Texas may be the key to the future of elections
Texas is the second most populous state in the US, and as such, it has the second largest number of electoral votes, with 38. Texas has voted for the republican candidate in every presidential election since 1976. But in recent years, the contest in Texas has significantly tightened. Texas could single handedly destroy Republicans’ chances in the 2024 elections, because with its 38 electoral votes, it holds significant power. Let’s first take a look at the impact that Texas can have. In 2020, T-Max considered Trump to have a 96% chance of winning Texas, and a 11% chance of winning the election. However, if Biden had won Texas, T-Max estimates Trump’s chances would have dropped to about 1 in 300. Take a look at the electoral map below, this map shows states that were decided by more then 5% in 2020, with their electoral vote counts updated to match the 2020 census As you can see, Democrats lead this count 226 to 189 with the rest of the states considered swing states, which will determine the election. However, if you switch Texas to the democrats, they would lead 266-129, only needing to win one more state to breach 270, whereas the republicans would need to sweep the remaining swing states to win the election. But why are we talking about Texas going blue? Isn’t it a deep south state? Pro gun and Pro life? Well, parts of it are. There have been large demographic shifts over the past 10 years in texas. The northern, eastern, and central parts of the state are still very rural, white, and christian, which means that they are dominated by republicans, but there have been two major shifts towards Democrats elsewhere. In the cities of Dallas, Houston, and Austin, there has been a significant influx of young democratic voters, causing democrats to pull better margins, among bigger turnouts, in the 3 largest counties in texas. The other significant shift is among Latino voters. Latino’s recently became the largest ethnic group in Texas, with about 40% of the population, and Latino voters tend to skew towards democrats. In recent elections, the Latino vote has shifted sharply to the right, in 2020, Biden won Texas Latinos by an estimated 17 points, whereas in 2016, Clinton won them by 29 points. Now that the Latino vote makes up roughly 40% of the electorate, if Biden is able to win that group by the 29+ points Clinton did, he will have a great chance to win the state. With the importance of Texas, and the respective importance of the Latino vote in texas, as well as the Latino presence is the key state of Arizona, it seems very likely that the future of elections may rest largely upon the Latino vote.
