Data analyst: Texas Democrats doomed from start
Texas Democrats were already 1 million voters behind Republicans before the first ballot was cast in the 2024 election cycle, and for all the high hopes of finally catching lightning in a bottle Nov. 5, after a three-decade drought in statewide elections, those dreams had probably been dashed eight months earlier.
That’s the analysis of political consultant and data diver Derek Ryan, who plowed through demographics and past voting habits of 99.8% of the 11,340,202 Texans who cast a ballot for president.
'The November election was probably decided back in March,' Ryan said in an email blast to people who sign up for his data and insight. 'In March, 2.3 million people voted in the Republican Primary while only 1 million people voted in the Democratic Primary.'
Because just about everyone who votes in the primaries comes back to the polls in the fall, Texas Republicans began the race with one heck of a head start.
'That means Democrats had to contact 1 million voters (AND convince them to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot) simply to catch up to where the Republicans already were,' Ryan said.
The analysis came after everyone knew that Texas Democrats had yet another lousy election cycle with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump smothering Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points and incumbent GOP U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz dusting Democratic U.S. Rep Colin Allred by nearly 9 points. But the numbers behind the numbers help fill in the gaps of why and how.
The big picture first: In pure raw numbers, more Texans voted in the 2024 general election than in any election that came before. But because the state is growing so fast, turnout as a percentage of the universe of potential Texas voters nose-dived.
Four years ago, Ryan found, turnout was 66.4% and Democrats had a pretty decent year, at least by Texas standards, with Trump beating Joe Biden by just 5.5 percentage points in the state. The 2020 turnout buried that of 2016, when just under 59% of registered voters cast ballots and Trump’s victory margin was 9 points.
The 60.6% turnout this cycle was just a tad better than 2016 but well short of what it was four years ago, suggesting that Republican voters were simply more motivated than their Democratic rivals.
Now, let’s get granular. One might wonder, what about female voters given that the Democrats nominated a woman for the top of the ticket and that previously constitutionally protected abortion rights vanished in a controversial 2022 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court?
Well, turnout among women was indeed higher compared with men, and the margin wasn’t all that close. In fact, a million-plus more women voted than men did, by Ryan’s count. But peel back another layer and you’ll find another slab of disappointment for Texas Democrats who were counting on women to carry them forward.
In 2024, about 63% of women who were registered to vote turned out to vote. Four years earlier, the turnout rate among women was 68%.
The age of people who voted also tells a story. About half of all ballots cast came from Texans 50 or older, according to Ryan’s analysis, and that demographic tends to lean Republican. But if Democrats, who tend to attract younger voters, were looking for a silver lining, they’d find that about 1 million more Texans who are ages 18-29 are registered to vote compared with those who are 70 or older.
That silver-lined cloud, however, gets grayer — figuratively and literally — when it comes to who actually bothered to show up to the polls. There were about 200,000 more voters who are 70 or older who cast a ballot that those who are 29 or younger.
On a related note, one byproduct of Democrats’ underperformance — and their inability to meet the expectation of at least narrowing the GOP advantage — was that Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa decided to step aside after a dozen years at the party’s till. The party’s Executive Committee is expected to choose his successor soon, but with it might come a bit of complication.
Under the Texas Election Code 'a committee has a chair and a vice-chair, one of them must be a man and the other a woman.' Currently, the vice chair is a woman, which suggests Hinojosa’s successor must be a man unless Vice Chair Shay Wyrick Cathey steps aside. However, in the letter to the chairman, the party’s lawyer said that provision might not apply when filling a vacancy midterm.
'Although the statute is clear that the chair and vice chair must be of differing genders, the statute does not further limit the party’s discretion as to how to handle this particular circumstance where the chair vacates the office, but where the vice chair remains in office,' Chad Dunn, the party’s general counsel said in the letter to Hinojosa.
