The prospect of turning Texas blue is once again tantalizing Democrats. But the party still faces imposing obstacles to reestablishing a foothold in the state.
With the solid victory of state Rep. James Talarico in last week’s US Senate primary, Democrats have found a young and media-savvy candidate who both excites party activists and offers an opportunity to recapture some of the voters who long favored Texas Republicans. The GOP, meanwhile, faces the likelihood of a bitter run-off campaign through late May between Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, even if President Donald Trump endorses Cornyn, as the incumbent’s allies hope.
Add in Trump’s eroding popularity in the state — particularly among Hispanic voters, who flocked to him in 2024 — and Democrats understandably see their best chance in years to win a Texas US Senate seat, something they haven’t done in nearly four decades.
Yet Texas Democrats have repeatedly seen other candidates who have inspired such excitement falter before. They have long struggled to translate favorable changes in the state’s population — increasing diversity and urbanization — into electoral success. And Cornyn’s unexpectedly strong performance in the primary’s first round has lifted the hopes of Republican strategists who believe he would be a much stronger general election candidate than the scandal-plagued Paxton.
“The primaries definitely leave the Democrats ahead of where they have been relative to any time since I’ve been working in politics, which is 2008,” says Dallas-based Republican pollster Ross Hunt. But while Hunt said the state would “immediately be in play with Paxton at the top of the ticket,” he believes Cornyn’s odds of winning the nomination now look much better. If he does, “Cornyn stands a very strong likelihood of winning the general (election).”
Other Texas strategists and analysts believe the nationwide recoil from Trump and the likelihood of lingering wounds after the GOP primary guarantee that Talarico can stay competitive against either Republican. But remaining competitive and actually prevailing are very different things. “I still have no reason to doubt it’s going to be a good Democratic year nationally,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “But Republicans have a pretty good seawall here.”
Much of the Democratic primary battle turned on competing theories of electability. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, known for her slashing attacks on Trump and other Republicans, minimized the need to recapture former Trump supporters and argued that the key to Democratic victories was mobilizing mostly non-White nonvoters. “I don’t agree that we are a conservative state. We are a nonvoting state,” Crockett told CNN during the primary campaign.
Talarico acknowledged that Democrats needed to activate more voters but said it was misguided to assume they could flip the state solely through mobilization. “I think everyone can agree, even if you have the highest Democratic turnout imaginable, you’re still gonna have to bring in some people from the other side,” Talarico told Politico.
Crockett is correct that Texas is, relatively speaking, a nonvoting state. In 2024, only about 58% of eligible Texas adults voted, well below the share in other Sun Belt battlegrounds such as North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, according to census figures. But while turnout is especially meager among eligible Hispanics (just 45%), it is relatively low for all major racial groups in Texas.
In 2024, Black, Asian and White adults without a four-year college degree all constituted exactly as large a share of actual as eligible voters in the state, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank. Hispanic people represented 7 points less of the actual than eligible electorate, Frey found, and college-educated White people about that much more of actual than potential voters.
Those patterns suggest the limits to a strategy centered on mobilization. Black, Asian American and college-educated White voters — three of the groups Democrats rely on most — are already present in the Texas electorate in numbers at least equal to their representation in the population. Most political strategists agree it is difficult to base a political strategy on the hope of energizing a large voting group to the point where it durably makes up a larger share of actual than eligible voters (beyond the traditional differentials that affect turnout, such as age and education).
Improving Hispanic turnout is undoubtedly an important component of any potential Democratic revival in Texas, but Trump’s gains among them since 2020 mean Democrats can’t assume that activating more irregular Hispanic voters will necessarily benefit them. Texas Hispanics who don’t reliably turn out “may be predominantly Democrats, but they are not predominantly liberal or progressive,” said Matt Angle, director of the Lone Star Project, a PAC that supports Democrats.
Given all these constraints, Angle said, the debate between Crockett and Talarico represented a false choice for Texas Democrats. “I’m in the camp that you have to build a coalition to win and you top out trying to just win people who think of themselves as Democrats,” he said. “But it is reasonable to think that you do need that type of energy and type of emotion to max out the Democratic turnout. That’s why it is hard in Texas — you have to do both of those things.”
