Five things to watch in Texas on Election Day

How does Trump perform in Texas?

All eyes are at the top of the ticket where Trump is trying to return to the White House after his loss to Democrat Joe Biden four years ago. The race is neck and neck in key swing states but Trump is expected to carry Texas, which last voted for a Democrat for president in 1976 when the state went for Jimmy Carter.

But Democrats looking for a silver lining will be watching the margin of victory and hoping that a good performance by Vice President Kamala Harris will give them enough fuel to put Texas squarely in the battleground state conversation next cycle.

Since 2012, the margin of victory for the Republican presidential candidates has been steadily dropping in Texas. Romney won the state by 16 percentage points that year. Four years later, Trump won the state by 9 points. In 2020, Trump won again, but by 5.6 points.

If the margin of victory narrows further, Texas Democrats could have more fuel to demand greater investment from the national party, which has refused to spend big in the state citing its expensive media market and an unfavorable electoral map.

If national Democrats began investing money in Texas, state officials say, the party could run more competitive campaigns.

Secondly, a good performance by Harris could give down-ballot Democrats a boost, most notably for Dallas Congressman Colin Allred who is in an uphill battle to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Allred’s strategy has always been to ride the momentum of presidential voters and then hope he can persuade enough moderate Republican and independent voters to make the race competitive.

Cruz v. Allred

Cruz is once again in the hot seat as he seeks reelection for a third term.

Allred is running a spirited challenge that has raised record-breaking amounts of money, pitching himself as a more moderate alternative to Cruz. Democrats are hopeful that Allred will end the party’s 30-year drought of Texas Democrats holding statewide office. A win by Allred could determine whether Democrats maintain their 51-seat majority in the U.S. Senate.

Senate Democrats are struggling to defend several incumbents in red states, making any flip opportunity valuable. Control of the Senate is crucial for whoever wins the presidency. The chamber has confirmation power over a future presidential cabinet and will determine the next president’s ability to pass meaningful legislation.

Democrats are more bullish about their ability to beat Cruz since former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke came within three points of unseating him in 2018. That race, which similarly broke fundraising records and was one of the most expensive Senate races in history, revealed Cruz’s vulnerabilities among moderate voters. Cruz has spent his career making a name for himself as one of the right’s most vocal fighters in Congress.

Both Cruz and Allred have a lot on the line. Allred gave up his safe Dallas-based U.S. House seat to run for Senate. He is well liked within the Democratic Caucus and was seen as having a promising career in the lower chamber. Cruz, meanwhile, hopes to one day run for president again, and his position in the Senate was a major platform for his 2016 presidential run.

South Texas congressional races

Texas’ two most competitive congressional races this year are rematches from 2022, both centered in South Texas.

In the 15th Congressional District, freshman Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz is trying to fend off Democrat Michelle Vallejo for the second straight cycle. Two years ago, De La Cruz became the first Republican to ever represent the district, which was left open by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s decision to seek reelection in a neighboring district.

The district is anchored in Hidalgo County and its biggest city, McAllen, along the U.S.-Mexico border. It runs through rural South Texas up to Guadalupe County east of San Antonio.

De La Cruz won by a comfortable 8.5-point margin two years ago, but Vallejo thinks conditions are more favorable this time: Trump would have carried the district by just 3 percentage points under the redrawn boundaries in 2020, and national Democrats are putting more money into the race than they did two years ago. Still, De La Cruz has staked out a huge financial advantage, raising more than $7 million to Vallejo’s roughly $2 million.

Gonzalez, meanwhile, is seeking reelection in the adjacent 34th Congressional District, where he ran in 2022 after his old district was redrawn to favor Republicans. The McAllen Democrat again faces former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores, the Republican he unseated two years ago, in a district that runs from the Mexican border along the Gulf of Mexico to just south of Corpus Christi.

The race is an uphill climb for Flores, who finished 8.5 percentage points behind Gonzalez in 2022. Biden would have carried the district by over 15 points in 2020 under the current boundaries. Still, Flores has raised around $6 million this cycle, more than double Gonzalez’s haul, and national Republicans have touted internal polling that shows the race is close.

In both contests, Republicans are looking to continue their recent momentum in predominantly Latino South Texas, while Democrats are trying to assert themselves in a region they had long dominated — until recent cycles.

