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DALLAS — 2020 has been the year of the voter in Texas—and it’s only just begun.
When early voting closed here on Friday, 799,437 people in Dallas County had cast their ballots—nearly 50,000 more than voted for president in the whole 2016 election.
It’s the same in high-profile urban counties across the state: Harris County (Houston), Travis County (Austin), and Bexar County (San Antonio) all saw more people vote early this year than in all of 2016, setting records for turnout along the way.
That boost in voters, especially in Texas’ deep-blue cities—combined with polls that show the race for president to be within just a couple of points, or even tied—have given Democrats and Joe Biden a burst of optimism that this might just be the year when Texas finally goes blue, knocking off President Donald Trump in the process.
But political experts in the state say the odds are still against it.
“Democrats are indeed increasingly competitive in a broader swath of Texas,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “But I will still be surprised if Trump doesn’t carry the state by around three points.”
That’s in part because while voter turnout has been high in deep-blue cities, a closer look at the figures shows it hasn’t all been good news. For one thing, turnout is lagging in the crucial border counties, where Democrats have been hoping for a big swing in Latino votes for Biden.
Instead, a recent New York Times poll of Hispanic voters in Texas found, Biden is doing slightly worse than Hillary Clinton seemingly fared in 2016 (analysts aren’t exactly sure), leading Trump by just 57 percent to 34 percent.
Meanwhile, the high voter turnout has been a statewide phenomenon, including in many of the red districts that have long kept the state solid Republican.
Indeed, among the five counties in the state with the largest upticks in voter turnout this year, three were won by Trump in 2016: Williamson County, outside Austin (Trump won it by 10 percent); Denton County, outside Dallas (Trump by 20); and Comal County, outside San Antonio (Trump by 50).
Jim Riddlesperger, a professor of political science at Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, has previously predicted that Texas would go blue in 2024, and he still thinks that’s right.
“What we’re seeing here is a more enthusiastic electorate, across the board,” he said. “I tend to think the early voting probably is slightly advantageous for Biden, but I suspect Election Day voting probably will benefit Trump. The big question is, How many voters are left out there?”
This wouldn’t be the first time Democrats got their hopes up about taking Texas only to end up sorely disappointed. In 2018, many national pundits thought popular Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke might defeat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz amid a national anti-Trump blue wave. In the end, O'Rourke fell short, but not by very much: He ended up just 2 percent shy of Cruz's tally, a difference of about 200,000 votes.
As in previous years, O’Rourke carried the cities and lost the rural parts of the state—more than 60% of his total vote came from five urban centers. The difference that year came down largely to those suburban districts, which O’Rourke generally lost, but by much less than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
This year, those suburbs have continued along the same demographic and ideological trends: increasingly young, diverse, and politically liberal. Voters there have also been uniquely disenchanted by Trump’s personal style of politics.
That means that Biden, like O’Rourke, doesn’t necessarily have to win them to carry the state; he just needs to do somewhat better than Clinton did in 2016. And regardless of what happens this year, it’s good news for Democrats into the future.
“Some of these changes are permanent, some of them are not,” SMU’s Jillson says. “At some point, the Republican majority [in Texas] is going to be unsustainable demographically, unless the party changes.”