Four years ago, Joe Biden came within a few points of taking the state that, for decades, has been something of a spiritual home for conservatism in general and the Republican Party specifically. In fact, in 2020 – for the first time in over 50 years – Texas was among the ten closest states, notably closer than former bellwether Ohio, and its six largest cities all went for Biden.

It’s important to travel back to this point, because it was relatively undercovered in the fallout from the 2020 election, but is key in assessing where the state stands and where it is going. This impressive overperformance reflects a confluence of factors, some temporal, others demographic, and many unique to the electoral and cultural behemoth that is Texas. But, discerning whether Texas’ leftward swing was a result of longstanding trends, the unpopularity of then-President Donald Trump, or the concerted efforts of Democrats to put the state on the map in the aftermath of 2016, is not as simple as presenting three theories and building them up. As would be expected from the second-largest and perhaps most important state in the country, there’s no one answer, and any attempt to simplify the race in Texas as clearly favoring one narrative or another is obscuring reality. So let’s dive in.

We’ll set the scene with the state’s most evident trend – triumphant urban growth. Six Texan cities have a population of over 500,000: Houston (2.3 million), San Antonio (1.5 million), Dallas (1.3 million), Austin (1 million), Fort Worth (1 million), and El Paso (700,000). Texas is experiencing a lot of growth in its large urban areas, particularly in Austin and Fort Worth, and all six of these cities and their respective primary counties were won by Biden four years ago. In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the county since Texas’ own Lyndon Johnson in 1964. This makes a big difference in Texas, because Texas is actually one of the more urbanized states in the nation, and it explains much of the great leap taken by Democrats in the state in the last decade, given Barack Obama lost the Lone Star State by about 12% and 16% in 2008 and 2012, respectively (relative to his national margin, this made Texas about 19 points to the right of the country in both elections). 

Numbers are fuzzy, but roughly 500,000 people have moved to Texas every year over the last four years. If you assume, all other things equal (and adjusting for partisan lean), that just 60% of them are more liberal (given the liberal cities are experiencing the higher growth rate), that’s an increase in the Democratic margin by around 400,000 – that alone would shift the state about four points towards Democrats. 

Still, Texas is a big state, and even all of these shifts only bring the state so far. So what’s keeping a lid on Democratic growth in the state? 

For one, the starting point. No matter which way you cut it, Texas is clearly a Republican-leaning state, and continues to be. Biden only got somewhat close after he won the national popular vote by a relatively large 4.5% (the second-largest presidential margin in the last six elections). Even if Texas shifted four more points because of hardy urban growth, it’d still take a stunning Democratic overperformance to eke out the narrowest possible win. Second, though urban growth buoys Democratic vote share, the “red wall” of rural Texas has proven remarkably resilient. Sure, these voters are increasingly making up fewer and fewer of the total vote, but for the time being, they are decisively more Republican-leaning than urban or suburban areas (in 2020, rural areas in the state were about 3-1 in favor of Trump, whereas cities were about 4-3 in favor of Biden).

Texas also has a large Latino population, which may have shifted to become more Republican over the last few years. Though Biden won 58% of Latinos in the state back in 2020, he notably underperformed Hillary Clinton’s performance with these voters, particularly in poorer and Latino-heavy areas in South Texas. These areas became the epicenter of a notable shift towards the right, and the continuance of this trend in the 2022 midterms suggests a more consistent pattern. Largely, this is attributed to concerns about immigration, the economy, and jobs – all issues which Trump tends to poll better on, even in this cycle. However, Texas’ sheer size obfuscates this to some degree: Biden (and Democrats generally) still did well with urban Latinos, and it’s unreasonable to lump the entire demographic into one simple narrative or even one grand trend. This exemplifies possibly the most important characteristic of assessing a giant state like Texas: small assumptions matter less, and reading too much into a notable trend one place is a fool’s errand, at least at the presidential level.

