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Dark alley no more: This time, Texas Republicans were ready for the Democrats

Texas isn’t trending blue, or even purple — yet.

President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s comfortable victories in the Lone Star State have stamped an exclamation mark on that.

Both Republicans outperformed election-eve public polls that forecast tighter races in Texas than actually materialized on Tuesday.

What happened?

Democrats Joe Biden and MJ Hegar failed to build on the inroads previous Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke made in Texas’ booming suburbs two years ago — though the Democrats held onto virtually all of the federal and state legislative seats they gained in the 2018 midterms.

Meanwhile, Trump and Cornyn combined forces with Gov. Greg Abbott’s high-tech voter mobilization machine to make sure their supporters cast ballots.

Cornyn built enthusiasm with an old-fashioned bus tour. Small-town and rural Texas remained deep red and engaged.

And Trump, instead of being a complete drag on Cornyn, turned in eye-popping numbers in heavily Hispanic counties in South Texas. While Trump’s surprise showing didn’t flip those areas to a Republican majority, it ate into vital winning margins that Biden and Hegar desperately needed — as have all modern-era Democrats running statewide.

And that dark alley where the state GOP got mugged two years ago?

This cycle, that alley had not just streetlights but floodlights installed, observed Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

“Back in 2018, Texas Republicans were caught off guard,” he recalled. “Most didn’t realize they had a competitive race on their hands until well into September, and some didn’t realize until Election Night. … In 2020, Texas Republicans, led by Greg Abbott, were ready and waiting for the Democratic challenges.”

While the state GOP didn’t claw back handfuls of seats in either the Texas House or the U.S. House, it was able to block any further Democratic gains, Jones noted.

Stopping the Blue

If anything, the map of Texas became a little pinker, not a little purpler. While Biden lost by 6 percentage points, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 9 points four years ago, the third-party presidential candidates proved less of a factor this time. They garnered just 1.5% of all votes cast, down from about 5% in 2016, and that helped Biden some, Jones explained.

But politics is an expectations game, and Democrats set theirs sky high this time.

Their hopes crashed Tuesday. In the suburban counties where Democrats focused lots of energy, they couldn’t necessarily match — much less improve on — O’Rourke’s 2018 showing against GOP Sen. Ted Cruz.

In Collin County, where two years ago Cruz won narrowly 53-47, Cornyn pushed that out to at 55-43 advantage over Hegar.

Tarrant County, which O’Rourke had narrowly carried in 2018, switched back to Republican.

Cornyn also carried Hegar’s home county of Williamson, which includes Austin’s northern suburbs.

In Collin, Denton, Tarrant and Fort Bend counties, Democrats enthused over the O’Rourke surge believed that with more and better-funded candidates, they’d grab GOP-held U.S. House and Texas House seats. They came up empty-handed.

Even more humiliating for Hegar, whose political rise occurred in the Austin media market, the Austin metro counties of Hays and Williamson went from red to blue in the presidential election. Both went for Trump in 2016 but for Biden this year. It was hard to point to a place where Hegar helped Biden.

“Perhaps at the margins with her own minor contribution via get out the vote efforts,” Jones said.

Asked why Biden and Hegar didn’t build on O’Rourke’s showing in the suburbs, Dave Carney, Abbott’s top political strategist said, “Because their message is out of touch with what’s going on in Texas. Jobs and the economy are really important. … We were able to talk about bread and butter issues.”

In the presidential race, the map of Texas remained red with a few blue islands.

In 2016, Clinton carried 27 of the state’s 254 counties. As of Wednesday afternoon, though results from a few hundred precincts in some counties were still not reported to the Texas secretary of state’s office, Biden had carried 21 counties.

Four of the state’s five biggest counties — Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Travis — remained blue in 2020, just as they had gone in the 2016 presidential and 2018 Senate races. Only Tarrant started out red in 2016, then switched to blue in 2018, then switched back to red in 2020 with a narrow margin for Trump (he got 49.3% of the Tarrant vote, while Biden got 49.1%).

Only two counties voted one way for Senate this year and the other way for president: Williamson, which picked Biden for president but Cornyn for Senate; and the Rio Grande Valley’s Zapata, which went the other way, voting Trump for president but Hegar for Senate.

While Cornyn put up some more impressive numbers than Trump in some of the big urban and suburban counties, Trump was not an ankle weight for the third-term Texas senator.

The president posted better numbers than Cornyn in some less-populated counties, such as Loving and Reeves in far West Texas. Nearby, in Hudspeth County, Trump won 66.6% of the vote. Cornyn trailed, with 58.4%.

In four counties in or near the Panhandle — Cochran, Dickens, Foard and Kent — the president nabbed between 80% and 90% of the vote. And Trump’s winning margin bested Cornyn’s by between 2 points and 3 points in each.

Some Hispanic counties turn red

Trump carried eight heavily Hispanic counties in South Texas and West Texas that supported Clinton last time — Frio, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kleberg, La Salle, Reeves, Val Verde and Zapata. Starr, the seat of which is Rio Grande City, went from 79% for Clinton to just 52% for Biden.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Trump’s top supporter in Texas, said such Hispanics joined conservative voters in urban and suburban areas “to deliver the message that life, liberty, law and order, Texas values and our Second Amendment rights are their top priority.”

“South and West Texas continue to trend Republican and many Hispanic-majority counties went red, just as we predicted they would,” he said in a written statement.

Deborah Zuloaga, president and chief executive of United Way of El Paso County, said it’s a mistake to overlook conservative leanings among some in the crucial demographic group.

“Both parties continue to analyze Latinos, Hispanics, … as a homogenous group,” she said at a panel discussion of election results sponsored by Children at Risk and two other children’s advocacy groups. “At the core of who they are beyond everything is, you say the word socialism and that’s it. You’re done.”

Democrats’ money washed out

Down the home stretch in the presidential jockeying for Texas’ 38 votes in the Electoral College, Biden and Democratic groups backing him spent 12 times more on TV advertising than Trump and GOP groups did, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of data compiled by ad tracker Advertising Analytics.

Between Labor Day and Tuesday, the Biden ad advantage was $17 million to Trump’s $1.4 million. Of that, $5.5 million was by Biden.

During that time, Hegar and groups supporting her forked over $35.5 million for commercials, considerably more than $27 million spent by pro-Cornyn groups.

Pointing to Mike Bloomberg and other Democratic billionaires’ spending in races up and down the Texas ballot, Patrick said, “Democrats may as well as lit that $125 million on fire.”

Added the state GOP in a written statement, “If Democrats want to keep wasting their money here, it’s their money.”

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