How Trump Saved Texas, In One Stunning Image

MAGA Capturing Minnesota, Virginia, and New Jersey wouldn't have made up for the loss of Texas - and we were much closer to requiring such a scenario than you may have thought.

One of the most pleasant surprises of President Trump’s 2024 victory was his 13.7% victory in Texas, a crushing blow to decades of Democrat fantasies of turning the state blue and eliminating any pathway for a MAGA candidate to win the Oval Office. Trump had won the state in 2016 by just 9.0% (807,179) and 5.6% in 2020’s cheat fest (621,221), putting the state a full ten points left of where Mitt Romney had won it in 2012.

Urbanization, transplants, cheating, and populist Republican views were all blamed, and on trend lines alone, it appeared possible Texas was heading for a photo finish at some point in the decade. Here is how I put it in my 2024 re-release of Texas will be Blue by 2032 – and the GOP is to Blame:

Texas Republicans, after decades of spiking the football, and with Rick Perry calling Texas the “political burial ground” of the Democrat Party, are now running scared and playing prevent defense. It took one close call in 2018 and a third-world election in 2020 to unravel the stoic demeanor of conservatives in a state once thought impossible to flip back to the Democrats (in case you didn’t know, Texas was once part of the solid South politically, and didn’t become a Republican mainstay presidentially until 1980).

I was certainly concerned Texas was going to slip out of the fold. At no point in the 2024 cycle did I expect Trump to lose the state, but my initial analysis gave room for a win as low as 3.5%:

With Trump’s enthusiasm with Latino voters and the slam dunk surge of conservative and Republican voters alike on the way, in a worst-case scenario, while things may be ugly and fraud may persist, Trump is on pace to win Texas no matter what, by 3.5 to 4.5% in a worst-case scenario. This trend of another 1-2 points left can be sent in reverse by outperforming expectations, especially in places Republicans should be dropping every last nickel on – like Harris, Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant, Denton, and Collin Counties. There aren’t enough voters in the Rio Grande Valley to offset the massive, more likely to vote populations settling into the affluent suburban areas near Austin and Dallas.

I think it is most likely, once the dust settles, that Trump winds up with a certified victory in Texas between 7 and 11 points; however, once Trump is gone – my grim reminder persists – Texas will be blue by 2032 if major work is not done to dent Democrat margins in a handful of sprawling and rapidly urbanizing counties.

Read that last sentence again – and there you have it on the conditional. If major work is not done…

Texas’s Democrat hopes are pinned on four major urban counties: Dallas, Harris (metro Houston), Bexar (metro San Antonio), and Travis, the left-wing cesspool that serves as a magnet attracting all regional leftists to their beloved entertainment and debauchery center, Austin. Those are the only counties that produced presidential margins of greater than 100,000 against Trump in 2016 and 2020, and the Democrats’ game is to bloat them up as much as possible to blot out the other 250 counties, which are overwhelmingly Republican as a whole. Here is how well they were doing that from 2012 to 2020:

2012 - A Romney Blowout

2016 - TIghter than You’d Like, But Whatever

2020 - Panic Time

2012, 2016, and 2020 cycles on the Texas Sponge Map

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As you can see, the four big blues were pushing far into the Texas frontier and were one jump away from having their fifth pet project, El Paso, up against a few holdouts like Texarkana, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls in a race to the finish line.

Then, it happened – my final call of Trump +8 minimum got massively overrun because he crushed it with the standard Republican suburban coalition, maxed out the frontier vote, hammered the new transplants home, and most devastatingly for Democrats, outright won the Latino vote, winning counties like Hidalgo, Starr, Cameron, Willacy, Maverick, and Webb, which haven’t backed a Republican nominee for decades – or ever.

Here is what that did to the sponge map of Texas:

Whereas, in 2020, Dallas had blotted out the entire Metroplex, Harris (Houston) had made its way down the Coastal Bend, Bexar (San Antonio) pushed itself into far South Hispanic Texas, and Travis (Austin) had made its way into the Permian Basin – this time around the map looks a lot more like 2012’s, and Trump took a lot less damage from El Paso and no damage from the Rio Grande Valley:

For now, and for decades to come, Democrat presidential hopes in Texas are crushed, and by the hand of the man they thought would turn Texas blue with his rhetoric. MAGA Americans could have picked up New Jersey, Minnesota, and Virginia and still wouldn’t have been able to make up for the loss of Texas; therefore, it isn’t much of a reach to say that Trump’s crushing performance in Texas, as under the radar as it seems, has preserved the future of the last great political hope of the American experiment.

Texas is now very unlikely to be Blue by 2032, and I’m happy my conditions were met to prevent that horrible fate.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.