Is Texas Now a Battleground State?

[TheReckoning]

Calling Texas a battleground is like calling Colorado a battleground.

It swung 1 point this year more to the Democrats relative to the NPV, and Trump is doing abysmally bad among suburban educated whites. It actually swung more Republican as recently as 2008-2012.

I wouldn’t say it’s solidly Republican anymore like it was staring in the 90’s, but it’s not a toss-up, either.

[TheReckoning]

I could see a map like this where TX is the decisive state. There is a case that this election might've been the last hurrah for Democrats in the rust belt, Biden was hand picked by voters because he was the canidate who could win back the WWC and flip the big 3, and he only narrowly one all 3 states from stalling rural trends and pushing suburban areas to their limit, and juicing just enough votes from the shrinking urban centers. If the rust belt is off the table, and if FL and NC are titanium tilt R forever, the next most plausible win would be TX.

I do think NC is officially going to fall in 2024.

It swung a whopping 0% this year relative to the NPV. Based on what do you think it’ll fall, barring a sizable NPV win for the Democrats that year (which isn’t impossible)?

[TheReckoning]

I could see a map like this where TX is the decisive state. There is a case that this election might've been the last hurrah for Democrats in the rust belt, Biden was hand picked by voters because he was the canidate who could win back the WWC and flip the big 3, and he only narrowly one all 3 states from stalling rural trends and pushing suburban areas to their limit, and juicing just enough votes from the shrinking urban centers. If the rust belt is off the table, and if FL and NC are titanium tilt R forever, the next most plausible win would be TX.

I do think NC is officially going to fall in 2024.

It swung a whopping 0% this year relative to the NPV. Based on what do you think it’ll fall, barring a sizable NPV win for the Democrats that year (which isn’t impossible)?

Trump's margin of victory still shrank by more than half between 2016 and 2020.

In an election where the country as a whole shifts to left a couple of points and the margin was tiny anyways, that means nothing. It doesn’t mean Democrats can’t win it, but no reason to be tilting that way now.

[TheReckoning]

I could see a map like this where TX is the decisive state. There is a case that this election might've been the last hurrah for Democrats in the rust belt, Biden was hand picked by voters because he was the canidate who could win back the WWC and flip the big 3, and he only narrowly one all 3 states from stalling rural trends and pushing suburban areas to their limit, and juicing just enough votes from the shrinking urban centers. If the rust belt is off the table, and if FL and NC are titanium tilt R forever, the next most plausible win would be TX.

I do think NC is officially going to fall in 2024.

It swung a whopping 0% this year relative to the NPV. Based on what do you think it’ll fall, barring a sizable NPV win for the Democrats that year (which isn’t impossible)?

Trump's margin of victory still shrank by more than half between 2016 and 2020.

In an election where the country as a whole shifts to left a couple of points and the margin was tiny anyways, that means nothing. It doesn’t mean Democrats can’t win it, but no reason to be tilting that way now.

Comparing states to the NPV is overrated.

Because? In this context, it means that Biden would have to increase on his NPV margin in 2024 to win NC. Don’t see why that line of think is flawed.

[TheReckoning]

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.

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.

[TheReckoning]

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.

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.
 

[TheReckoning]

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.

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. In comparison, CA swung 3 points more to the GOP relative to the NPV. Doesn’t mean that CA will be competitive in a couple of election cycles.

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

[TheReckoning]

I'm really getting tired of the "muh uniquely bad" takes with respect to like every single state. Trump won against the odds in 2016 and kept it shockingly close in 2020. It seems just as likely to me that Trump is a uniquely good fit for the Republican coalition as opposed to uniquely bad, and we'll have to wait until at least 2024 to see with any measure of confidence which one is the case.

Trump got less votes than Romney as a share of the electorate twice, and you think he’s a good fit for the GOP?