Texas is a southern state that is bordered by New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mexico. It is the second most populous state in the United States. Greg Abbott is the current governor of Texas.
Demographics
According to the 2020 United States Census, the Texas population is 29,145,505. Persons under 5 years of age make up 6.3% of the population. Persons under 18 years of age make up 24.8% of the population. Persons 65 years of age and older make up 13.7% of the population. Females make up 50.1% of the population in Texas.
White people make up 76.8% of the population. African Americans make up 13.6% of the population. American Indians and Alaskan Natives make up 1.1% of the population. Asians make up 6% of the population. Hispanics make up 39.8% of the population. White alone, excluding Hispanics, make up 39.8% of the population.
85.2% of the population has a high school diploma and 32.3% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher. The median income is $73,035 which is relatively higher than the national median $37,585.
Races
In Texas, there were four candidates running for president of the United States: Donald J. Trump (Republican), Kamala Harris (Democrat), Chase Oliver (Libertarian), and Jill Stein (Green Party). Trump comfortably won 56.2% of the Texas vote.
There was a U.S. Senate seat up for grabs that Ted Cruz (Republican incumbent) held on to. His opponents were Colin Allred (Democrat) and Ted Brown (Libertarian).
There were also 38 U.S. House races. Republicans won 25 of those seats, leaving 13 seats for Democrats.
Three out of nine seats on the Texas Supreme Court were up for elections and Republicans held onto those seats. There were also Texas Senate and House elections. The Republican Party remains in control of both the Texas State House of Representatives and the Texas State Senate.
Electoral History
Texas joined the United States in 1845 and participated in its first presidential election in 1848. Democrats had a political grip on Texas from 1872 to 1976, the state shifted Republican in 1980 and has remained a Republican stronghold since, aided by the Bush family’s political presence. In 2020, Donald Trump won Texas by 6.5%, the narrowest margin since 1996.
Rapid population growth has made Texas increasingly significant, with its 29.1 million residents in 2020 giving it 40 electoral votes. This growth, driven by shifting demographics, positions Texas as a potential battleground in future elections hence my interest in exploring Texas.
The graphic above, created by 270 to Win highlights why Texas is a core state for Republicans.
Forecasted Outcome
Given the electoral history of Texas, expert ratings from The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball predicted Texas as a likely Republican state for the 2024 election. The polls supported this conclusion as well. 538 averaged Texas polls, predicting a Trump victory with 51.6% of the vote and 43.9% for Harris.
The actual outcome though showed greater victory margins for Trump. Trump won the state with 56.3% of the vote and Harris won 42.4% of the vote. Trump outperformed the polls by almost 5 percentage points while Harris underperformed the polls by 1.5 percentage points. Did any poll get it right? The closest poll was a 400 likely voter sample run from Sept. 26 to Oct. 16 by ActiVote, predicting 56% for Trump and 44% for Harris. AtlasIntel and The NYT/Siena College were not too far off, predicting a 11 point difference between Trump and Harris when in reality it turned out to be a 13.9 point difference.
The Campaign in Texas
Texas is considered a likely Republican state hence there was not a strong campaign by either candidate in the state. With limited resources, campaigns have to make strategic decisions regarding resource allocation and because Texas is not a battleground state, the amount of resources poured into the race were relatively less compared to the swing states.
Trump won the state in 2016 by nine percentage points and in 2020 by six percentage points. The winding victory margin and changing demographics in Texas has raised hopes for a blue Texas in the coming decades but in 2024, Trump victory margin increased to almost 14 percentage points.
Immigration is a relevant issue to Texas voters because it is a border state. 48% of Texas voters think the number of migrants attempting to cross the U.S-Mexico border is “a crisis,” and 23% consider it a “very serious problem, but not a crisis.” underscoring the salience of this issue for voters (Henson and Blank).
Harris’ immigration policy calls for reforming the “broken” immigration system, including a pathway to citizenship, and signing the bipartisan border bill into law. The bipartisan border bill includes immigration restrictions, partial border shutdowns if crossings rose above a certain threshold, and additional funding to hire more judges, and combating drug trafficking (Axelrod and Hutzler).
