Progressives have been patiently awaiting the day when the inevitable would happen in Texas, and now it appears their moment has arrived. Steadily accelerating demographic change over the course of the past three-plus decades meant it was only a matter of time before the Lone Star State joined one-time red bastions California and Virginia as Democratic Party strongholds. On Nov. 3, the blue wave swept over Texas and catapulted Democrat candidates into the US Senate, the governorship, lieutenant governorship and attorney general post. In fact, Democrats took every statewide office on the ballot. All except possibly incoming AG Nathan Johnson can be considered stridently leftist.
A refreshingly honest and compellingly accurate Oct. 29 op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News aptly displays this “wait for it, wait for it” attitude on the verge of coming to fruition. “Will Texas’ shifting voting demographics influence the election outcome?” the headline plaintively asked. We now have the answer to that question in resounding fashion.
Rogelio Saenz, Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, asked: “How have Texas voters changed over the past two years?” Saenz has frequently written in support of massive immigration, both legal and illegal, into the US and Texas over the years. “I draw on the most recent data [on] Texas citizens of voting age population, or CVAP – people 18 and older who are US citizens – available from the 2022 and 2024 American Community Survey to address this query,” he continued.
The findings are nothing short of catastrophic for GOP hopes for the future in the second-largest state in America by population. An already majority-minority state is seeing a distinct rise in voting blocs that historically do not support Republicans.
’More Than Four-Fifths of the People Added’
“Between 2022 and 2024, the Texas voting-age population increased by 688,000, a rise of 3.4%. Nonwhites account for more than four-fifths of the 688,000 people added to the state’s voting-age population. Latino (209,000), African American (165,000) and Asian (138,000) newcomers outnumber the 131,000 whites added between 2022 and 2024,” Saenz wrote.
Those numbers translate directly into ballot-box power. According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanic citizens already made up 32.3% of Texas’s eligible voters in 2024.
And guess where many of those whites being added to the Texas voting rolls came from?
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“Interstate migration patterns across racial/ethnic groups are also revealing,” Saenz stated. “Latinos and whites moving to Texas in the past two years most commonly came from California, while African Americans most likely originated from Louisiana.”
Those shocked to see “Red Texas” suddenly elect a slew of hard-left progressives to major office have simply not been paying attention to the demographic signposts over the years. Almost one third of Texans are either first or second-generation immigrants, according to the American Immigration Council.
“About 17.8 percent of the state’s residents are foreign-born, and 12.0 percent of its US-born residents live with at least one immigrant parent,” AIC reports. That’s a staggering 29.8% of the population right there. “Immigrants make up 22.2 percent of Texas’s labor force,” the organization also states. This is where powerful corporate support for cheap labor in the agriculture, construction, and other major industries, so often backed by Republican elected officials, leads.
“The number of foreign-born residents in Texas grew from 4.5 million in 2014 to 5.8 million in 2024,” USAFacts reports. Think of the impact such growth in just ten years has on a state’s voter rolls.
We no longer have to imagine it. Texas went into this election with a record 19 million registered voters, nearly 6.5 million more than in 2005. The rolls didn’t just grow; they ballooned.
Non-Hispanic White Population in Texas Today: 37.3%
The hard truth is that the results in Texas on Nov. 3 are completely unsurprising. A demographic clock has been ticking for some 40 years now, all leading to this day. It was anything but difficult to see coming.
“Among the seven states with the largest number of immigrants, only Texas remains reliably Republican; but it is beginning to resemble California,” Pat Buchanan wrote way back in 2006 in his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “In the 1990s, the Lone Star State took in 3.2 million new residents, 60 percent of them Hispanic, raising the Hispanic share of Texas’s population from 25 percent to 33 percent. Today, it is 34 percent and rising.... Where the white population of Texas was 60 percent in 1990 and 53 percent in 2000, today whites are a minority for the first time since the Alamo.”
That was written 20 years ago. Today, the non-Hispanic white population in Texas is 37.3%, according to the US Census Bureau. One can argue whether or not this is an inherently bad thing. One cannot argue which party it favors on Election Day.
Buchanan was reviled as a “far right” extremist for pointing out the rapid demographic change transforming America in the early years of the 21st century. Yet progressive professor Saenz has also soberly documented this same reality in his role as “demographic trends” expert.
In 2018, Saenz co-wrote a study for the University of Wisconsin-Madison titled “White Deaths Exceed Births in a Majority of US States.” “In 2016, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in twenty-six states; more than at any time in US history,” the report began. “White deaths also exceeded white births in the nation as a whole for the first time in US history in 2016, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.”
“The Latino population is considerably younger (median age of 29 in 2016) and has moderately higher fertility rates than the white population, so Latino births exceeded deaths by a substantial margin in all fifty states and the District of Columbia,” he added.
Younger Hispanics Overwhelmingly Vote Blue
As has already been demonstrably proven in California and Virginia, an overwhelming increase in Hispanic voters heavily favors Democrats in the long run. Texas is simply the latest American state to feel this in force.
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The warning signs were visible before a single vote was counted. In the first week of early voting, nearly 150,000 ballots were cast in Hidalgo and Cameron counties in the Rio Grande Valley, a 63% jump over the same stretch in 2022.
By the end, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project counted 2.7 million Hispanic Texans casting ballots, up from 2 million in 2022. Seven hundred thousand additional Hispanic voters in four years. Do the math.
“Roughly 7 in 10 Hispanic voters supported Democrat James Talarico in the US Senate contest, while only about 3 in 10 voted for Republican Ken Paxton,” the Associated Press reports. “Younger Hispanics’ shift was even more pronounced, with swings of around 20 percentage points toward Talarico among Hispanic voters in Texas under 65 years old.”
For those Republicans who still want to deny political reality and pretend demographics do not matter, there may be one more bitter lesson coming sooner rather than later.
“Even in the Senate race in Florida, where Republican Sen. Ashley Moody managed to narrowly win reelection, less than half of Hispanic voters supported Moody,” AP relates. Just two years earlier, Trump had won 55% of Florida’s Hispanic voters.
A firmly Democrat Texas in the California or Virginia mold will be an enormous liability for Republicans moving forward. But imagine a GOP presidential candidate trying to win an election in 2040 with Texas and Florida firmly in the blue ranks.
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