Split ticket voting among Latinos in Texas.
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All but one of the Republicans running statewide campaigns in Texas this year beat their opponents by 8 to 11 percentage points. The one? President Donald Trump, who beat Joe Biden by 5.8 percentage points.
Statewide, Texas Republicans outperformed the leader of their ticket.
In several places along the Texas border, the opposite happened. Much has been written about Trump’s strong performance in the persistently blue counties on the Texas-Mexico border. His border supporters were numerous and enthusiastic. The New York Times sent reporters to Zapata County, which flipped from its customary spot on the Democratic side of the aisle to a seat on the Republican side. The Wall Street Journal went to Starr, where Trump improved dramatically on historical Republican results.
But it’s not like those blue counties switched sides altogether. Voters there supported Trump — in most cases that meant he still lost, but by less than in his first race in 2016 — but then many of them went back to voting more or less like they usually do.
Start with Zapata County. Chrysta Castañeda, a Democrat running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, beat Republican Jim Wright in Zapata by 531 votes. (Wright won statewide, by almost 10 percentage points.) At the same time, Trump was beating Biden in Zapata County by 212 votes.
Castañeda wasn’t the odd duck on that county’s ballots. Trump was. While he was winning, the same Republican candidates who outperformed him statewide were often losing. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn landed 363 votes behind MJ Hegar. Nathan Hecht, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, lost to Democrat Amy Clark Meachum in Zapata by 512 votes. The chief got 53% of the statewide vote, but in Zapata County, he only got 41%.
It’s both interesting and not that consequential. Only 3,279 people voted in Zapata County. Many of the border counties are rural, and a change in a relatively small number of votes can produce outsized percentage shifts.
Even so, this election marked a significant and unusual change of direction. If Trump had performed like the rest o
If the Republican ticket, the border votes wouldn’t be a topic of conversation. And in some ways, the numbers point to a result that’s more complicated than a county moving from one party to the other.
Several of these counties only did it for the president.