Trump’s immigration policy would reinstate policies from his first term such as the “Remain in Mexico” program and vows to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American History.” as well as end birthright citizenship (Axelrod and Hutzler).
How do Texans feel about the border? Approximately 60% of Texas voters are in favor of making it more difficult for migrants to seek asylum in the U.S., including those fleeing violence in their countries (Henson and Blank). 80% of Americans believe the U.S. government handled the migrant influx poorly (Henson and Blank). Since Harris is a part of the Biden administration that most Americans believe is doing a poor job of dealing with immigration, it probably hurts the validity of Harris’ claims that her administration will secure the border. Trump is explicit about the extremes he will go to to close the border and I believe that when it comes to the border, most voters believe Trump will actually implement policies that impede immigration.
Given that Texas is not a battleground state, it is expected that relatively less was spent on running ads in Texas in comparison to swing states. I was unable to find exact figures for how much each candidate spent on ads in Texas, but I doubt it was a significant sum since the race was concentrated in the seven battleground states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Overall, the Harris campaign did spend more on online political ads. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the Harris campaign spent more than $180,000,000 and the Trump campaign spent a little over $45,000,000 between January 1, 2023 and August 31, 2024 (Petry and Short). The 2024 election cycle demonstrated there is not necessarily a positive correlation between money spent and electoral outcomes.
In regard to the ground game, I was unable to find figures for whether the Harris campaign knocked on doors in Texas but I highly doubt they did because a blue Texas was not plausible in this election cycle and thus would not be a strategic move given resource constraints.
Regardless, Harris had a strong ground game. The Harris campaign had thousands of staffers in battleground states knocking on doors to increase voter turnout (Lerer et al.). On the other hand, Trump has outsourced his ground game to super PACs like America PAC (Lerer et al.).
However, both campaigns did make a stop in Texas. The Harris campaign held a rally on Oct. 25, 2024, featuring Beyonce (Messerly and Daniels). At this rally, Harris reminded the audience that Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices are the reason why Roe. v. Wade was overturned (Messerly and Daniels). 54% of likely voters in Texas believe Harris would protect abortion rights, compared to 28% for Trump (The Texas Politics Project).
Trump held a rally a few hours earlier that day in Austin, Texas (Barragán et al.). He was in town to tape the Joe Rogan podcast. Trump honed in on the border and immigration at his rally, arguing that Harris had allowed “the greatest invasion in the world. (Barragán et al.)”
Takeaways from the Election
The latest poll conducted in Texas prior to the election was conducted by AtlasIntel, predicting 55% of the vote for Trump and 44% for Harris. It had a 2% percentage point error margin with confidence intervals which does capture the final vote in Texas of 56% - 43%. Therefore, I do not think there was a grave forecasting error in this race, but this race was not very tight to begin with. I chose Texas because I was curious about the trend of winding support for Republican candidates. At one point, Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, was close (2.6% losing margin) to winning a senate seat in Texas against Ted Cruz (CNN).
Trump won the state by a margin that had not been seen in two decades. What explains this? Economic fundamentals have stood the test of time and have proven to be a solid predictor of who will win the election. Achen and Bartels argue that voters do not necessarily act rationally when they vote in the sense that they do not think retrospectively about economic conditions and whether the president can control those economic circumstances. At the polling place, they will vote how they feel about the economy. In 2022, inflation increased the cost of essential goods and while inflation has slowed, prices remain high and thus have left many voters dissatisfied with the current administration. Because Harris is the vice president and was not able to distinguish herself from the Biden campaign, she was not able to rally enough votes, providing Trump with the edge on the economy.
There are benefits that come with incumbency such as name recognition and campaign resources. This election cycle was interesting because Trump had served as president already and Harris is the current vice president so both candidates had name recognition. However, Brown argues that voters don’t really care about incumbency which could explain why the incumbency advantage seemed less important in this election.
Trump made electoral gains with men, especially Latino men (Montanaro). It was expected that women would turnout in higher numbers and support Harris given the two candidates different stances on abortion but in reality women turnout only slightly increased and it was not sufficient for Harris to make electoral gains (Montanaro). Kim and Zilinsky tested the predictive power of five key pieces of demographic information: gender, education level, race, income, and age for vote choice and the results showed that these five pieces of information can only predict about 60% of the time the vote choice of the voter. I thought this was an interesting study because so much of the discourse on political strategy focuses on targeting voters with specific demographics and this article goes against that and it’s not necessarily wrong either. I think the common belief is that Latinos would side with Democrats but this shows that it’s not the case. Trump made gains with most demographic groups.
