Emotion Moves Electorates
A Deep Dive into the Texas Electorate
Let me tell you what happened in Texas in 2024.
Not the headline version. Not the “Trump won by 14 points, the end” version.
The real version. The one that tells you something about what is actually happening in this state — and why 2026 may be one of the most consequential elections the country hasn’t fully woken up to yet.
Since COVID, Texas has added more new residents than any other state in the country. 2.6 million people moved to Texas between 2020 and 2025— that number includes three Kinzingers from Illinois. The biggest domestic migration in the country. California to Texas — roughly 171,000 people in just a two-year stretch.
That is not a small number. That is a city.
And yet.
Texas grew more Republican in 2024, not less. Trump’s margin jumped from 5.6 points in 2020 to 13.7 points in 2024 — nearly tripling. On the surface, it looks like a paradox. Millions of new residents, a rapidly diversifying population, and a bigger Republican blowout than the decade before.
How does that happen?
Here’s the answer: two separate earthquakes hit Texas at the same time in 2024, and most people only noticed one of them.
Earthquake One: The Democratic Base Collapsed
A record 18.6 million Texans were registered to vote in 2024. That is a historic number.
Only 61% of them showed up.
That was nearly six points lower than 2020. And the drop wasn’t random — it was concentrated exactly where Democrats needed voters the most: Harris County (Houston), Bexar County (San Antonio), and Dallas County.
Harris County— the most populated county in Texas, and third most populated in the country— tells the story most clearly. In 2020, Joe Biden won it by 13 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris won it by just 5. The margin didn’t flip. It just collapsed. Democrats showed up — just not enough of them, and not with enough energy.
The suburban counties — the ones that had been registering new voters at record rates, the ones full of people who had just moved from California and New York — didn’t break toward Democrats the way anyone had predicted. Williamson County, which voted for Biden in 2020, flipped to Trump. Collin and Denton set early voting records, but those voters went Republican.
The new Texans had arrived. They just weren’t energized enough to vote Democrat — some stayed home, others went quietly Republican.
Earthquake Two: The Hispanic Realignment
This is the story people are still trying to fully understand.
Starr County, Texas. Sits along the U.S.-Mexico border. 97% Hispanic. Had voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1896.
In 2024, Donald Trump won it. 57.7% to 41.8%.
That is a 76-point swing from 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the county by 60 points.
This didn’t happen overnight. In 2020, Biden barely won Starr County by 5 points — down from a 48-point Democratic margin just four years earlier. The direction was clear. In 2024, it completed the journey.
And Starr County wasn’t alone. Trump flipped nearly every major county in South Texas. Zapata County. Hidalgo County. Communities that had been Democratic for generations.
Who were these voters? Working-class. Border-adjacent. Many of them employed in law enforcement or energy. Communities where the economy is personal, where the border is not a talking point but a lived reality. For them, immigration wasn’t an abstract policy debate — and comments about defunding police didn’t land the way Democratic strategists hoped.
Exit polls showed that 54% of Latino men in Texas voted for Trump. That was up from 36% in 2020.
These weren’t reluctant Democrats holding their noses. These were voters making a deliberate choice.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Something shifted after 2024.
In March of this year, Democratic primary turnout in Texas surpassed Republican primary turnout for the first time since 2020.
Let that land.
2.31 million Texans voted in the Democratic Senate primary in 2026. In 2024, that number was 967,000.
That is a 140% surge.
James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate, has become one of the most talked-about candidates in the country.
More importantly, he and Jasmine Crockett each individually received more primary votes than the entire Democratic Senate primary in 2024.
On the Republican side? Over 2.12 million voted in the Senate race. More than the 2024 primary — but the energy gap told the real story. Democrats were on fire. Republicans were showing up out of obligation.
In Tarrant County — which has leaned Republican in every election since at least 2018 — Democrats held a 12-point lead among early primary voters this spring. In Collin, Denton, and Williamson counties, the state’s most competitive suburban battlegrounds, turnout was significantly above average and swung toward Democrats by more than 40 points compared to 2024.
These are not small numbers. These are people waking up.
Texas in 2024 was not a story about a red state getting redder. It was a story about two earthquakes hitting at once — a Democratic base that stayed home, and a Hispanic working-class that had been drifting for years and decided to arrived somewhere new.
Those are not the same problem. And they don’t have the same fix.
But here is what 2026 is already showing: the people who stayed home in 2024 are not staying home anymore. The suburban voters who went quietly Republican — or nowhere at all — are showing up, and they are showing up angry. That 140% surge in Democratic primary turnout didn’t come from nowhere. It came from people who watched what happened after the election and decided that sitting it out had consequences.
The lesson of 2024 isn’t that Texas is unreachable. It’s that Democrats can’t take a single vote for granted — not from new arrivals, not from Latino communities, not from college-educated suburbanites who are philosophically sympathetic but not yet committed. Enthusiasm is not a baseline. It has to be earned.
What’s happening in Texas right now is happening in places like Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin too. Voters who felt abandoned by one party, or uninspired by the other, are being handed a reason to re-engage — not by a charismatic messenger or a perfect policy platform, but by the daily, undeniable reality of what the Trump second term has actually looked like. The chaos. The cruelty. The institutional damage that is going to take years to undo.
That is a dark gift. But it is real.
Texas may not flip in November. It may not need to. What it can do — what it is already beginning to do — is serve as proof of concept. That the coalition is still there. That it can be rebuilt. That the voters Democrats lost didn’t leave forever; they left because no one gave them a reason to stay.
Give them a reason. The rest follows.
Thank you for reading. This one took a while to put together, and I hope it gave you something worth thinking about — not just about Texas, but about what is happening to the electorate across the country right now. If you’re a paid subscriber, I’m adding a bonus section below. It’s a more personal one. I spent years working inside the Republican National Committee, and I watched firsthand as the 2016 primary surge unfolded in real time — from inside the building. What I saw and what I think it tells us about the moment Democrats are standing in right now.
