{"id":92580,"date":"2025-12-18T08:19:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T08:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/92580\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T08:19:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T08:19:14","slug":"the-biggest-lie-in-texas-politics-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/92580\/","title":{"rendered":"The Biggest Lie in Texas Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a story about politics that might challenge your assumptions. It\u2019s about the race for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 2018, the last blue wave, when a large chunk of the electorate was angry enough at Donald Trump to show up at the polls in numbers not seen in a midterm in the modern era. By the time voting locations closed at 7 p.m. in El Paso on November 6, the campaign staff of both Ted Cruz and Beto O\u2019Rourke had reason to be anxious: O\u2019Rourke because no Democrat had won a statewide seat in Texas since 1994, and Cruz because his opponent had conducted a ferocious tour of the state and raised more than twice as much money<\/a>, amassing a war chest that might have made Genghis Khan jealous. Then, before ballots were tabulated, the total vote count of 8.3 million was recorded\u2014a turnout<\/a> of 53 percent that shattered the percentage in all midterms in the state since 1970. As a person familiar with one of the campaigns relayed to me years ago, one candidate began to celebrate.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve followed Democratic politics this century, you might expect that the ebullient candidate was O\u2019Rourke. The Texas Democratic Party\u2019s conventional wisdom for decades has been that nonvoters tend to lean toward it, and that a campaign that could convince enough unconscientious objectors to exercise their rights could win. The palliative comes with an oft-repeated punch line\u2014\u201cTexas isn\u2019t a red state, but a nonvoting one\u201d\u2014that even O\u2019Rourke has voiced.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the candidate who cheered high turnout on election night in 2018 was not, in fact, Beto. The Cruz campaign knew that there weren\u2019t 8.3-million-divided-by-two-plus-one Democratic voters in the state, so if turnout was that high, there was no way he could lose. (A spokesperson for Cruz declined to comment on the anecdote.) And of course, Cruz was right. He did win. It was the closest statewide election since the nineties, but this was not, as Democrats often argue, because O\u2019Rourke activated masses of onetime nonvoters. The real magic trick of his campaign was convincing hundreds of thousands<\/a> of Texans who also voted for Republican Governor Greg Abbott to support him simultaneously\u2014not enough, but no small measure.<\/p>\n

Old canards, however, die hard. As we approach another midterm election during a Trump presidency, another Democratic Senate hopeful is preaching the message that Texas is a secretly blue state. Announcing her bid for the Democratic nomination to run for Senator John Cornyn\u2019s seat last week, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett addressed<\/a> \u201cthe haters in the back\u201d of the South Dallas venue and explained how she could win a statewide seat though no Democrat had in three decades. \u201cSo they tell us that Texas is red,\u201d she said, pausing, first as laughter erupted, and then to snicker herself. \u201cThey are lying,\u201d she said, \u201cWe\u2019re not. The reality is that most Texans don\u2019t get out to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was not there, but allow me, for a moment, to assume the role of Hater in the Back. Crockett\u2019s claim is, bluntly, wrong. Texas is indeed a nonvoting state. Those who are eligible to vote but abstain have outnumbered those who turned out for the highest vote getter in every Texas election this century. The specific electorate changes every cycle, but as a group, the nonvoters are disproportionately young, poor, and Hispanic\u2014three demographic segments Democrats have long assumed are likely supporters. Part of the reason some Texans don\u2019t vote are voter suppression laws that make the state one of the toughest<\/a> to cast a ballot in. But Texas is a red state because those who don\u2019t vote, or who don\u2019t often vote, are not, as a bloc, Democrats-to-be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2022, when I asked dozens of local election officials, pollsters, political scientists, and political operatives for their estimates of the nonvoting population\u2019s partisan allegiance, there was bipartisan consensus on the skew. The Texas Democratic Party\u2019s model estimated about 56 percent of 2018 nonvoters were Democratic leaning. A GOP operative told me that lined up pretty well with his party\u2019s estimate given its voter file, which modeled nonvoters by their consumer habits. (Do they shop at Cabela\u2019s or Whole Foods? Subscribe to Garden & Gun or have a Sierra Club membership?)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Who <\/a> Sorry, Democrats, Texas Is Not Secretly a Blue State<\/a> <\/p>\n

