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In 2018 U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke broke state fundraising records and sparked national attention with his campaign for a Texas Senate seat. The polls never had him as the favorite—FiveThirtyEight gave him a 23 percent chance by Election Day—but it was noteworthy that in Texas a Democrat was even close. Bolstered by the notoriously unlikable Ted Cruz and a national “blue wave,” O’Rourke lost by only 2.6 points. Not bad for an anti-gun Democrat in a seemingly deep-red state.
In hindsight, O’Rourke’s narrow loss was actually the cruelest thing he could’ve done to the Democratic Party. It created a misleading impression that a long-dreamed-of blue Texas was right around the corner. That idea was emboldened in 2020, after Joe Biden lost the state by just 5.5 points. It was a larger loss than O’Rourke’s had been, but it was arguably more impressive when you took into account the more Republican-friendly national environment.
Democrats’ hopes were high, and they held on to them even after taking a step back during the 2022 midterms. Then came Kamala Harris’ 2024 Texas wipeout, when she lost to Donald Trump by 13.7 points. It was a massive regression, and it felt familiar. For years, optimistic Democrats—braced by near misses—had promised a blue Texas over the horizon. And, once again, when the big moment arrived, the state apparently returned to a deep-red hue.
Not only did this seemingly destroy any hope that Texas was trending blue, but a core part of the blue Texas theory—that Hispanic and Latino voters would carry Democrats across the finish line—had been debunked. Trump won 55 percent of Latino voters in the state, a stunning swing from his 41 percent share in 2020.
The blue Texas dream is widely scoffed at post-2024, with liberals themselves often the most skeptical of the idea. They’ll say they’ve been promised that the state will flip one too many times, so don’t you dare try to get their hopes up again. Conservatives, meanwhile, appear to see blue Texas as a total joke; whereas Cruz’s 2024 Senate campaign ads took the idea seriously, in 2025 the White House urged Texas legislators to redraw their state’s congressional map in an attempt to grab Republicans five additional seats. It’s a move that conveyed total confidence that Texas would remain in the GOP’s hands.
And so it is with some trepidation that I come to argue that the blue Texas dream is not over. Not only that, but there’s a historical precedent for a state flipping from one party’s bastion to the other’s playground.
Let’s begin with those electoral maps that Republicans redrew this summer, a move that took on additional salience last week after the Supreme Court upheld them for the upcoming election. It’s not clear that this power grab will actually yield the party the five new seats it’s hoping to snag—particularly if the national political environment continues to favor Democrats in 2026. As elections analyst Eli McKown-Dawson noted, two of those five districts aren’t actually safe red: Texas’ 28th District can easily fall in a blue-wave environment, and its 34th could fall too if the Hispanic vote shifts back to Democrats. Given Hispanic and Latino Texans’ status as swing voters and their already-observable leftward shift in the 2025 elections, this hardly seems like a safe bet for the GOP. And considering that the recent Tennessee special election showed a district moving 13 points to the left, these 2024 Texas margins just aren’t that impressive.
But when I talk about blue Texas, I’m talking about something more ambitious than a wave election that flips a few House seats.
Republicans’ moves in Texas suggest an assumption that the state will remain deep red in perpetuity. But it wasn’t so long ago that the party believed it had a megastate in the bag, only to see it flip on them.
Rewind 31 years, and you’ll find a California that had leaned Republican for over a generation. Voters elected not a single Democratic presidential candidate from 1968 to 1988 and only one Democratic governor from 1966 to 1998. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, later famous for repeatedly winning reelection on autopilot, actually lost her first statewide race to a Republican in 1990. Much like O’Rourke’s 2018 defeat, Feinstein’s 3.5-point loss was described by the Oakland Tribune as an “impressive closing campaign” that put her “in the front ranks” in an upcoming 1992 primary for the Senate.
The California of 1990 isn’t a perfect comparison with modern Texas. For one thing, its pro-choice Republican governor, Pete Wilson, started off more moderate than politicians like Greg Abbott and Cruz did. Still, it’s hard not to look at the next gubernatorial election in 1994 and not see some parallels to 2024. 1994 was the year Wilson won reelection by a much larger margin than his first time around, and he did so by tacking notably to the right on immigration. After his victory, he described the race as a sweeping mandate, and other GOP figures in the state certainly agreed: “This is a glorious day to be a Republican,” Wilson’s attorney general told reporters. “We have made a change in America and California that’s going to last a long, long time.”
But a Democrat won the governor’s race four years later, and (give or take one Terminator) the party continued to win that seat for decades to come. Within one generation, Republicans had gone from the clear favorites in statewide elections to candidates barely taken seriously at all. This was not an instant switch but a culmination of a decadeslong trend, one that necessitated many steps forward and plenty of steps back. Colorado and Virginia would go through similar transformations in the 2000s, while Georgia and Arizona are on similar trajectories today. So why is it so hard to imagine Texas, a state that voted Republican by 23 points in 2004 and by only 5.5 points in 2020, going down the same path?
The easiest explanation for all the doomerism is that the changing national environment has created a misleading picture. 2018 was a bluer year nationwide than 2020, which was a bluer year than 2022, which was itself a bluer year than 2024; Democrats’ vote share in Texas declined during this period at least partially because their vote share was declining everywhere. It’s similar to the way Republicans’ California win in ’94 grows less impressive when you remember that as the year of a historic national red-wave midterm. National trends can cloud one’s takeaway from statewide elections; Wilson falsely interpreted his win as a sign that California was fully on board with his increasingly conservative, anti-immigrant platform, and that fundamental misread of his electorate paved the way for a Democrat to win big in 1998.
