'They’re terrified': TX Republicans fear Dem surge with 2.5M new voters added since 2018

Texas has surpassed 18 million registered voters for the first time as an increasingly urban and diverse population reshapes the state’s political landscape and pushes the GOP to retool its decades-old playbook to keep a grip on the state.

The state’s voter registration rolls are expanding at a quicker pace than other fast-growing southern states like Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. And they're surpassing the state’s population growth, a sign that more than just new Texans are signing up to vote.

Since U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was last on the ballot in 2018 and narrowly won reelection by just 215,000 votes, Texas has added nearly 2.6 million voters — the size of Connecticut’s entire voting rolls.

The biggest growth has come in Harris County and along the I-35 corridor, areas that have trended blue in recent elections.

While transplants from other states make up a good portion of that rise, voter advocacy groups say it is also a product of their work in places like Houston and San Antonio to find and register Texans who don't typically participate in elections. Also fueling the rise is the state's booming youth population coming of voting age. Many high schools have programs to help sign up new voters and people can also register when getting a driver's license.

The shifting demographics are forcing both parties to lean on advanced analytics to help them identify who these new voters are, where they came from, how likely they are to vote in November and which party's platform they gravitate more towards.

While some Republicans have convinced themselves Texas will always be red, top strategists in the party warn Texas is at risk of following other Southwestern states like Arizona and Nevada, once solid Republican states that started turning blue in the last two decades and helped put Joe Biden in the White House in 2020.

“We are in a competitive state and we are not going to win just sitting on our laurels,” said Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist who has helped Gov. Greg Abbott and former Gov. Rick Perry dominate Texas politics for the last 25 years.

Republicans have not lost a statewide race in 30 years, but the results have been getting tighter, and not just Cruz’s 2018 campaign. In 2020, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in Texas by 5.6 percentage points — the closest presidential race in Texas since the 1990s and the 9th closest race in the entire nation just after Florida and Michigan.

But it's shown itself in other ways too. Over the last six years, Democrats have flipped a dozen seats in the Texas House, two seats in the Texas Senate, and two seats in Congress held by Republicans. In response, Republicans surgically redrew the state’s congressional and legislative districts in the latest redistricting cycle to keep more imperiled seats from swinging to Democrats.

The changing nature of the electorate has also pushed Republicans to focus more money and time on targeting Latinos in South Texas, especially voters with ties to the oil and gas industry, and families that may be growing frustrated with disruptions from border crossings. Abbott kicked off his 2022 reelection campaign in majority-Hispanic Nueces County talking about defending energy sector jobs at all costs.

Why so competitive?

There are two key reasons Texas has been getting closer: Houston's Harris County and a developing blue spine along Interstate 35 from Laredo to Dallas.

Harris County, which has more registered voters than any county in Texas, has flipped from being one of the most reliably red, big metro counties in the United States to being solidly Democratic and only getting bluer.

For 40 years Republican presidential candidates won Harris County easily until 2008, when Barack Obama flipped the county by the narrowest of margins. He carried Harris County by just 19,000 votes that year, and by only 971 votes in 2012.

Since then, Harris County has added 670,000 additional voters to the rolls — more than any other county in Texas. The influx has helped turn the former Republican anchor a deep shade of blue. In 2020, Biden won Harris County with 56% of the vote, or about 217,000 more votes than Trump. Biden’s percentage was the highest in the county for any Democratic presidential contender since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

“They’re terrified,” Harris County commissioner Rodney Ellis, a Democrat, said about the change Republicans have witnessed at the ballot box over the last decade.

The size of Harris County's population – bigger than 25 other states and making up 16% of Texas – gives it weight in state politics unlike any other county, Ellis said. As the county gets bluer, Republicans' margins statewide get tighter.

Ellis said the trend explains why Republicans constantly are fighting Harris County over voting and election laws. The state has rewritten laws specifically to stop Harris County from offering drive-thru and all-night voting centers. Republicans sued the county over how it managed the 2022 elections that Democrats swept. In 2021, the GOP state legislature carved up Harris County to protect three Republican Congressional seats that were in danger of flipping to Democrats.

“They keep coming after us because we represent the future,” Ellis said. “They know as Harris County goes, eventually so will Texas.”

The result has been more attention from presidential campaigns. Just this summer, Vice President Kamala Harris spent four of her first 10 days as the party's presumed presidential nominee campaigning in Houston. Biden himself visited Houston in the spring before ultimately dropping out of the race and late last year, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Houston. Trump is scheduled to be back in Houston on Wednesday for a private fundraiser.

A similar trend is playing out along Interstate 35.

The highway cuts through 22 counties from Laredo to the Oklahoma border that for decades voted Republican. From 1994 to 2014, Republicans racked up huge margins of victory along the route. In 2014, Sen. John Cornyn won the stretch by about 350,000 votes as he cruised to reelection

That all changed in 2018 as the diversifying population boomed around Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Waco. El Paso Democrat Beto O’Rourke beat Cruz by more than 400,000 votes along the stretch in 2018. And in 2020, Biden won the same stretch by nearly 500,000 votes.

And that area is only getting bigger. Since 2018, the electorate along 1-35 has grown by 16%, adding more than 1 million additional voters to the state's rolls. While the growing tech industry and diversifying economy is drawing people to the region, it’s also been a focus of voter registration groups targeting younger voters in places like Bexar County.

Republicans still have rural West Texas and East Texas in their corner, but those regions aren’t adding new voters at nearly the rate of Harris County and the blue spine.

In response, Shelby Williams is changing the GOP playbook from his post in one of the fastest-growing counties along I-35. The new Collin County Republican Party chairman said just because his suburban county north of Dallas has been a Republican stronghold for decades doesn’t mean it's going to stay that way.

“Our work is never done,” he said. “In a place like Collin County, we can never sleep.”

After an election passes, he said they can’t afford to wait until the next one to start voter outreach again. They have to keep it going even during periods that were once considered the political off-season.

Recent election results show why. In 2012, Mitt Romney easily carried the county with 65% of the vote. But after the county’s voting rolls grew by more than 56% in the years since then, Republicans have been watching their margins wash away. In 2020, Trump won just 51% of the vote in the county of about 1.2 million people in 2020. Since that election, the county has seen 92,000 more voters sign up in the county. Only Harris County had more.

Williams said the booming job market in Collin County has brought a surge of younger and diverse people to the community. The biggest city in Plano has blossomed into the state's ninth most populated. He said the job of Republicans in counties like his is to remind newcomers about the Republican economic programs that drew them there in the first place.

With so many new people moving in, Williams said complacency is an enemy of his party.

The GOP there is being more aggressive with community outreach, signing up new voters, and using advanced analytics to track those registering well before elections even happen, he said.

Further south in Bexar County, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said state Republican leaders are helping Democrats because of how often they are attacking city governments – where the voter registration rolls are growing fastest.

“The issues that urban communities are challenged with are not the ones that state Republican leaders are governing to,” Nirenberg, a Democrat, said. “They have declared war on the cities.”

San Antonio voters a decade ago routinely backed Republicans in statewide races. But after 35% of voter registration growth since 2012, the county is now a Democratic stronghold.

In 2014, Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton both won the county by 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively. But in their last reelection bids in 2020, both lost by more than 15 percentage points.