Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994.

From 2002 to 2020, predictions that Texas will “turn blue” and elect a Democrat statewide in either the presidential, gubernatorial, or U.S. Senate race were made by authors John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, as well as former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, and Texas congressman Joaquin Castro, along with many journalists. That has not come to pass.

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The closest any Democrat has come to winning a statewide race was Beto O’Rourke in 2018, with 48.3 percent, against incumbent GOP senator Ted Cruz. Keep in mind, Texas is a massive state with high turnout, so Cruz’s 2.56 percentage-point win that year amounted to 214,921 votes. That margin alone is about 40 percent of the entire turnout in the state of Delaware in 2024.

In 2022, O’Rourke ran statewide again, this time for governor, and won only 43.8 percent against incumbent Greg Abbott. (That was the highest percentage of the vote for any Democratic candidate running statewide.) That year, abortion and gun control were supposed to drive Democrats to a win in Texas. That did not come to pass.

More recently, NBC News wrote May 4, 2023: “ Texas Democratic Rep. Colin Allred announced a Senate bid against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz Wednesday, the latest in a long line of Democrats in the last few decades arguing that THIS is the year Texas turns blue.” In late 2024, The Week summarized its coverage with the headline, “Is Texas about to put a Democrat in the Senate?”

That did not come to pass; Allred lost his Senate race against Cruz by about 960,000 votes.

Jen Rubin, this morning: “The Year Texas Might Turn Blue.”

Yes, every streak must come to an end sometime, even Cal Ripken’s. Is Ken Paxton a slimeball and a uniquely flawed and weak Senate candidate? Absolutely. Is James Talarico, in theory, better than usual for a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in the Lone Star State? Yeah, but as Ramesh points out, the reality of Talarico is quite different from that theory. Talarico has a lot of hard-left progressive stances that are going to be a hard sell in a fundamentally conservative, GOP-leaning state.

What’s more, in 2018, 4,045,632 Texans voted for O’Rourke. In 2022, Beto O’Rourke won more votes than any other Democrat running statewide… and won 3,553,656 votes.

In 2022, Paxton won his reelection bid as state attorney general with 4,278,986 votes. (Note that other than lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, every other Republican running statewide won with 4.4 million votes or more, with several judges getting more than 4.5 million votes.)

To win, James Talarico has to do better than the best performance of any Democrat who has run statewide in recent cycles, and Paxton has to do worse than the worst performance of any Republican who has run statewide in recent cycles. That is not an impossible scenario, but it is a tall order.

People who want to see a Democrat win a statewide in Texas always claim that they see evidence that a Democrat is going to win statewide in Texas. And for 31 years, it has not come to pass.

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