Is Texas Now a Battleground State?

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Texas is at least as much of a battleground as Florida is. Very little resources were put into Texas, and huge amounts have been put into Florida for decades, and yet Texas was almost as close as Florida.

The demographic trends in Texas are clearly favorable for Democrats. In Florida, that is a lot less clear because of the effects of in-migration of Seniors who tend to vote Republican.

The 2020 results in Texas were very close to the 2018 Senate race, with one exception: Hispanic performance, especially in South Texas, but that also seems to be the bulk of what under-performance there was in the urban counties. If anything, it appears that white suburbanites might possibly have voted even more Dem in 2020 in Texas than in 2018.

It is plausible that at least a significant amount of the Dem underperformance with Hispanics was attributable to one-off factors:

First, Trump may have gotten a bit of a dead cat bounce with Hispanics, because at least the very worst case scenario of what he would do with regards to anti-Hispanic racism and immigration didn't play out; he didn't mass deport everyone who was already here, so despite the obvious controversial nature of his immigration position, any voters who were on the fence with Trump mainly because of that would probably have been less worried about re-electing him. This was helped by Trump talking focusing on distracting wedge issues like BLM rather than immigration this time around.

Second, voters, especially low info voters, tend to give the President credit for the economy. The economy was relatively good up until the virus. Voters also seem to have given credit to Trump for the stimulus for similar reasons (voters irrationally always credit the President for everything, regardless of whether they were responsible for it), so despite the fact that Dems supported stimulus checks, pretty much all the credit for it went to Trump. That was also helped by the fact that he abused the discretion of executive power to put his name on the stimulus checks, fooling some voters into thinking that the money came from him.

Third, Trump's support of re-opening the economy appealed especially to poorer low information voters. Unfortunately, the message that "to fix the economy, we need to handle the virus first" was harder to communicate. The reality is that poor working class people have to work or have some way to get money, or else they face serious economic hardship. The fact that Democrats wanted to support people with stimulus spending during time when they could not work due to the virus was a lot harder to communicate, especially to low info voters. Many people could not comprehend/were not aware that it could have been possible to better take care of people during temporary shut downs than was the case under Trumpist/GOP rule - for them the false choice between "shutdown and have no income and no jobs" or "open the economy and have income and jobs" seemed like the actual choice.

Fourth, Biden clearly had relatively weak appeal relative to some other Dems with Hispanics. He did poorly with them in the primary, focused a lot on things other than the bread-and-butter issues which are important for working class Hispanic voters, and was associated with the Obama "deporter in chief" record but not all of the generally positive feelings towards Obama just transferred over to Biden. Hispanics were neglected a lot in comparison to African American voters, from picking Kamala Harris as VP partly to appeal to black voters, to talking about nominating a black woman as Supreme Court justice (would he really not consider someone like Sotomayor?), to focus on BLM as a higher priority than issues affecting Hispanics.

These may not explain all of the Hispanic underperformance, of course (I would guess it is a mix of this and also a slow gradual trend of Hispanics, especially in rural areas, to be more competitive as they gradually become more integrated in society, as indeed Hispanics are not a monolithic voting bloc). But if those sorts of one-off factors explain a significant amount of it, and white suburbanites in Texas continue to trend Dem, then the state will be competitive in future Presidential elections.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked in the form of newly registered voters etc, which has already been picked over extensively in states like FL and PA, but where Dems have tons of room for further gains with in Texas. Do the same sort of work in Texas and build the infrastructure that has already been built in other states, and that by itself is worth up to a few points and brings Texas clearly into the competitive territory (albeit still likely leaning R without other changes/further trends).

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

If Texas is a battleground, Minnesota should be too.

You are right that MN and TX are similar in that one party has won all the recent races and one is clearly in a better current position than the other.

However, the important difference between the two is the trend.

TX is clearly trending Dem with favorable demographic trends, but Minnesota is not trending GOP with favorable demographic trends.

Although it is true that rural parts of MN are trending R, and we can probably expect further R gains in the rural parts of MN, the problem for Republicans is that Minneapolis-St. Paul is both growing (a lot more than rust belt cities near the Great Lakes, and more similar to Madison), and that the metro area is a very large share of the overall statewide vote, so that further gains in rural areas are not likely to make Republicans win MN unless they also can make gains/stop the Dem trend in the urban/suburban metro.

