Texas just hit 18M voters

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas has surpassed 18 million registered voters for the first time as an increasingly urban and diverse population reshapes the state’s political landscape and pushes the GOP to retool its decades-old playbook to keep a grip on the state. The state’s voter registration rolls are expanding at a quicker pace than other fast-growing southern states like Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. And they’re surpassing the state’s population growth, a sign that more than just new Texans are signing up to vote. Since U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was last on the ballot in 2018 and narrowly won reelection by just 215,000 votes, Texas has added nearly 2.6 million voters — the size of Connecticut’s entire voting rolls. The biggest growth has come in Harris County and along the I-35 corridor, areas that have trended blue in recent elections. While transplants from other states make up a good portion of that rise, voter advocacy groups say it is also a product of their work in places like Houston and San Antonio to find and register Texans who don’t typically participate in elections.

Also fueling the rise is the state’s booming youth population coming of voting age. Many high schools have programs to help sign up new voters and people can also register when getting a driver’s license. The shifting demographics are forcing both parties to lean on advanced analytics to help them identify who these new voters are, where they came from, how likely they are to vote in November and which party’s platform they gravitate more towards. While some Republicans have convinced themselves Texas will always be red, top strategists in the party warn Texas is at risk of following other Southwestern states like Arizona and Nevada, once solid Republican states that started turning blue in the last two decades and helped put Joe Biden in the White House in 2020. “We are in a competitive state and we are not going to win just sitting on our laurels,” said Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist who has helped Gov. Greg Abbott and former Gov. Rick Perry dominate Texas politics for the last 25 years.