Increasingly blue Harris County could help swing Texas to Biden
Texas is not the sort of place national candidates visit just before Election Day or where political ads play on a loop during popular TV shows.
And, yet, here we are: Texas has been declared “in play,” with some polls rating the long solidly red state as a tossup between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
A key reason is decades of rapid growth, as a strong economy drew millions of residents from across the country to Texas, most of them to urban areas — and more residents means more voters.
Harris County alone has grown its voter roll by about 292,000 since the 2016 election, equivalent to absorbing all of registered voters in Galveston County and tacking on another 70,000.
To earn a shot at Texas’ 38 electoral votes, Biden would need to combine a blowout here with sweeps in the state’s other large metros to offset Trump’s expected dominance in rural areas. If that occurs, the Houston area’s newly minted voters likely will play a key
role.
A Houston Chronicle analysis of precinct-level voting patterns shows the Houston area’s growth has moved in tandem with Democrats’ widening advantage here in recent elections.
In general, the faster a Harris County voting precinct added registered voters from 2016 to this fall, the more likely 2018 Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke was to improve on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s performance in that precinct two years before. This is notable partly because Clinton, too, won the county by 12 points, improving greatly on Barack Obama’s razor-thin victories in the two prior presidential cycles.
The same shift occurred in the county’s six state representative races contested by both parties in 2016 and 2018, and in the share of voters who chose to vote a straight ticket for either party in those two election cycles.
And it is not just Harris County. Some of Texas’ fastest-growing counties, such as Williamson County in Central Texas and Collin and Denton counties up north, saw major swings toward O’Rourke in 2018.
Harris County data also show the newly registered voters are younger, and polls show young voters have preferred Biden to Trump throughout the campaign. A recent Texas poll by the New York Times and Siena College found Biden leading by 22 points among voters under 30, while Trump had a 12-point edge among those 65 and up.
A key driver of Harris County’s leftward shift is its ever-increasing diversity, said Richard Murray, a University of Houston political science professor who has studied local voting trends for decades. That is apparent, Murray said, in precincts where newhomes are being built, which often are inhabited by nonwhite residents who recently moved into the county.
“We’re joining Dallas County as a landslide county, and a lot of that’s just the demographics,” Murray said. “We just have more voters who are people of color.”
‘Math is unavoidable’
Though racial and ethnic data were not available for Harris County’s new registered voters, the county’s pronounced demographic shifts indicate white voters make up a minority of those registering to vote here in recent years, Murray said.
Polls show Black and Latino likely voters consistently have favored Biden by wide margins.
“What we don’t have, since 2000, is virtually any net growth of Anglos,” Murray said. “Overall, the math is unavoidable. If you’re adding, say, 500,000 more voters since then, most of them are not Anglo becausewe have had no net growth.”
Harris County’s voter roll grew incrementally younger over the last four years, with the median age falling from 46 to 45. And though the overall voter roll grew by about 292,000, or 12 percent, about 642,000 people on the list were not registered here in 2016; the median age of these newly listed voters is 32.
Republican media strategist Chris Beavers took no issue with an analysis linking fast-growing areas to a blue shift from 2016 to 2018, but he questioned whether that trend will outlast Trump’s time in office.
“Look, in 2016 we lost some Republicans voting Democrat at the top of ticket. That’s no secret,” he said. “Having said that, I’m not sure that in what I would call ‘traditional cycles’ that would be that way. I don’t think the Republican Party has permanently lost the Republicans that we lost in ’16.”
As for the county’s increasing diversity, Beavers said his work this year with former county treasurer and Houston mayoral candidate Orlando Sanchez’s Texas Latino Conservatives group has led him to expect Trump to earn a larger share of Latino votes in Texas this year than he did four years ago.
To see how growth is driving political change in Harris County, consider the State Street Apartments, a 198-unit complex next to downtown Houston.
The tiny voting precinct that includes the building was home to just a handful of voters when the first tenants signed leases four years ago. Now146 people— with a median age of 29 — are registered to vote there. In this year’s primaries, 25 of them cast a Democratic ballot; no one voted in the GOP primary.
Aiming to be close to the bustle of the downtown scene, Dr. Sharon Ogidan signed a lease in the building last year after finishing her medical residency and getting a job at a clinic in The Woodlands. The 28-year-old Dallas native has not seen any political signs at her complex but said the neighbors she has met mostly are young and ethnically diverse.
Weary of polarization under Trump and hoping Democrats can deliver reforms to lower drug prices, give more people access to health care and better manage the pandemic, Ogidan voted for Biden.
“I wanted us to get to a place where we can come together as a country again, hopefully some healing,” Ogidan said.
Not just the urban core
Three-quarters of the county’s 200 fastest-growing precincts are outside Loop 610. Those precincts added 140,000 voters since 2016, compared within the 29,000 added within the Loop.
And though O’Rourke most exceeded Clinton’s margins inside the Loop, the trend clearly held in the outlying precincts, too — he posted a 9-point lead over Sen. Ted Cruz there, compared with Clinton’s 2-point edge over Trump two years before. Democrats improved their showing, too, in the outlying precincts in the six local state House races both parties contested, with 8 percent more voters in those areas casting a straight-Democratic ticket in 2018 than in 2016, more than double the GOP uptick in straight-ticket ballots.
Take two neighboring precincts in Katy at the Grand Parkway and Interstate10, where homebuilders have spent years turning prairie into houses and the count of registered voters has more than tripled in four years.
Trump won a narrow majority in the area in 2016; that year, three-quarters of the precincts’ voters who participated in primaries chose the Republican ballot.
Two years later, population growth helped both O’Rourke and Cruz earn hundreds more votes than Trump or Clinton had — but the final tallies favored O’Rourke by more than 5 points. Of the area’s voters who participated in this year’s primaries, 58 percent pulled the Democratic ballot.
The home Joel Santos-Maldonado bought in the Elyson development in Katy did not exist in 2016. The 37-year-old Puerto Rico native and his wife, Marisel, moved in two years ago, baby in tow, to be closer to Santos-Maldonado’s work as an engineer.
The couple voted on the first day of early voting this month. That more Democratic voters are calling the area home did not surprise Santos-Maldonado, who voted for Biden.
“I would imagine so, just because of the demographics,” he said. “The people here are mostly younger couples with children.”
Renee Cross, senior director of the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, said newly registered voters are especially key for Democrats along the border and in big counties where they enjoy even wider margins than in Harris, such as Travis and Hidalgo counties, because they have little room to grow their margins among the existing electorate in those areas.
To win Texas, Biden would have to improve on O’Rourke’s margins in the state’s three biggest blue counties, Cross said, though she added there are plenty of other places in the state to find votes.
“It probably wouldn’t even have to be that big a jump in those three — Bexar, Dallas and Harris — in order to pull off a win,” Cross said. “I still think it’s Trump’s state to lose, but on the other hand, I see a lot of possibilities here.”