The Number Texas Democrats Actually Need In November
What it actually takes to beat Abbott, Paxton, and thirty years of bad governance.
Earlier this week, James Talarico held several town halls in the Black community. Before his town hall in Houston, he was the surprise guest speaker at Letitia Plummer’s event, where he endorsed her and vowed to support her. One of the things that Talarico has promised is $25 million in Black voter outreach across the state.
What I would like to see is a good chunk of that invested in joint organizing with Letitia Plummer to turn out the vote in Harris County. Nearly 25% of Texas’ Black population lives in Harris County. If the Talarico campaign invests heavily in turning out the vote there, that will be beneficial not only for him, but also for Letitia Plummer. And we really want Letitia Plummer to win Harris County.
We really need Harris County to hit 2018 levels, with a turnout of between 750,000 and 850,000 Democratic votes. This is the biggest Democratic county in the state, and if they can hit those numbers, we can hand Talarico and Plummer a win, but we also have four Texas House seats (HD127, HD132, HD133, and HD138) and one Congressional seat (TX09) that may be flipped.
Yeah, Harris County is a big deal, but it isn’t the only puzzle piece for November.
The Hispanic vote’s wide swing left.
In March, something happened along the Rio Grande. Democratic primary turnout in Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, and Willacy counties more than doubled from 2024. The share of registered Democrats who actually bothered to vote beat 2018. It beat 2020. It beat every comparable midterm we’ve got on the books.
Hidalgo County: 61,480 Democratic primary voters, a 114% increase over the last comparable cycle. Cameron County: Democratic early voting more than doubled, 22,317 ballots versus 8,561 Republican. Starr and Hidalgo posted the two biggest turnout jumps of any counties in the entire state, 67% and 51%, relative to their 2020-2022-2024 average. A full third of Latino early voters hadn’t shown up for a primary in years. They showed up this time.
Talarico’s been building relationships in the Valley since December, when he and Tejano star Bobby Pulido held a joint rally in Weslaco and cross-endorsed each other. That was already his second Valley trip since launching his Senate bid. In February, Talarico, Pulido, and Gina Hinojosa packed the ACE Center in Edinburg, Pulido’s hometown, and Pulido told the crowd, “If we’re going to win, we have to talk to people that voted Republican. They’re not our enemies.” This month, Talarico ran a 750-mile “Frontera Tour” from El Paso to the Valley, stopping in Laredo for a tariffs conference, a town hall, and a school supply drive.
Paxton, for what it’s worth, rallied in McAllen that same week. Only about 100 people showed up.
A UnidosUS poll has Texas Hispanic voters backing Democrats 54 to 28 if the election were held today. National polling from Axios has Latino voters favoring the generic Democratic House candidate 54 to 27, with immigration enforcement now their second biggest issue, right behind the economy. And here’s my favorite number in this whole section, the DCCC’s own internal memo, the one analyzing why Republicans redrew five congressional seats around a Latino rightward swing that was supposedly permanent, now calls that entire mid-decade gerrymander “a misguided and failed effort.”
A dummymander, just like I’ve been saying all along.
I predict Bobby Pulido will flip this district (TX15). Republicans also think they’re going to pick up TX34 (Vicente Gonzalez) and TX35 (Johnny Garcia), but I’m also predicting Democrats hold on to those districts as well. My mode of prediction is my Magic8ball, obviously, since I can’t see the future.
The Republicans drew the maps really stupidly.
We talked about this a lot last year, and I’m glad we’re finally getting closer to the chickens coming home to roost. Because what they did with their racist gerrymandering was try to eliminate Black political power in favor of more Hispanic districts that swung for Trump in 2024. But instead of basing it on census numbers, they based it on Trump’s election data. 😂 And now that the Hispanic vote is swinging back left, they’ll have wound up shooting themselves in the foot.
Republicans got exactly the map they wanted. Every seat they carved out, every line they drew based on Trump’s 2024 Hispanic numbers, and it’s still not going to save them. You can gerrymander a district. You cannot gerrymander a voter’s mind two years later when ICE shows up in their cousin’s neighborhood.
Now let’s talk about what it actually takes to flip anything.
Texas House: Democrats need 76 of 150 seats for a majority. That’s 14 seats Democrats need to net.
Which brings me to the DLCC, who showed up to the party for the first time in years with $50 million and a target list of 12 Texas House seats. I appreciate the enthusiasm. I really do. But their own math, by their own list, only gets Republicans down to a 76-74 margin. That’s not a majority. That’s a nicer minority. And three of the seats on that list are on defense, not offense.
So if the national money is only bringing a 12-seat plan to a 14-seat fight, guess who has to make up the other two. Us. The county parties. The precinct chairs. The people actually knocking doors instead of running spreadsheets in DC.
State Senate is not happening this cycle. Democrats need 16 of 31 seats for control, and we are nowhere close. What we’ve got is a chance to chip away, SD2 chief among them, the seat running through Dallas, Rockwall, and Kaufman.
Congress is the one where the gerrymander cuts both ways. Texas has 38 seats. Republicans currently hold 25 of them, and the whole point of the 2025 mid-decade redraw was to hand them 30. Five more seats, a cushion for the US House majority. However, don’t expect to see that happen this year.
Abbott vs. Hinojosa.
This race matters more than the US Senate race (in my opinion), but it’s going to be a much harder climb. The polling is a mess, and I mean that as a compliment to Hinojosa. NYT/Siena had Abbott up 51 to 44 on June 30th. Three weeks earlier, UT’s Texas Politics Project had it 47 to 40. The RealClearPolitics average sits at Abbott plus 6.8, 49 to 42.