By Ben Rowen<\/a> <\/p>\n

To make up the large advantage Republicans have among existing voters, Democrats need to either drive huge numbers of those nonvoters to the polls while Republicans don\u2019t or convince GOP-leaning voters to support them. Many campaigns try to do both, including that of Crockett\u2019s primary opponent, state Representative James Talarico<\/a>. JT Ennis, a spokesperson for the campaign, told me, \u201cEnding thirty years of one-party rule in Texas requires a campaign that energizes the Democratic base, turns out new voters, and welcomes Trump voters who are now feeling conned.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I asked Crockett about the balance of her strategy. \u201cNearly half of Texans don\u2019t cast a ballot. Many feel that nothing ever changes or that their vote doesn\u2019t matter. Frankly, too many politicians have relied on the same tired playbook of politics as usual,\u201d she wrote. \u201cBy speaking directly to our shared realities, being unafraid in my advocacy, and unapologetic in my service, I\u2019m earning the trust of a broad cross-section of Texans.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to the turnout approach, there is no recent evidence, despite high-profile and expensive efforts to do so, that the Democratic party can outperform the GOP in getting nonvoters to the polls. Take the 2020 election, for example, the best turnout operation Democrats have ever run. That year, when there was a presidential race between Trump and Joe Biden, and Cornyn was last up for reelection, the party went all in on a strategy to activate low-propensity voters, those who are eligible to cast ballots but rarely do so. The state party invested a large chunk of its $25 million coffers into a voter model, which assigned each Texan a partisanship rating and a likelihood-to-vote score, based on prior electoral history. For those who were eligible to vote but had not registered\u2014a number leaders said totaled 5 million (likely a twofold overestimate, which you can read more about here<\/a>, and one Democrats have subsequently lowered)\u2014the party estimated as much as 75 percent leaned Democratic. And then the party contacted all it deemed future Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Republicans also saw fertile ground among the nonvoters. Steve Munisteri, the former party chair who had left Texas in 2015 to work for Senator Rand Paul and then for the Trump White House, returned to the state to assist with Cornyn\u2019s reelection campaign and to help lead a turnout operation with Karl Rove, the electioneer who turned Texas red in the nineties. They focused some on the unregistered but eligible, setting up registration efforts outside places where Republicans gather, including Trump rallies and gun shows, and getting more than 200,000 Texans added to the voter rolls. (In Texas, voters don\u2019t register by party, so the partisan allegiances of those they registered are unknown, but given where they were registered you can get a pretty clear idea.) They focused more heavily, however, on the 7.4 million Texans who were registered but hadn\u2019t voted in 2018, targeting the 3 million the GOP\u2019s voter model had flagged as likely Republican.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unprecedented numbers of low-propensity voters went to the polls that year: The election in November was the highest turnout election by percentage since 1992, with 11.3 million of the state\u2019s 17 million registered voters casting ballots. And Republicans swept every race\u2014because infrequent voters in the state aren\u2019t de facto Democratic ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a postmortem report, the Democratic party noted that, according to its model of voter likelihood, Republicans were more successful at getting low-propensity voters to the polls. They were also better at getting new registrants to show up: While Democrats registered 150,000 more Texans than Republicans did, the GOP got 26,000 more people who were freshly eligible to vote to actually vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why might that be? In 2022, I drove 1,454 miles, crisscrossing the lowest turnout counties in Texas, one of the lowest turnout states in the country, looking for nonvoters who could help provide an answer. I ignored the old wisdom to avoid discussing politics with strangers and spent days outside convenience stores, grocery emporiums, and dive bars asking whether folks planned to vote or not. The majority response was not yes or no. It was \u201cWhat election is there?\u201d<\/p>\n

Many I met were lapsed but devout Republicans, voters who cared deeply about the oil and gas industry and gun rights but didn\u2019t feel either were at risk and thus didn\u2019t need to defend them. But I also met dozens of one-time Democrats who had suffered crises of faith and believed their votes didn\u2019t matter enough to bother casting. Locally, these nonvoters told me, Democratic politicians who won accomplished nothing\u2013streets remain unpaved, flood zones unprotected. Statewide and federally, some said, their votes didn\u2019t count\u2014Texas always went red anyway.<\/p>\n

I met less cynical likely Democrats who told me they weren\u2019t voting because no candidate had sought their vote, despite O\u2019Rourke focusing heavily on turnout during his bid that year for governor. At the Reeves County Library in Pecos, I chatted with the receptionist, Mariana, beside a credenza where stacks of primary-election voter guides remained untouched, months after that election. Mariana was a college student who told me that her biggest concerns were the environment and gun control, and that she was on the \u201cDemocratic side of things.\u201d But, even as O\u2019Rourke, who famously vowed<\/a> to seize citizens\u2019 assault weapons, campaigned for governor, she insisted she wouldn\u2019t vote for him. She explained she didn\u2019t \u201cknow enough about the candidates\u201d since \u201cno one had reached out.\u201d It\u2019s unlikely any Democratic campaign would: Activating reticent voters is costly, and the party focuses most of its spending in large cities, where money goes further.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Democrats might see opportunity in Mariana\u2019s story. Might Crockett, if she wins the party\u2019s nomination, do a better job reaching out to those just waiting on a Democrat to care about them? Can she spend on those efforts better than Beto did with his massive campaign coffers?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dewey did not defeat Truman<\/a>, so I\u2019ll hold off on predictions. But here\u2019s another telling anecdote\u2014this one less surprising. The day Crockett launched her candidacy, Derek Ryan, a former data whiz for the Republican Party of Texas, reported on X<\/a> that at least one voter who hadn\u2019t cast ballots for Democrats recently had been reached with a text requesting support and a donation. That voter was his wife, who had voted in eight straight Republican primaries.<\/p>\n

Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s a story about politics that might challenge your assumptions. It\u2019s about the race for the U.S. Senate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3485,2135,3481,2116,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-92580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-elections-2026","tag-james-talarico","tag-jasmine-crockett","tag-politics-policy","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}