Republicans have faced a mirror image of this debate. Cornyn’s allies argue the nationwide Democratic eagerness to vote against Trump creates such a risk of losing the Senate seat that Republicans can’t risk nominating someone as polarizing as Paxton. That is the central argument Cornyn supporters are hoping will persuade Trump to endorse the senator.
Paxton’s allies in turn maintain that Talarico will ultimately prove no more viable than other Democratic hopefuls (largely because of his liberal views on social issues) and that warnings of his strength are just a ruse to scare both Trump and primary voters into supporting Cornyn. “The establishment wants you to believe … Talarico is a huge threat in Texas, and that only RINO John Cornyn — who was rejected by 58% of his own party yesterday — can defeat him,” one conservative group supporting Paxton posted on social media the day after the primary.
The coming contest between Talarico and Cornyn or Paxton marks the latest round in the long struggle by Texas Democrats to restore their relevance. Texas Democrats last elected a US senator in 1988, a governor in 1990, and last won any statewide office in 1994. They haven’t controlled either state legislative chamber since 2002.
Without power, the Democratic infrastructure and ability to fundraise has atrophied. Though Talarico has attracted torrents of small donations, the Democratic infrastructure across the state remains skeletal. “When you haven’t won statewide elections for so long, there is no permanent in-state political apparatus,” said Hunt, the GOP pollster. “Republicans have lots of organizations that have become extremely adept at winning elections.”
But even during these lean years for Democrats, Texas has been reshaped by the same tectonic economic and demographic forces that have boosted the party in other Sun Belt states. One is growing racial diversity: From 2000 to 2024, when Texas added more than 10.4 million residents, people of color accounted for 92% of that growth, according to the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California.
Another is increasing urbanization: The state’s four largest metro areas —Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — accounted for more than 80% of the state’s population and job growth since 2000, according to analysis by Richard Murray, a senior research associate at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs.
This combination of diversification and improved performance in growing metros is the same formula that allowed Democrats to flip Colorado and Virginia blue after 2000, and more recently has allowed them to compete more effectively in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
For much of the 2010s, Democrats felt optimistic that Texas appeared to be moving, albeit more haltingly, along a similar trajectory.
Calculations by Murray tracked the change. He and his colleagues have divided the state into three large geographic buckets: the 27 counties that make up its four big metropolitan areas; 28 counties in heavily Hispanic South Texas; and 199 non-metro counties across the state.
Democrats first marked notable gains in the big metros in the 2016 presidential race (when Hillary Clinton narrowly carried them against Trump), and then advanced further in 2018, when Democratic US Rep. Beto O’Rourke ran an electrifying Senate campaign that fell just 2.6 percentage points short of ousting Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
O’Rourke posted a solid margin over Cruz in the four large metro areas, winning 54% of their combined vote, Murray found. O’Rourke also ran well in heavily Hispanic South Texas, drawing about two-thirds of the vote there.
But even that wasn’t enough for O’Rourke because Cruz, according to Murray’s calculations, carried over 72% in the state’s sprawling expanse of smaller cities and rural places — enough to provide him an insurmountable cushion of more than 875,000 votes.
O’Rourke’s close call against Cruz turned out to be the modern high point for Texas Democrats. Though Joe Biden in 2020 and O’Rourke in his 2022 gubernatorial race also won the combined vote in the four large metros, neither matched O’Rourke’s 2018 total share. By 2024, Trump carried each of the big Texas metros except Austin and pushed back past 50% of their combined votes.
Simultaneously during the Biden years, Democrats retreated in the other two big buckets of Texas places. Both Abbott in 2022 and Trump in 2024 swelled the GOP vote share past 76% in the state’s smaller and midsize counties, Murray found, while the GOP’s vote in heavily Hispanic South Texas soared from only about one-third for Cruz to just over half during Trump’s reelection in 2024.
Rather than building on the Democrats’ modest but measurable Texas momentum, the Biden presidency punctured it. “Biden was a classic East Coast guy who rarely, if ever, had visited Texas, knew nothing about it, and totally botched the immigration issue,” Murray said.