The Legislature

Given the state’s electoral maps, it’s a given that Republicans will retain control of both chambers of the Legislature this November. The real question is whether the legislative branch will continue its right-ward lurch, which will have an impact on everything from public school funding to transgender rights and abortion access.

A number of Republican incumbents in the House were ousted by right-wing challengers in the primaries earlier this year. The challengers rode a wave of discontent over the incumbents’ decision to buck Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan for school voucher legislation and to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, a polarizing figure in the party. Those challengers promised to support Abbott’s push for voucher legislation and to take the lower chamber in a more conservative direction after accusing current House Speaker Dade Phelan of being too liberal and siding with Democrats.

The insurgent wing of the Republican Party in the House has already coalesced around Mansfield Rep. David Cook as its choice to replace Phelan in January and he has pledged to do away with the long-standing bipartisan tradition of naming Democrats as committee chairs.

Republicans are even bullish about picking up seats where long-serving moderate or conservative Democrats are retiring.

But Democrats are holding out hope that they can cut into the GOP advantage and once again make a stand against school vouchers. Though many of the rural Republicans who aligned with Democrats to beat back the voucher push have now been replaced, the minority party is trying to convince moderate Republican voters that the GOP has overreached.

Will Texas high courts stay red?

Three seats on the all-GOP Texas Supreme Court will be decided this year — the first statewide judicial election since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Democrats this year, are targeting the three incumbents — justices John Devine, Jane Bland and Jimmy Blacklock — hoping bipartisan backlash over abortion rulings will give them their first win on the bench since 1994.

Polling has found that Texas voters are broadly dissatisfied with the strictness of the state’s abortion laws. But experts say that Democrats face hurdles on Tuesday given the lack of attention paid by voters to the Texas Supreme Court, the state’s highest civil body. Since Jan. 1, Bland and Blacklock have also raised and spent more than three times as much as their opponents, judges Bonnie Lee Goldstein and DaSean Jones.

There are signs that Devine could be more vulnerable than his Republican colleagues in his race against Harris County District Court Judge Christine Weems. He was the only justice with a primary challenger this year, and narrowly survived a heated campaign that focused on, among other ethical concerns, his absence from half of oral arguments before the court last year. Devine has trailed Weems in both fundraising and spending this cycle.

Devine is a longtime fixture in conservative Christian legal causes who has called church-state separation a “myth” and, as a Supreme Court candidate in 2011, claimed to have been arrested 37 times at anti-abortion protests in the 1980s. Earlier this year, the Tribune reported that Devine did not recuse himself from a high-profile sex abuse lawsuit against Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler despite working for Pressler’s law firm at the time of the alleged molestations. Last month, the Tribune also reported that Devine has for years overseen the trust of an elderly millionaire with dementia — despite prohibitions on Texas judges serving in such fiduciary roles for non-family members. Devine has denied any wrongdoing, saying the woman considered him like a son for decades.

Texas’ Court of Appeals has traditionally been overshadowed by the state Supreme Court, its civil counterpart in Texas’ bifurcated judicial system. But this year, a series of political fights over the death penalty and voter fraud investigations have thrust the all-Republican judicial body into an unexpected spotlight — and created a fork-in-the-road moment for voters, who will decide Tuesday between three judges backed by Attorney General Ken Paxton, or their Democratic challengers.

The surprise drama of this year’s race traces back to 2021, when the court ruled that Paxton’s office must get permission from county prosecutors to pursue cases of alleged voter fraud.Furious, Paxton vowed revenge and launched a full-on electoral blitz that decisively ousted three incumbent judges during the GOP primary in March.

On the ballot Tuesday are the three Paxton-endorsed candidates — David Schenck, Gina Parker and Lee Finley — and their respective Democratic challengers, Holly Taylor, Nancy Mulder and Chika Anyiam.

Separately, the Court of Criminal Appeals has faced recent scrutiny for its role in the high-profile political fight over Robert Roberson, a death row inmate whose scheduled execution was halted earlier this month by a bipartisan group of Texas House members. All three of the court’s outgoing judges voted to allow Roberson’s execution to move forward. But if even one of the court’s new judges seems likely to take a different stance, it could open the door to a rehearing. Those chances are likely to diminish if Republican candidates sweep next week.

— James Barragán, Jasper Scherer, Matthew Choi, Robert Downen