Asian Voters, Redistricting and the Texas Blue Shift
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 06 Mar, 2026

Last Tuesday's primaries may have put Texas Democrats in a position to win statewide office for the first time in 36 years.

The state of Texas held its first round of primaries on Tuesday and Democrats appear more hopeful than ever that they might finally win a statewide race.

While both parties set voter turnout records, more Democrats voted in their respective primaries than Republicans, accounting for 2.3 million of a total 4.5 million votes cast.

James Talarico defeated Jasmine Crockett to become the Democratic Senate nominee on Tuesday

To be clear, primary turnout does not always translate to the general election, and there are a number of practical reasons why Republicans remain favored in November.

Texas is, of course, one of the reddest states in the country.  In fact 36 years have passed since a single Democrat, Governor Ann Richards, won a statewide race there.

And yet year after year for over a decade now Democrats approach every election convinced that they have a shot at finally flipping Texas Blue. 

Here’s why this could actually be the year.

Narrowing The Gap

When Democratic State Senator Wendy Davis made national headlines for speaking against an anti-choice law in 2013, Democratic operatives believed that she could be the person to finally flip Texas blue.

Governor Ann Richards was the last Democrat to win statewide in Texas

She ran for Governor in 2014 and lost to Greg Abbott by 21 points.  Since then, it’s been tough to believe that any Democrat running for statewide office actually has a shot.

Most “Blue Texas” predictions admittedly began to feel as likely as the idea that Lucy might actually hold the football in place for Charlie Brown or Sisyphus would finally make it up the hill.

But then came Democratic senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who challenged unpopular incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. Heading into election day, polling showed that the race might actually be a tossup.

O’Rourke ultimately lost.  But by just 2.6%, making his performance the strongest by any Texas Democrat in decades.

Republicans John Cornyn and Ken Paxton are headed to a runoff

Two years later in the 2020 election Democrats saw a similar outcome when President Trump beat Biden by just 5%, making it the closest performance by a Democratic Presidential candidate in Texas in 24 years. 

Those numbers however were undercut by the fact that Republican Senator John Cornyn won re-election over his democratic opponent by 10%.

And in 2024 Democrats took a major step in the wrong direction as President Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 13.7% in the state.

Ultimately the particulars of the given race seem to matter more than just red or blue.  But there’s no doubt that Democrats have narrowed the gap in recent years.

And they have changing demographics to thank for that.

Democrat Beto O'Rourke challenged incumbent Senator Ted Cruz in 2018

Asian Americans

It’s well-documented that Asian Americans are among the fastest growing demographics in the United States. That’s especially the case in Texas.

Between just 2022 and 2023, Texas’s AAPI community grew by a staggering 5.5%, which is roughly 92,000 individuals. 

To put that in perspective, the number of Blacks in Texas grew at a rate of 2.4%, Hispanics grew by 2%, and Whites increased by just .2%.

In the abstract, an increase in Asian American voters—as with most minority populations —is generally a good thing for the Democrats.

According to a survey taken by Texas’s Asians For Justice ahead 2024 elections, about 40% of AAPIers identify as Democrats while 31% are Republicans. 

Yet as we know, Asian Americans are far from a monolith and vary greatly by specific ethnicity.

Vietnamese Americans, for example, are more conservative. Just 30% ID as democrats while 44% are Republicans. Texas’s Japanese Americans skew Republican as well while Chinese Americans are split.

But no AAPI group in Texas identifies as Democrats more strongly than Indian Americans, 55% of whom are Democrats. Just 16% are republicans.

One might have expected, therefore, that the Democrats would have fared particularly well in 2024 with Harris, an Indian American at the top of the ticket. 

On the contrary, however, Texas’s Asian American electorate shifted rightward.  From 2020 to 2024, Asian Americans increased their support for Trump by 5%.

While there is no clear consensus on what explained the shift, it may have very well been driven by economic concerns. Inflation that occurred during the Biden administration was felt all across the state and country

This election, however, economic concerns appear to be even worse, which implies that those voters may swing back towards the Democrats. 