Think of it this way: Texas is about six times bigger, both physically and in terms of population, than Alabama – so imagine taking political interests of voters (even those who share defining demographic features) across Alabama, plus Mississippi, plus Tennessee, then throw in Georgia. The economic and political concerns of any group of voters across an area of that size will be distinct, sometimes dramatically, and that matters. Counterintuitively, this makes Texas easier to assess, as we can smooth out our assumptions about the state at large as these interests push against each other and we can assume less likelihood of a massive statewide shift. So, even if we assume that concerns about immigration drive Texans slightly more rightward this cycle, we’re still probably pretty close to our starting point.

We’ve spilled ink talking about a future “blue Texas” a couple times before, sketching out the state’s trajectory given current trends and extrapolating forward to make the case for a future where Texas becomes the ultimate tipping point state. The throughline of these pieces is that, even if time and demography suggests that Texas will peak in political import at the same time it’s primed to become the largest state by population – combining political relevance with cultural relevance – Texas is definitely not there yet.

And yet, something’s bothering us about Texas – though the state’s polling average remains pro-Trump, it’s by far less than you’d expect given the apparent tightness of the national race. Many polls have Trump up by around eight points. Eight points is enough to deprioritize the state for Democrats, who would benefit from strategically spending resources in narrower states, though it’s still the kind of margin that would have excited Democrats only ten years ago (Mitt Romney led Barack Obama by around 15-19 points in the last few polls of the state in 2012). But many polls, even when Biden was still going to be on the ballot, also only had Trump up by around five or six points, in line with Biden’s 2020 performance… and tantalizingly close to being in play. Here’s what’s giving us pause: given 2024’s tight national environment, Biden’s unpopularity, and Trump’s frequent lead in polls (all factors which were not exactly present in 2020…), why does Texas seem to be so much closer than it should be, all things considered?

It’s possible the polls are missing a lot of the entrenched Republican resistance, providing a firewall in the state. Heavily Latino and more rural areas may be poorly represented in polls; if these areas have shifted disproportionately rightward, then it’s likely the polls are overestimating the Democratic vote share. Polls were off by a bit in the state in 2020 (they tended to suggest Trump led by only around 1% there), but were pretty close in 2022 (if still slightly underestimating Republicans), so we’re inclined to nudge the rating a bit more than a point towards Republicans as a result of the “red wall” rural areas.

It’s also possible that issues like abortion, an issue which Texas thrust itself into the center of, are driving a backlash against Republicans. Though there’s not a lot of evidence for this (it certainly did not manifest in 2022, for example), it is telling that Texans by and large overwhelmingly oppose the state’s near-absolute abortion ban and generally favor less strict abortion laws. Still, 2022 was a slightly-Republican-leaning midterm year, and it’s at least notable that incumbent Texas Governor Greg Abbott (and who was reelected with a near 11% margin of victory) probably slightly underperformed the state’s partisan lean (of note, he did worse in 2022 than he did in 2018, despite 2018 being a year that strongly favored Democrats up and down the ballot). As more stories about the consequences of Texas’ abortion law have come to the forefront of the national conversation, there is a case to be made that as time goes on, these issues have become more salient, and it may move the needle – if only slightly – in the state. 

Then there are less obvious things that could help Democrats too. The Biden administration’s investment in renewable energy delivered billions of dollars to Texas, already (perhaps surprisingly) a titan in the green energy space, and it’s possible those investments ultimately pay off in delivering some votes. The fractured state Republican Party faces staff shortages, fewer funds, and has more closely tied itself to the far-right, which – even though it won’t make much difference at the top of the ballot – may turn off disaffected Republicans. And the well-funded Harris operation may give her a leg up in advertising and canvassing in the otherwise expensive state to campaign in, drawing Trump’s attention to where he should be favored.

Those are each worth some consideration, but are unlikely to deliver the state in their own right for one side or another. And that brings us back to what we’ve been saying for years: Texas has a lot to offer Democrats, but it will take some time or serious effort – or both – to get there. For now, the state would be in play only in an overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning cycle, one where the generic ballot suggests a margin favoring Democrats by seven or eight points. This cycle does not appear to be one of those, meaning that Texas remains tentatively, but firmly, on the Republican side of the ledger. It’d take a major polling error or unforeseen demographic shift from one election to another to hand the state to Harris; these are things that are always possible, but are still unlikely to happen.