helped catapult it to the White House before Trump romped through all three this time,” the AP wrote. “The shift might even make it harder for Democrats to win in the West, in states such as Arizona and Nevada.”

So, Texas isn’t turning blue any time soon. And in a twist, Hispanics might soon swing a few states red. So much for the pundits.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.