Flipping the Texas Electoral Vote

States of various shadings each house about one-third of the US population. The four states with the dark blue shading have more than half (56%) of the 270 electoral votes a presidential candidate needs to win. Map by the author.

In the upcoming 2024 presidential election Texas will have a huge impact on the outcome. Texas will have 38 electoral votes, second only to California’s 54. Both states are huge electoral prizes. (Florida with 30 and New York with 28 round out the ‘Big 4.’) Those four by the way, two red and two blue, have more than half (56%) of the 270 electoral votes a presidential candidate needs to win.

I read somewhere that “if the Democrats can turn Texas blue they will have a lock on future presidential elections.” NO it’s not a lock, but YES a switch of the Texas vote from its current status as a red state to a blue state would have flipped several recent elections.

Note that this is a very different outcome from my earlier post about ‘what if Texas left the Union?’ (titled Let My Texas People Go). In that scenario taking Texas out of the picture only affected one recent election: Gore would have beaten Bush Jr. in 2000.

Let’s get right to it: as you can see in the chart below, switching Texas from red to blue — that is, if Texas had voted Democratic rather than Republican, as it has voted in 12 of the 13 elections since 1972, a Texas flip would have switched three electoral outcomes. The far right column on the chart is the key. Hillary Clinton would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016; John Kerry would have beaten George Bush Jr. in 2004, and…