The Latino Vote

AAPI-ers aren’t the only formidable force in Texas politics. Texas’s population is about 40% Latino.  And while Latinos typically lean Democratic, exit polls imply that they actually voted for Trump in 2024. 

Despite being a minority group that is constantly demonized by the right, there are a number of reasons why it would make perfect sense for Latinos to vote Republican.  For one, they typically subcribe to Catholicism, a belief system that skews conservative on social issues. 

Large populations of Latinos voters also happen to live in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, much of which sits along the border.  The perception that Democrats did not prioritize immigration enforcement was off-putting to many who believed that an influx of laborers directly threatened their own ability to find work. 

But while that may have been the perception two years ago, Trump has arguably overplayed his hand on immigration since then. 

While a majority of Americans supported greater immigration enforcement during the 2024 election, Trump’s perceived cruelty against immigrants has caused a majority of Americans to now believe that the President has been too aggressive on immigration enforcement, particularly when it comes to deporting those who have no criminal record or are here legally.

If Latino voters fear for the safety of themselves and their neighbors under Trump’s Administration, they may very well turn out in record numbers to hand power back to the Democrats.

There are about 12 million Latinos in Texas.  For context, Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by about 200,000 votes.

Candidate Quality

There are a multitude of factors that contribute to the outcome of a race, but I would argue that candidate quality is at the top. 

After all, Beto O’Rourke’s success was not simply the result of a blue wave, but rather, because he was considered a particularly strong candidate. 

O’Rourke was not the statewide Democratic candidate on the ballot that cycle.   Democrat Lupe Valdez was running against incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, but lost by 13.3%, performing over 10% worse than O’Rourke did among the same voter pool.

In 2017 Democrat Doug Jones pulled off one of the biggest Senate upsets in history by beating former State Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore in Alabama, a state that had voted for Trump by +27.72% the previous year.

While Democrat Jones was generally seen as supportable, the outcome was largely a result of the fact that Republican Moore had been credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women who were underage at the time of the alleged incident.   In the end, Moore was disliked enough to offset what should have been a comfortable margin of victory for most Republicans. 

As it turns out Texas’s Republican nominee for Senate may be a similarly controversial figure as well.  State Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging incumbent Senator John Cornyn in a race that’s headed to a runoff. 

In 2023 Paxton was impeached in the Republican-controlled statehouse over a scandal that involved accusations of bribery.  Though he was ultimately acquitted in the state senate, the scandals continued.  The following year, he paid a $300,000 settlement for securities fraud.  The year after that he was accused of having an extramarital affair and was divorced on ”biblical grounds.”

While most of these controversies mirror scandals that President Trump has himself faced, Democrats are hoping that facing Paxton in a general election would greatly improve their chances of victory.

And following a brutal months-long Democratic primary race, Democrats solidified their own nominee on Tuesday.  State legislator James Talarico triumphed over Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

Crockett is known for her propensity to speak bluntly against Trump and Republicans while Talarico has taken more of a conciliatory approach.  While both tactics have been used successfully for various Democratic candidates across the country, most pundits believe that Talarico’s is more likely to win over the independent and Republican voters who would be key to a Democratic victory. 

Gerrymandering

To be clear, much of the Democrats’ optimism in Texas lies only at the state level.  Statewide elections like the US Senate race enjoy the benefit of not being skewed by partisan gerrymandering. 

While growth among the state’s minority populations should have theoretically benefitted Democrats all over the state, the party is actually bracing for losses in the US House. 

Just last year, Texas Republicans made an unprecedented mid-decade change to their electoral maps, diluting the voting power of minority communities to give their own party an edge.

President Trump, who ordered the redistricting action, dropped any pretense by explicitly stating that the goal was “A very simple redraw [where] we pick up five seats.”

Democrats do have a plan in place to offset the potential losses however, as they passed their own gerrymandered maps in Democratic-controlled California.

Ultimately, all eyes are set squarely on the Senate race. A victory in Texas would likely help Democrats take control of the US Senate and blunt any potential Republican legislative success during President Trump’s final two years in office.

This could very well be an upset 36 years in the making.