Recently, my allergist decided to use the first half of my appointment to ask about when, if ever, Democrats will flip Texas. I have been asked at grocery stores, board game clubs, and my youngest cousin’s bat mitzvah. I am making a little series of my favorite graphs from work to answer the question from a variety of data based lenses.
First, I think it would be good to do a little background on Texas. I haven’t seen a Democratic victory statewide in Texas in my lifetime. In fact the last victory was in 1994! The Texas GOP has been pretty effective at shutting Democrats out for quite a long time. However, there is reason for hope.
Something notable happened last year! For the first time for as far back as I have reliable data, there are more Democrats than Republicans in Texas according to our modeling. This value is calculated by modeling the number of expected Democratic and Republican votes should everyone vote and subtracting the Democratic total sum from the Republican total sum. Additionally, as a comparison point, I show the perennial swing state: Florida. My analysis suggests that Florida Democrats will likely have a smaller electorate advantage than Texas in the 2024 election.
This is meaningful because it means if Democrats match GOP turnout we could win a statewide election in Texas for the first time in decades! The details of how likely that is and if it would work are a bit dicey. That will likely be a my next post in this series. Thank you for reading!
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