By contrast, Texas has a clear and strong Dem trend in urban/suburban areas going back even as far as 2004 or so. Texas remained quite safely Republican despite that urban/suburban trend because up until 2016 or so, Republicans were able to make gains among rural white voters who were still in the process of shifting to the GOP. That process is now over; rural whites are essentially 100% Republican in Texas, and there is essentially no additional ground to be gained there. In order for Republicans to continue winning Texas, literally the only way this can happen is to either entirely stop the urban/suburban Dem trend, or else to make gains among minority voters. Since Trump did improve among minority voters (clearly among Hispanics), I am certainly fine with admitting that this could be a real trend and Republicans could make further gains (most plausibly with Conservative rural Hispanic voters). However, for Texas to remain safely R and not become a battleground state, not only would that trend have to be persistent, but it would have to be strong enough to offset the pro-Democratic urban/rural trend which has a much longer and clearer history. It is one thing to argue that Rs can make gains with minority voters in Texas, but it is a much heavier lift to argue that any such gains will be enough to offset the general Dem urban/suburban trend.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Trump was a uniquely bad candidate for Texas.

It swung GOP from 2008-2012, once Southern Whites were already a stronghold for the GOP.

No reason to think it can’t swing back.

Look at the county trend maps going back all the way to 2000. Basically every 4 years, the big urban counties in TX have been trending ever more Dem, with very little exception. And likewise the suburban counties, although there is a bit of occasional temporary counter-trend in a handful of counties/years in that case:

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2000&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2004&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2008&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2012&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2016&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2020&fips=48&f=1&off=0&elect=0

If you put these all together in a combined 2000-2020 trend map, it would light up all the urban and suburban counties with massive Dem trends and basically all the rural non-Hispanic counties with massive GOP trends.

Also, in 2016 Trump made continued gains in rural TX beyond what Republicans won in 2012. There were a number of rural counties with dark blue (atlas blue) trends, and many more with medium blue trends.

In 2020, Dems seem to have finally hit an effective floor among rural white voters - in the rural non-Hispanic counties, about half of the counties very slightly trended D, about half very slightly R, simply because there was basically no room further to fall, in a purely mathematical sense.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

You’re not taking into account that Trump is a uniquely bad candidate for the wealthy, educated suburban whites that are growing in Texas.

If a candidate can get Trump support among Hispanics and rural areas, and Romney support in urban/suburban areas, Texas will be around 20%+ for GOP.

This would be a much more plausible argument if the GOP were doing something to distance itself from the very things that, as you put it "the wealthy, educated suburban whites that are growing in Texas" don't like about Trump. Do you see them doing that? I don't see any sign of that at all, so far... They seem to be doing rather the opposite, doubling down on Trump and Trumpism in the wake of Trump's defeat. If anything, it appears Trump may well run again and perhaps be the GOP nominee once again in 2024.

And in addition, it doesn't address the fact (as shown by the trend maps linked above) that this urban/suburban erosion is a longer run trend going back about 16-20 years, and that a similar trend has also been happening across the country in urban/suburban areas even before that (i.e. Philly suburbs going from GOP in the 1980s and 90s to solidly Dem now). I do agree that Trump accelerated this trend in Texas, but it was already a trend in process in Texas, and nationwide, even before Trump came along.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

If Texas was swinging so heavily towards the Democrats, it wouldn’t have swung by only 1 point relative to the NPV this year, especially in a year of record turnout.

Is Texas less Republican than it was in the 2000s? Sure. Competitive? No.

I think you are not reading what I said, or at least not carefully enough. I said that Texas (not even Texas as a whole, so much, but urban/suburban Texas) has been consistently trending Dem going back to the 2000s. That is a different thing than saying that Texas as a whole has consistently swung Dem. To understand the overall statewide swings, you need to look at the competing localized trends and countertrends, which I have explained in more detail above.

As far as the national popular vote goes, because Democrats normally win the popular vote and Republicans sometimes "win" while losing by millions of votes, the average battleground state is to the right of the nation, so it is not especially meaningful to say that a state is not a battleground because it is to the right of the national popular vote average.

At the end of the day, Texas voted almost the same as Florida. Rationalize that all you want, I guess, but the broader trend is clear and long-running.