Texas was considered by some to be potentially in play, as the state had not backed a Republican for president by double digits since it favored Mitt Romney in 2012. This increased competitiveness was largely explained by the fast-growing Texas Triangle trending leftwards in some elections, namely in the closely-contested 2018 U.S. Senate race and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which saw the Metroplex county of Tarrant and the Greater Austin counties of Williamson and Hays flip to the Democratic candidate for the first time in decades. However, in the 2020 state elections, predominantly HispanicSouth Texas shifted significantly Republican, a trend that the rest of the state followed in the 2022 midterms.[2][3] In 2024, Trump went on to win Texas by a margin of over 1.5 million votes, the second-largest margin of victory for any presidential candidate in Texas history.[4] Trump won 242 out of the state's 254 counties, the most for a Republican since 1972.[citation needed]
Trump’s 13.7 percent margin was significantly greater than his single-digit margins in 2016 and 2020. Trump significantly outperformed his polling averages in the state and became the first presidential candidate to win Texas by double digits since 2012, reversing the trend towards Democrats that Texas had exhibited in the two previous presidential elections. According to exit polls, 55% of Latinos in the state voted for Trump.[5] Data also showed that Trump made large inroads with Asian-American voters in Texas, who awarded him 58% of their votes.[6] This marked the first time a Republican candidate won a majority of both Asian and Latino voters in Texas. Such Republican trends by these groups were replicated nationwide.
Trump became the first presidential candidate to receive over 6 million votes in Texas, setting a record for the most votes received by a candidate in any election in the state, as well as the largest vote total ever received by a Republican presidential candidate in any state in American history.
^"Republican victories show Texas is still far from turning blue". The Texas Tribune. November 9, 2022. As large as the cities are and how Democratic that they are, Texas Democrats still don't have a way to get past that red wall of rural West Texas, [Drew Landry] said. Rural Texas still rules the day. I was seeing some very, very close numbers before a lot of the rural counties reported [election returns], and once they did, it just blew the door open for Abbott.