Will economic progress turn Texas progressive?

Whither Texas politics?

For several decades now, Texas has been a graveyard for Democratic dreams. The state that was the home of LBJ, Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Governor Ann Richards hasn’t elected a Democrat for state-wide office for over 30 years.

So Democrats around the country are understandably excited by the promise of the cherub-faced James Talarico, who won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for November’s Texas Senatorial race. Talarico, a virtual political nobody six months ago, appears to have a good chance of winning that contest.

But why has Texas been such a Democratic disappointment for all these years? And what do those disappointments portend for Talarico?

Let’s begin by understanding that a state’s politics often follow economics. And whatever else you may say about Texas, its economic growth over time has been impressive. Its share of national GDP has trended strongly up.

Texas’s economic growth is a major reason Democrats perennially hope that they will someday turn the state blue. For in modern America rich states tend to vote Democratic, while poor states vote Republican: Think Massachusetts versus Mississippi. So as Texas grows richer and more sophisticated, won’t it eventually free itself of rabid, backward-looking Republicanism?

These speculations are especially topical given Talarico’s primary win. G. Elliott Morris runs through the reasons Texas could quite possibly elect a Democratic senator in November. They include the fact that Ken Paxton, the attorney general, may become the GOP nominee, and he has “been dogged by scandal after scandal for over a decade.” They also include the fact that Texas has a large Latino population — and Latinos have swung hard against Donald Trump and his party since 2024.

But these may be factors special to this year’s election. What about the long-term political impact of the “Texas economic miracle?” Is Texas shifting permanently towards the blue zone due to its outsize growth? My initial thought was that economic success might indeed cause Texas to flip politically. But the more I look at it, the less convincing I find that case. Why? Because Texas’s economic story isn’t what many people — including Republicans who boast about it — think it is. And that’s an important point even aside from politics.

Why has the economy of Texas grown more rapidly than the US economy as a whole? Conservatives like to attribute growth to low taxes. But the claim that low taxes lead to rapid economic growth has been more thoroughly tested in practice than any other proposition in economics, and has failed every time.

What Texas does do right, however, is let businesses build stuff, especially housing, in stark contrast with the regulations and multiple veto points that strangle construction in many blue states. A new house in Greater New York costs about 85 percent more than a house in Dallas. A house in the San Francisco Bay area costs around 150 percent more.

The same openness to building that has held the cost of Texas housing down has also helped the state become by far the nation’s largest producer of wind energy (don’t tell Trump.)

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a state having economic growth driven by relatively inexpensive housing and energy. On the contrary, growth through affordability is great!

However, the fact that affordability is driving Texas’s growth has an important implication for the character of that growth, which in turn has important political implications.

Texas, you see, has not been outpacing growth in the rest of the nation by achieving exceptionally rapid growth in productivity, or by drawing in industries with exceptionally high value-added per worker. Instead, it has been growing by attracting workers, drawn by its relative affordability. The availability of a growing work force, in turn, pulls in businesses. But the result is what economists would call “extensive” growth: More people, more jobs, but not higher income or output per person.

In fact, per capita income in Texas has if anything slipped a bit compared with per capita income in big blue states.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with this, and if you take the cost of living into account, Texas may well be offering most workers a higher standard of living than they could have achieved in California. (Texas treats the poor and vulnerable terribly, but that’s another story.) But if we’re asking about the political effects of Texan growth, Texas’s economy is getting bigger relative to the rest of the country, but not relatively richer on a per capita basis. That is, economically Texas isn’t looking more like rich blue states such as Massachusetts or even California.

Now, per capita income probably isn’t the big driver of differences in political orientation across states. Education levels are almost surely far more important. In fact, there’s a startlingly strong relationship between the percentage of a state’s population over the age of 25 with a bachelor’s degree or more and the way it voted in 2024.

If you look at the chart above, you see, first, that Texas does not have an especially highly educated population. Why not? Mainly because the state hasn’t been especially attractive to industries that employ large numbers of highly educated workers. A few years ago there was a lot of hype about Austin rivaling Silicon Valley as a technology hub, but that move has largely fizzled.

The second thing you see from the chart is that Texas’s political orientation isn’t dramatically different from what you would expect if all you knew about the state was its education level. The share of highly educated adults in Texas is intermediate between that in deep blue states and deep red states; its Republican lean is also somewhere in between.

Now, I don’t mean to say that Democrats have no chance of turning Texas blue. While Texas has mainly had extensive growth rather than rapid growth in productivity or per capita income, it has been transformed in one important respect: It’s now home to not one but two world-class metropolitan hubs in Houston and Dallas. Indeed, the maturing of those metropolises is certainly the main reason that Texas has become more culturally and professionally sophisticated.

The only other red state with comparable metropolitan depth is Georgia, which I’ve circled along with Texas in the chart. Georgia has Atlanta — and Georgia, which has a similar education level to Texas, has become a genuine swing state. The rise of Texas urbanism hasn’t yet altered the outcomes of state-level races, in which Republicans have had a lock on power. But, as in Georgia, that could change.

Also, in Texas a significant share of eligible voters are Latino, and they are a real wild card. According to exit polls, in the 2024 election 55% of Latino Texas voters voted for Trump – a 13-percentage-point increase from 2020. Many (mostly Republican) pundits quickly proclaimed that there had been a fundamental realignment of Latinos toward the GOP. But that was simply wishful thinking. Recent elections and polling have shown a sharp swing in Latino voters back to the Democratic party. In fact, the Trump administration’s hostility and brutality toward anyone with brown skin are likely to undo many years of Republican cultivation of Latino voters in states like Texas.

So the point here is that while Texas could be shifting towards the blue zone, it won’t come easily. It won’t be a simple matter of a state becoming more progressive as a result of economic progress. In other words, Texas is not about to become New Jersey, or even Colorado. But with the right Democratic candidates, who can straddle the divide between urban Democrats and non-urban Republicans, it could become Georgia. And maybe, just maybe, Texas could blaze the trail for Democrats in other deep red states.