Democrats came too close in Texas in 2000 and they also did in Ted Cruz’s last senate reelection run. But in an exclusive for LifeZette, Dr. Tim Blessing, one of America’s foremost political analysts, states the Democrats may not get close enough for a win. The Republicans have a secret weapon from a surprising source.

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Blessing: The last time Texas voted for a Democrat for President was 1976. The chances of a Democrat winning a state-wide election appear to be more than zero but are definitely low. So why am I asking whether the Democrats are losing a state they have not won in a long, long, time?

To the outside observer, the Democrats might seem to have good reasons to feel that “somewhere down the line” a Democratic candidate will finally push his or her nose over the line first in some election. Donald Trump received just slightly over 52 % of the state’s vote in 2020—making Texas one of the tightest of the states that Trump won. In 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke managed to hold Republican Ted Cruz to a razor thin victory in an off-year Senatorial race. The Dallas and Houston suburb are turning deep blue and growing quickly. Demographically, Texas is growing “browner.” What could go wrong? The map below shows what could go wrong for the Democrats.

Using cluster analysis, a statistical method for grouping together items that share common characteristics, thirty-one counties near the US-Mexican border showed a pronounced shift—an average of nineteen percent—toward the GOP at the presidential level. Two other counties near Texas’s northern border showed a similar shift.

Three important details stand out. First, these are the Texas counties that showed the greatest shift toward Trump. Second, with the exception of the two counties near the Oklahoma border, these counties would be the ones through which illegal immigrants would be more likely to flow than most other Texas counties. Third, and perhaps most importantly for analyzing Democratic chances, twenty-eight of these counties were majority-minority counties. The average percentage of the population claiming Hispanic heritage in these counties was 67.9 percent; the median percentage claiming Hispanic heritage was 69.2 percent. Six of the counties that shifted so strongly Republican were over ninety percent Hispanic.

Obviously, Trump’s (or the Republicans’) policies so met the interests of these counties that they shifted massively toward the GOP. I mentioned these numbers to a colleague of mine and she first responded that the white population in these counties must have voted together en bloc against Mexicans (I presume she meant Mexican immigrants) and that such bloc voting produced the shift. While this is a nice simple answer that fits stereotypes prevalent among many elites and pundits, the numbers simply do not fit such an explanation. Counties that have such a high proportion of Hispanics simply do not have enough white voters to create large shifts of the type my colleague suggested—even if white infants had been allowed to vote. Webb and Maverick Counties, for instance, are over ninety-five percent Hispanic. Webb shifted towards Trump by fifteen percent and Maverick shifted towards Trump by twenty-four percent. It is to be doubted that whites could have magically turned their four percent share of the population in both counties into rises four and six times greater than their proportion of the population.

It is possible, of course, that some type of voter suppression helped to produce the rise in the Republican proportion of the votes in these thirty-three counties. A T-test to compare the ratio of change in voter turnout between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, however, shows that there are no statistical differences between the rises in turnout in these mostly border counties and the other Texas counties. Texas had a considerable increase in turnout in most parts of the state in 2020 when contrasted to 2016 and the counties that moved Republican so strongly shared equally in that increase. In short, there is no evidence of voter suppression.
The shifts in presidential voting, therefore, do not seem to directly related to race or ethnicity. If the voters in these majority-minority counties believed that Donald Trump held views that were against them because they were brown, they still seem to have seen Trump as better than Biden—and by a fair amount. The most likely explanation at this time, though, is that the voters in these counties simply preferred Trump and his policies. Given their clustering near the US-Mexican border, and in the absence of polls, it seems quite likely that these voters preferred Trump’s immigration policies to those espoused by the Democrats and that proximity to the border—and illegal immigration—played a significant role in their movement toward the Republicans.

Could the Democrats’ policies on immigration cost them their chance in Texas—and potentially their chances with Hispanic voters? These numbers demonstrate that there are grounds to believe that, at the least, such counties as are being most impacted by illegal immigration, regardless of their demographics, prefer Trumpian policies to Democratic policies.