Meanwhile, a Texas Public Opinion Research poll back in April had it 48 to 43. Hinojosa’s own campaign put out an internal in February claiming a 3-point race. Take it with the grain of salt it deserves.
But here’s the number that actually made me sit up. In March, Public Policy Polling found Abbott and Hinojosa tied 48-48 in TX23. Trump carried that district by 15 points in 2024. Fifteen. If a Republican governor is drawing dead even in a seat Trump won by double digits less than two years ago, that’s floor-cracking.
Now the part that should worry you if you’re the type who worries. Abbott is currently sitting at $71 million as of this month. Hinojosa raised about $8.5 million so far.
The question is whether it’s finally enough to break a streak that has survived Beto, survived Wendy Davis, survived every Democrat who’s ever told you this was the year. I’m not going to promise you it’s different this time. I’m going to show you the numbers and let you decide for yourself.
Here’s the number.
In 2024, Republicans turned out 6,393,597 votes in Texas. Their best ever. In 2020, Democrats turned out 5,259,126. Their best ever too. Those are presidential-year numbers, and 2026 isn’t a presidential year, so neither one is the target. But they tell you the ceiling on each side, and that matters.
Midterms are a different animal. Turnout drops for everybody. In 2018, the best midterm Democrats have ever had in this state, Beto pulled 4,045,632 votes and still lost by 215,000. In 2022, a rougher cycle, Beto got 3,546,615 running for governor and lost by nearly 900,000. That’s the real range we’re working with. Not presidential turnout. Midterm turnout.
So here’s the math. Texas has 18.6 million registered voters right now, up from 15.8 million in 2018. That’s 18% growth in the voter rolls in eight years. If Democrats simply matched their 2018 turnout rate, the same level of participation, on today’s bigger voter file, that alone gets you to roughly 4.7 million votes.
And here’s why that number might actually be enough this year, in a way it wasn’t in 2018. Paxton is polling under 50% against his own party’s preferred candidate for the Senate seat. Abbott’s margin has been shrinking in poll after poll. The primary turnout we’ve already seen, record-breaking across the state, doubled in the Rio Grande Valley, up 88% in Bexar County early voting, tells you Republican enthusiasm isn’t showing up the way it did in 2024. If the GOP comes in anywhere near their 2018 or 2022 floor, somewhere around 4.3 to 4.6 million, then 4.7 million doesn’t just close the gap. It wins the race outright.
That’s the number Talarico and Hinojosa need statewide. 4.7 million. I might even say 5 million to be safe.
Now watch how fast the math gets local. Harris County alone, at 2018 levels, delivers 750,000 to 850,000 of those votes. That’s somewhere between 16 and 18 percent of the entire statewide win number sitting in one county. Add Dallas, which delivered 511,027 votes for Harris in 2024 and represents about 10% of all Texas Democrats. Add Tarrant, which is 7.96% of the statewide Democratic base and just proved in a special election that it can outperform its own recent history by 50 points in the right precincts. Add Bexar, which just posted 88% higher primary turnout than the last midterm. You start stacking up the four biggest counties in this state, and you are most of the way to 4.7 million before you’ve even gotten to the Valley, before you’ve counted a single vote out of Travis, before Black voter outreach money has even fully hit the ground in East Texas.
This is arithmetic. The counties know their number. Now they just have to hit it.
That’s the whole ballgame.
A number that’s smaller than what Republicans already proved they can turn out in a good year, and smaller than what Democrats proved they could turn out in 2020. We’re not asking Texas to do something it’s never done.
Harris County gets you 750,000 to 850,000 of it, and that number gets a lot easier to hit if Talarico’s $25 million in Black voter outreach actually lands where it needs to land, which is arm in arm with Letitia Plummer. Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar stack another enormous chunk on top of that before you’ve left the four biggest counties in Texas. And then there’s the part of this map Republicans handed us themselves. The Rio Grande Valley has done a complete 180. Hidalgo up 114%. Cameron more than doubling Republican turnout. Starr and Hidalgo posting the two biggest jumps in the entire state.
Republicans spent 2025 racially gerrymandering a map off Trump’s 2024 numbers, like a guy betting his whole paycheck on a horse because it won last Tuesday. The dummymander is going to hand Bobby Pulido a congressional seat in a district Republicans built specifically to prevent that from happening, among other seats, including TX35, TX34, and TX09 (maybe).
Abbott still has more money than some small countries. No Democrat has won a governor’s race in this state since Ann Richards, and that streak doesn’t care how good our polling looks in July. The DLCC’s own list only gets us to 76-74 in the House, not a majority, which means the last two seats are on us. Precincts across Harris, Dallas, and Tarrant are still sitting empty, waiting for someone whose actual job it is to knock on the next door over. Talarico still has real work to do with Black voters after the primary.
But here’s what I know for certain. The people writing Texas off as a lost cause haven’t done the math. I just did it for you. Every county has its number.
Texas doesn’t flip because of a poll. It flips because neighbors talk to neighbors until the people writing the laws finally look like the people living under them.
104 days until the November election!
Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.
LoneStarLeft is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
That was a lot of mathing. It really is on us which is one reason I am not vacationing this summer. It has also been puzzling to me why more attention has not been paid to the Governor race. Could it have anything to do with the Democratic candidate being female????
Thank you, Michelle. Kinda sobering, but the kick in the pants we need. Just shared to bsky.