How high turnout could give Biden the ultimate election gift: Texas

The GOP in Texas, led by Governor Greg Abbott, has done all it could to depress turnout

Trump supporters take part in a flotilla in Texas in support of the president (Getty Images)

In a sign of how bad things look for Donald Trump as America heads into its final weekend before Tuesday’s presidential election, the tightest race in the country is in… Texas?

You can’t blame Americans for doing a double take at this news. After all, Texas last voted for a Democrat for president in 1976, and it took Watergate and a southern candidate, Jimmy Carter, to pull that off. It’s been a reliable part of the Republican’s red wall in the sunbelt ever since. But now that wall seems to be collapsing against a blue wave of early voting.

Even though the election date is November 3, voting is well underway. And that’s what has Democrats in Texas near a state of euphoria, given it’s the second-biggest prize on the map with 38 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

“We can see a crumbling red wall,” non-partisan Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman said on MSNBC. “Arizona, Texas and Georgia are very much in jeopardy for the president. Texas just surpassed its 2016 total votes cast on Thursday and we have one day of early voting and election day to go.”

Wasserman added on Twitter: “We're just headed for a massive, unprecedented turnout there (and a lot of other places).”

The GOP in Texas, led by Governor Greg Abbott, has done all it could to depress turnout. Consider that in Harris County, home of Houston and the most fertile ground in the state historically for Democratic votes, Abbott ordered just one drop box could be placed there. Harris County is 1,777 square miles.

Harris County’s response? 24-hour voting. And as is the case statewide, voting there has already surpassed 2016 levels.

“Something special is happening in Texas,” said David Plouffe, former Obama Campaign Manager Thursday. “It’s going to be close. You wouldn’t have said that six months ago. With some of these early vote numbers in suburban areas of Texas, when you talk to people working in the state house races down there, you see movement of 30 points from 2016 to 2020. They count a lot of their vote early so we should know a lot on election night.”

In 2012, President Obama lost the state to Mitt Romney by 16 points. In 2016, Trump’s margin over Hillary Clinton shrunk to nine points. And in 2018 in a statewide and hotly contested Senate race, Ted Cruz prevailed over Beto O’Rourke by just 2.6 points.

The Cook Report and NBC have moved the state into the “toss-up” category. And ABC Chief Political Analyst tweeted, “Biden has a better chance today of carrying Texas than Trump has of carrying Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.”

ABC’s FiveThirtyEight has the race 1.2 points in favor of Trump’s GOP, that’s half the margin they registered on October 4. The latest Dallas Morning News/University of Texas poll has Biden leading by three points.

But the polls right now are assuming varying turnout that may prove to be much different than what actually occurs. When Monmouth University adjusted their highly graded (by FiveThirtyEight) poll for a higher turnout model, Biden gained two points in Georgia versus the normal model.

A similar bump with high turnout in Texas would be more than enough to wipe out Trump’s current  average polling lead there.