Trump carries Texas for a second time
President Donald Trump proved Tuesday that Texas is still plenty red.
Despite Democrats’ vows to flip the state blue for the first time in decades, Trump was poised to win more than 230 of the state’s 254 counties, a victory he had been predicting for over year. As of 11:30 p.m., Trump had a 6 percentagepoint lead over Biden in what promised to be the 11th consecutive presidential election in which Republicans have carried the Lone Star State.
When polls showed Texas close this summer, Trump told supporters during a trip to West Texas in July not to believe it.
“We’re many points up,” Trump said then.
His confidence was based on the oil and gas industry that employed nearly 430,000 Texans in 2019, which he repeatedly warned would be in further jeopardy if Democrat Joe Biden were to win the election.
From a strategic standpoint, the Trump campaign said Democrats underestimated the
ground game Republicans had developed in Texas since Trump first took office.
Samantha Cotten, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign in Texas, said Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation was light years ahead of the Biden campaign’s. She said Trump’s team made 10 million voter contacts and had thousands of volunteers mobilized statewide.
“Bottom Line: Trump Victory’s permanent, data-driven ground game cannot bematched by Joe Biden’s anemic efforts in the Lone Star State,” Cotten said.
But the Biden campaign took a more aggressive approach in Texas than any Democrat in more than 30 years, sending Biden’s wife, Jill, to the state two weeks ago, followed by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the final stretch to campaign in FortWorth, Houston and the border.
The Trump campaign had insisted it didn’t need to send either Trump or Vice President Mike Pence to Texas in the closing days, convinced Trump had the state in hand. Instead, they focused on more traditional battleground states.
On a conference call with reporters lastweek, formerGov. Rick Perry said the long-rumored blue wave is nothing more than a pipe dream for Democrats.
“He’s going to carry Texas, I think, rather handily,” Perry said.
Trump did lose four of the five largest major Texas metropolitan areas but won enough suburban counties such as Collin, Denton and Montgomery to offset those losses.
The only positive for Democrats may be that Biden, if he keeps his defeat to 5 or 6 points, will have come closer to winning Texas than any Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1996.
One of Biden’s biggest counties early on was Bexar County. In 2016, Trump lost the county by just over 79,000 votes to Hillary Clinton. But this year, Biden was winning the county by 131,000 votes. In Harris County, Biden was leading Trump by 188,000 votes — bigger than the 162,000 vote margin Hillary Clinton carried in the county in 2016.
The intensity of the race could be seen at polling sites around Houston on Tuesday.
Outside theWestGrayMulti-Service Center, Biden and Trump supporters on either side of the street yelled, waved flags and cheered or booed passing cars.
Luis Ruiz, a 32-year-old attorney, had arrived at 3 p.m. wearing fake pearls in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He didn’t know most people there, but quickly made friends and stood next to 51-yearold Eduardo Elizondo. Elizondo
had a Biden flag he’d attached to a makeshift metal pole.
“It’s good to see,” he said, gesturing to the Biden crowd.
Across the street, Jessica Teachout, 37, stood in cowboy boots and sunglasses on the bed of her boyfriend’s truck, waving a Trump flag and blasting music.
“It’s a party,” she said. “Americans are ready to take back their country.”
Houston’s Tommy Price Jr. said he’s missed some elections in the past, but there was no way the 39year-oldwas going to miss this one.
“We need a change,” Price said as he emerged from voting at the Sunnyside Community Center. “Seems like a lot more racism and hate going on. We need to do something different.”
He’s not alone. He said many of his friends who had never voted before were determined to get to the polls this year.
Biden and his advisers clearly thought they saw an opening. The decision to dispatch Harris to Texas in the closing weekend marked the first time in 30 years a Democratic presidential campaign was actively campaigning in Texas in the final month of the campaign. They also spent money TV ads and digital ads targeting Texas voters.
Trump carried Texas by 9 percentage points in 2016 over Clinton. That was the closest race for a Republican presidential candidate in Texas since 1996.
Despite the defeat, Democrats were still celebrating the increase in voter turnout and energy they thought were around the Biden campaign.