Tuesday night’s results in Texas’ Senate primaries have Democrats in the Lone Star State — and everywhere else — sharing excited whispers: Could this be the year that Texas turns blue?
In fairness, Democrats have been whispering that question for quite a few years now. It’s regularly the case that good candidates or favorable environments or (and here the whispers become downright audible) both lead the party to wonder if maybe, this time, finally, Texas will once again elect a Democrat to statewide office.
For a long time, these mutterings were a function of demographics. So many people were moving from the northeast to the Sun Belt, New York Democrats becoming Austin ones! Not to mention that the population was so heavily Hispanic, and Hispanic voters vote so heavily for Democratic candidates!
But then the Trump era arrived. That calculus changed. Blue Texas seemed to drift further into the mists of fantasyland.
Then came Tuesday. Texas Hispanics turned out heavily for Democratic primary races. State Rep. James Talarico won his U.S. Senate primary in part because of Latino support. And his opponent in November might just be the polarizing, scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton — who is headed to a runoff for the GOP nomination against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. It’s a year in which Democrats nationally are expected to overperform, thanks to President Donald Trump’s unpopularity. And so: whispers. Maybe this is the year Texas turns blue.
But here’s the thing about that: “Turning blue” — or red for that matter — doesn’t really mean that a party’s candidate won one race in one year. What Texas could possibly do is shift back from deep red to reddish-purple.
I’m going to be pedantic on this point, in part because I find the habit of exaggerating political shifts to be both annoying and noisome. Trump’s approval rating dropping two points does not mean it is PLUMMETING or BOTTOMING OUT. And even if Talarico were to win a Senate seat, that no more makes Texas blue than Doug Jones winning a Senate seat in Alabama nine years ago made that state a Democratic haven.
Usually we use “red” and “blue” as descriptors of states based on presidential voting in the state. This is a relatively recent affectation, solidified during the 2000 election. It is one that obscures the actual variation in how states vote — even between voting heavily for one party and voting only narrowly for that party.
Consider the past nine presidential elections, taking us back to 1992. There are only 27 states that have consistently voted for presidential candidates of the same party during that time; the other 23 all switched at least once. Even states such as Texas that consistently voted with the same party saw wide swings in margins; in Texas’ case, from 3 points to 22 points during that time.

If we’re using “red” and “blue” to describe presidential voting, we are having to constantly update our descriptors of what constitutes “red” and “blue.” Pennsylvania was a blue state in 2013 and then a red state in 2017 and then a blue state in 2021 and then a red state in 2025. This suggests that “blue state” and “red state” are perhaps not useful descriptors for Pennsylvania.

But this also ignores other state-level voting. If we throw Senate votes into the calculus, we see that all but a handful of states have either flipped partisan loyalty or, at some point since 1990, have voted for senators or presidents of differing parties in overlapping periods.













