Let’s go to the data:
County Trump Clinton Trump Biden
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Bexar 240,333 319,550 303,871 440,823
Cameron 29,472 59,402 48,834 63,732
Dimmit 974 2,173 1,384 2,264
El Paso 55,512 147,843 81,235 168,801
Frio 1,856 2,444 2,812 2,421
Hidalgo 48,642 118,809 89,925 127,391
Jim Hogg 430 1,635 831 1,197
Jim Wells 5,420 6,694 7,077 5,094
Maverick 2,816 10,397 6,881 8,324
Nueces 50,766 49,198 64,467 60,749
Presidio 652 1,458 721 1,463
Starr 2,224 9,289 8,224 9,099
Webb 12,947 42,307 18,985 32,442
Willacy 1,547 3,422 2,437 3,097
Zapata 1,029 2,063 2,032 1,820
Zavala 694 2,636 1,490 2,864
Total 453,643 779,320 641,116 931,555
County Trump% Clinton% Trump% Biden%
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Bexar 42.9% 57.1% 40.8% 59.2%
Cameron 33.2% 66.8% 43.4% 56.6%
Dimmit 31.0% 69.0% 37.9% 62.1%
El Paso 27.3% 72.7% 32.5% 67.5%
Frio 43.2% 56.8% 53.7% 46.3%
Hidalgo 29.0% 71.0% 41.4% 58.6%
Jim Hogg 20.8% 79.2% 41.0% 59.0%
Jim Wells 44.7% 55.3% 58.1% 41.9%
Maverick 21.3% 78.7% 45.3% 54.7%
Nueces 50.8% 49.2% 51.5% 48.5%
Presidio 30.9% 69.1% 33.0% 67.0%
Starr 19.3% 81.7% 47.5% 52.5%
Webb 23.4% 76.6% 36.9% 63.1%
Willacy 31.1% 68.9% 44.0% 56.0%
Zapata 33.3% 66.7% 52.8% 47.2%
Zavala 20.8% 79.2% 34.2% 65.8%
Total 36.8% 63.2% 40.8% 59.2%
Webb County totals are early voting only – they have taken their sweet time getting those results. I have no prescriptions to offer, and even if I did, I’d be the wrong person to listen to for them. I’m just reporting what happened. As others have observed, in some counties Biden met or exceeded Hillary Clinton’s numbers from 2016, but Trump greatly increased his numbers from that election. You may recall that in the last NYT/Siena poll, Nate Cohn observed that higher turnout, at least beyond a certain point, didn’t actually benefit Biden, because sufficiently high Latino turnout wasn’t in his favor. Starr County was a particularly shocking example of that, but we see that in some larger counties like Hidalgo and Cameron, and to a lesser extent El Paso as well. In some counties – Maverick, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Willacy – it appears some Clinton voters may have switched to Trump, or not voted while non-participants from 2016 came in. Bexar County was the only clear improvement for Biden. If you had to pick only one county for that, Bexar would be the one, but there’s only so much it can do.
You can look at this two ways. Hillary Clinton netted 346K votes, while Biden netted 290K. That’s not all that much, but there’s the ground we could have gained given the higher turnout as well as the ground we lost. If Biden had performed at exactly the same level as Clinton, he’d have netted 415K votes. Adjust the final score to account for that, and Biden would have lost by four and a half points, instead of almost six. Wouldn’t have mattered in this case, but it wouldn’t have taken much. Plus, you know, better to make your task easier rather than harder.
Like I said, I have no solutions to offer. Plenty of smart people have plenty of ideas, and quite a few of them were raising issues before the election. Might be a good idea to listen to them. All I’m saying is that whatever happened here, it wasn’t what we wanted. If we want to avoid a repeat, we better get to work.
Here in Harris County the heavily Latino precincts voted overwhelmingly for Biden.
Who knows what happened, in the “Hispanic Counties”, but very few of the “Hispanic” counties have a majority of voters with Spanish surnames.
The Biden campaign invested very little in outreach here in Texas and within those border communities. There is a price to pay for allowing your opponent to define your position as being antithetical to their interests.
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