The other reason for the blue Texas skepticism is that the Democrats’ dominance in California was fueled by its burgeoning Hispanic population. The transition helped contribute to the “emerging Democratic majority” theory, the idea that an increasingly diverse America would usher in an inevitable age of Democratic dominance. The theory was half right: The country has indeed gotten more diverse. But at the same time, many of its minority groups have shifted right. If Hispanic and Latino voters were still casting ballots like they did in 2016 (their estimated 20-point swing from ’16 cost Democrats at least 400,000 votes in ’24), Texas could already be an undeniable swing state; instead, Hispanic voters swung hard for Trump and helped him carry the state with ease.
But while the evolution of the Hispanic vote is a complication in the blue Texas dream, it certainly doesn’t kill it. After all, that transition is similar to what happened with Irish and Italian voting blocs during the mid-20th century. As Vox correspondent Christian Paz put it before the 2024 election, “Hispanic and Latino Americans may simply be following the trends of previous waves of immigrant communities: assimilating, diffusing across the country, and becoming as ideologically and politically diverse as native-born and white Americans are.” Just as Irish and Italian Americans went from reliable Democrats to less-predictable swing voters, so too are Hispanic Americans today. The transition may be messier given the sheer variety of Hispanic voters (hailing from over a dozen different major countries), but the general trend seems clear.
And a demographic that swings in one direction can swing back just as quickly in the other. Nearly all recent polling data shows that Hispanic and Latino voters are souring on Trump, and these numbers have been backed up at least partially in the 2025 election results. Especially in states like New Jersey and Virginia, Latino-heavy districts have shown a major reversion toward Democrats. And as party strategist Chuck Rocha noted in an August interview for the Texas Tribune, the president has shown a unique strength with Hispanic voters that might not be replicable for other Republicans, nor may it help them much in the 2026 midterms. In 2024 Ted Cruz performed 4 to 6 points worse than Trump in the most Hispanic-heavy districts throughout the state; whose coattails will Texas Sen. John Cornyn be able to ride in 2026?
Another common argument against blue Texas is the state’s apparent exodus of liberal voters combined with an influx of conservative voters. While there is a trend of political self-sorting in America that accelerated in the COVID era, the impact this has had on Texas appears overstated. Not only are far more people entering the state than leaving it, but the people entering (primarily young people of diverse backgrounds) are evidently motivated more by job opportunities and cost of living than by partisan politics. It’s also the blue and purple metro areas that are booming in Texas, not the red rural counties. Just as Hispanic residents have been shown to vote more liberal when they live in liberal districts, so too do most other Americans. As long as most people are moving into Texas suburbs and cities, self-sorting migration is likely not enough to reverse the state’s blueward trend on its own.
Perhaps the biggest factor holding back a blue Texas is voter apathy in the state. As the Texas Blue Action website notes with great frustration, the state already has enough registered Democrats to flip most of its recent statewide election results, but many of those registered Democrats aren’t voting. This logic could easily be flipped around on the advocacy group (there are plenty of registered Republicans in the state who don’t vote either), but the general point stands: Voter turnout among Democrats tends to be lower than among Republicans in the state, further hurting Democrats’ chances. Texas has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country, a fact that blue Texas skeptics constantly cite as proof that the state is unflippable.
The obvious counter is to ask why voter apathy is so high in the first place. It can’t be explained away by the state’s restrictive voter policies, as similarly restrictive states, such as Georgia and Florida, regularly see higher turnout. The difference is that those states are perceived as swing states and Texas isn’t. People are more likely to turn out in elections when they think their votes matter, but Texas voters feel as if theirs don’t. And although the state’s Republican voters get at least the satisfaction of being on the winning team, for its Democrats, voting can feel like an undignified, Sisyphean task. What’s the point in showing up if you think you’re just going to lose again and again?
This is why it’s so crucial for Democrats to not give up on Texas: A single win would deal a major blow to the perception that their statewide elections are a foregone conclusion. Much like how Georgia’s surprise 2020 flip led to a boost (relative to the nation) in voter turnout in 2024, a single win could energize Texas Dems’ get-out-the-vote efforts going forward. Both the 2026 state Senate race and gubernatorial race are too far out to say anything for certain, but the national blue-leaning midterm trend will make those contests Democrats’ best chance to win the state in over 30 years. Flipping Texas with the right candidate in a blue-wave midterm would hardly turn it into a blue state yet, but it would provide the much-needed proof that blue Texas isn’t a delusion.
Even if Democrats fail to win statewide in 2026, it’s important that they take the possibility seriously and continue putting in the work to make it happen. Winning Texas’ Senate seat could be crucial to regaining control of the U.S. Senate, and turning Texas into a purple state would radically shift the presidential electoral map in Democrats’ favor. After the 2030 census, Texas is expected to gain four electoral votes, while the heavy-blue states may lose up to nine of them; this math is devastating for Democrats unless they manage to put Texas on the table.
Most importantly, Democrats need to believe in and strive for a blue Texas because persistent groundwork is vital for the long-term flipping of a state. Just as Stacey Abrams’ doomed 2018 gubernatorial campaign still paved the way for Democrats’ triumph in Georgia two years later, so too could the Democrats’ campaigns in 2026. There’s a decent chance that things won’t work out as nicely for Texas, that flipping the state truly is a total nonstarter, as so many pundits insist. That doesn’t mean, however, that the party should give up on it after having gained so much ground. Blue Texas is not guaranteed, but it is at least possible, and that should be more than enough reason to keep up the fight.
