Do you consider Texas part of the South?

[Torie]

In 2012 the white vote in TX was as close to SC as it was to AZ, KS, and NE (DKE). The Deep South (LA, MS, AL, GA, SC) average Obama white vote was 13.6%. The central and southern Great Plains (OK, KS, NE) was OWV of 25.1%. The Southwest (AZ, NM) was OWV of 36.8%. The average of those three are 25.1% and TX was 23.4%. That certainly suggests a model where TX is only about 1/3 consistent with the South.

I don't know that I entirely trust that DKE data. (For example, that shows Obama's share of Oklahoma whites being cut roughly in half from 2008 to 2012, which doesn't add up to me.) I was only looking at the 2008 exit polls (since they exit polled all 50 states that year). That showed both Texas and South Carolina whites giving Obama 26%. The nearest states to those were Georgia at 23% and Oklahoma at 29%. I suppose it's not really fair to describe the Deep South white vote as a voting bloc. Whites in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are really in a realm of their own, separate from all other states. However, it's still the case that Texas whites did vote very similar compared to South Carolina and Georgia whites in 2008.

What you are doing is trying to find a single state fit based solely on voting behavior. Many posters here and most geographers recognize that TX is split between different regions. My point is that you can just as easily get the TX value by averaging voting patterns from different adjacent regions.

Yes, Texas has three different cultural strains, but if one had to pick a region to put the state in, the South to me is clearly the most appropriate choice. LBJ incidentally when he had presidential ambitions in the late 1950's agitated to have TX labeled a Western state, to get away from the baggage associated with the South as the Civil Rights movement was reaching critical mass.

[Torie]

Dallas is pretty darn Southern to me. San Antonio presumably isn't, although I have not been there. Houston in some ways is less Southern to me than Dallas.  In some ways, it even has kind of an LA ambiance. To me, where the primary minority is blacks, it's Southern, where Hispanic, and the cattle start running in lieu of crops, it's Western, and in the Panhandle and the flat as a pancake wheat growing belt, it's Midwestern plains.