San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas remains a red state, but its ‘blue spine’ is growing
Texas remains a red state, but the 2020 presidential election showed again that there is a blue spine running through it.
And it’s growing.
For the third consecutive election cycle, Democrats saw their advantage over Republicans grow in the 21 counties along Interstate 35, allowing them to further chip into the Republican dominance that has lasted for nearly three decades. The result was Joe Biden won over 46 percent of the vote in Texas, joining Texas native Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter as the only Democrats to get over 45 percent of the vote in Texas in a presidential race in 56 years.
A key reason for Biden’s performance in Texas is what is happening along I-35 from Laredo, through San Antonio and Austin and up to the Dallas Metroplex.
It’s not a mystery. U.S. Census data shows a shift toward a more diverse, better educated and wealthier electorate since 2010, changes that favor Democrats.
Along I-35, Biden flipped traditionally red counties like Tarrant, Williamson and Hays, and did vastly better in Travis, Dallas and Bexar counties than Hillary Clinton did just four years earlier.
This is a major departure from the way Texans in those counties voted over the previous two decades. Back in 2014, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican at the
top of the ticket, won the same counties by a combined 346,000 votes.
Two years later. Clinton would win that stretch by just over 116,000 votes over Donald Trump. Then 2018 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke won it by 440,000 votes over U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Biden pushed his lead in the blue spine this year to nearly 500,000 votes.
That is a swing of more than 800,000 votes from Republicans to Democrats and explains why, along with Harris County’s march to solid blue, the state has seen increasingly competitive races at the top of the ballot since GeorgeW. Bush won Texas by 22 percentage points in 2004.
“The blue spine exists,” said Antonio Arellano, the executive director of Jolt, a voter engagement and advocacy group aimed particularly
“The blue spine exists. It’s only going to keep expanding and it will soon be insurmountable for Republicans.”
Antonio Arellano, executive director of Jolt, a voter engagement and advocacy group
at young Latinos. “It’s only going to keep expanding, and it will soon be insurmountable for Republicans.”
GOP success in border
But if Texas Republican leaders are worried, they aren’t showing it.
“This election cycle proved that Texas is a not a battleground state,” The Republican Party of Texas said in a statement about the election results.
Instead, Texas GOP chairman Allen West and the party focused more on how they’ve made gains in the Rio Grande Valley that suggest Texas is becoming redder. West said Republicans are going to continue to build on that momentum and make the party even stronger.
Nevertheless, Democratic momentum in communities along Interstate 35 continues to grow. Two years after the Democrats flipped 12 Texas House Districts and two Texas Senate districts, the party flipped another Texas Senate in this year’s election. State Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton, had won the seat in a 2018 special election. Despite winning 13 of the 17 counties in the expansive District 19 that runs from San Antonio to Big Bend National Park, Flores lost re-election because of a massive Democratic vote surge in Bexar County.
Democrats now hold 13 seats in the Texas Senate, enough to block any bills from making it to the floor of the Senate for a vote.
The impact of growing Latino populations and efforts to register them to vote are big reasons for the shift along I-35. Arellano said 2020 saw about 500,000 Latino voters register and vote for the first time in Texas. And it’s along the blue spine that they are having a major impact. Arellano said his group’s data show Biden won almost 80 percent of the Latino vote in Dallas, Tarrant and Travis counties.
At the same time the I-35 corridor is getting more Democratic, Republicans are facing challenges with their on base of support inWest Texas and East Texas. Those regions simply are not growing as fast as I-35. In the Panhandle, the 27 counties with a combined 250,000 voters saw just a4 percent increase in voter registrations over the past four years. But Hays and Williamson counties, with a combined 500,000 voters, registrations have grown a combined 25 percent over the same period.