Shaw and Petrocik demonstrate the increasing turnout does not provide an advantage to either Democrats or Republicans which makes sense. Although the Harris campaign did attempt to increase voter turnout, the campaign targeted what they believed were undecided likely voters because to win an election by increasing voter turnout, the campaign should aim to increase voter turnout of those who will vote for the campaign’s candidate. Trump’s campaign targeted low-propensity voters such as young men by appearing on nontraditional media like the Joe Rogan podcast (Hartman).
The deviations from the forecasted outcome in Texas were minor, but the election results provide insights into voter behavior and campaign strategy. Trump’s significant margin of victory, despite a trend of narrowing Republican support in the state, underscores the importance of economic fundamentals and the impact of campaign messaging tailored to specific voter groups. Harris’s inability to distance herself from the Biden administration hurt her campaign. Finally, since she did not go through a primary, she was not required to actively secure the support of Democratic voters, which may help explain why Democratic turnout was lower in this election cycle.
References
Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Achen, Christopher, and Larry Bartels. “Blind retrospection: Electoral responses to droughts, floods, and shark attacks.” Democracy for Realists, 31 Dec. 2017, pp. 116–145, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400888740-007.
Axelrod, Tal, and Alexandra Hutzler. “Here’s Where the 2024 Presidential Candidates Stand on Immigration.” ABC News, ABC News Network, abcnews.go.com/Politics/2024-presidential-candidates-stand-immigration/story?id=103313097.
Barragán, James, et al. “Beyoncé Endorses Kamala Harris While Donald Trump Vows Border Crackdown in Dueling Texas Stops.” The Texas Tribune, 25 Oct. 2024, www.texastribune.org/2024/10/25/kamala-harris-trump-ted-cruz-allred-texas-beyonce-joe-rogan/.
Brown, Adam R. “Voters don’t care much about incumbency.” Journal of Experimental Political Science, vol. 1, no. 2, 2014, pp. 132–143, https://doi.org/10.1017/xps.2014.6.
Hartman, Sydney. “Low-Propensity Voters: How Are Trump and Harris Targeting Them?” WVTM, 28 Oct. 2024, www.wvtm13.com/article/who-are-low-propensity-voters-election/62736805.
Henson , Jim, and Joshua Blank. “New UT/Texas Politics Project Poll: As Primary Voting Begins, Texans See a Crisis on the Border.” The Texas Politics Project, 19 Feb. 2024, texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/new-uttexas-politics-project-poll-primary-voting-begins-texans-see-crisis-border.
Kim, Seo-young Silvia, and Jan Zilinsky. “Division does not imply predictability: Demographics continue to reveal little about voting and partisanship.” Political Behavior, vol. 46, no. 1, 20 Aug. 2022, pp. 67–87, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09816-z.
Lerer, Lisa, et al. “The Ground Game: Harris’s Turnout Machine vs. Trump’s Unproven Alliance.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Oct. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/us/politics/trump-harris-campaign-ground-game.html.
Messerly, Megan, and Eugene Daniels. “Why Kamala Harris Is Barnstorming Texas.” Politico, www.politico.com/news/2024/10/25/kamala-harris-campaigning-texas-00185369. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.
Montanaro, Domenico. “Why Trump Won - 9 Takeaways from the 2024 Election.” NPR, NPR, 8 Nov. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/11/08/g-s1-33274/2024-election-how-trump-won-takeaways.
Petry, Eric, and Grady Yuthok Short. “Online Political Spending in 2024.” Brennan Center for Justice, 19 Sept. 2024, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/online-political-spending-2024.
Shaw, Daron R., and John R. Petrocik. The Turnout Myth: Voting Rates and Partisan Outcomes in American National Elections. Oxford University Press, 2020.
The Texas Politics Project, texaspolitics.utexas.edu/. .
“Texas | Full Senate Results.” CNN, Cable News Network, www.cnn.com/election/2018/results/texas.