The Biden years left Texas Democrats in a deep hole. But the rapid backlash against Trump’s tumultuous second term has them eyeing Talarico’s Senate bid with energy and optimism unmatched since O’Rourke’s race in 2018.
Compared with O’Rourke then, Talarico has several potential advantages — but also several enduring, and in some ways deepening, challenges. The advantages start with Trump, whose position today is weaker both in Texas and nationally than it was in 2018.
Trump’s approval rating in University of Texas polling hasn’t exceeded 45% since last June. And in contrast with Trump’s first term, when voters mostly expressed satisfaction with the economy, today he is facing widespread disapproval of his economic record in Texas. Henson of the University of Texas says Trump faces discontent over “a very similar set of (economic) concerns” to those that motivated “a lot of voters who changed sides or didn’t turn out for Democrats in 2024.”
The other big change that has strengthened Democrats since 2018 is the state’s continuing diversification. Even with lackluster Hispanic turnout, the sheer growth of minority voters in the population is inexorably transforming the electorate. People of color accounted for 39% of actual voters in Texas in 2018, but 46% in 2024, with Black, Latino and Asian American voters all recording gains, Frey found. (White people with and without a four-year college degree each provided almost exactly half of the remaining votes in 2024.) As of January, non-Whites now make up over 53% of all eligible Texas voters, up almost 3 points just since 2024, Frey found.
Murray said the electorate’s growing diversity alone could tip the 2026 outcome. If all the major racial groups vote as they did in 2018 but compose their current shares of the electorate, Talarico would win the Senate race, he has calculated. “If you can just perform at that level, you are very competitive,” Murray said.
For Democrats, the rub is performing at the same level. Democrats haven’t equaled O’Rourke’s 44% showing in 2018 among college-educated White voters in either the 2020 and 2024 presidential races or in O’Rourke’s own 2022 gubernatorial bid, according to the exit polls. (That contrasts with Arizona and North Carolina, other Sun Belt battlegrounds where Democrats have reached majority support with them.) More ominously for Democrats, their support among Texas Hispanics has nosedived.
Virtually all Texas observers agree that Republicans this year are unlikely to match Trump’s 2024 showing with Hispanics, when exit polls showed him winning a stunning 55% of them. But most still doubt Democrats can roll the clock back all the way to the nearly 2-to-1 advantage O’Rourke amassed with them in 2018.
The GOP’s 2024 success with Texas Hispanic voters “was a moment in time, it was economics,” said Sergio Garcia-Rios, a professor at the University of Texas’ LBJ School and former pollster for Univision. But while Garcia-Rios said, “I wouldn’t now be surprised to see a swing back to Democrats, especially in the (Rio Grande) Valley,” he added, “I don’t know if (Democrats) can get back” to matching the higher level of Hispanic support they enjoyed earlier this century.
With his religious background and calm demeanor, Talarico appears well positioned to regain ground in the big metros, and his primary showing signals he can help Democrats climb at least partly out of their hole with Hispanic Texas voters. But even if he does both those things, he still must scale the state’s vast expanse of staunchly Republican midsize and small communities, which together cast about one-fourth of all Texas votes.
“The big Texas is not the populous urban Texas,” said Bill Miller, a leading Texas lobbyist and political strategist who has worked for candidates in both parties. “You drive and drive and drive and drive and then you’re still not f*cking anywhere. And all those places have people, and those people, they sit around and they listen to Fox. Men in women’s sports? F*ck that. Gun control? F*ck that. The national Democrat message is not a winning message in Texas.”
The equation for Talarico is no different from the math the party faces in other Sun Belt states such as Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina: Can he maximize support in the largest metros, and minimize his losses in smaller places, enough to squeeze out a win? The problem is complicated for Texas Democrats because even some of the groups generally most favorable to the party — Hispanics and college-educated Whites — are more conservative there than in the other Sun Belt battlegrounds.
Everything is indeed bigger in Texas — including the challenge for even the most talented candidate to build a winning Democratic coalition.