Compare/contrast American Presidential elections

[pbrower2a]

Here's one state that shows trends in America as a whole. The last time that a Democratic nominee for President won Texas was 1976:


TEXAS and its 256 Counties




Jimmy Carter did well in eastern Texas aside from the Dallas-Fort Worth "Metroplex" and Greater Houston, winning the part of Texas most like "Dixie", and in a way unlikely to be repeated for more than half a century (we are 46 years away from that) many heavily-rural counties of central and northwest Texas. I'm guessing that both Texas' "Dixie" and farm areas of Texas that much more resemble the Midwest still had plenty of voters over 50 who gave credit to the New Deal for greatly reshaping their lives all to the better.

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...What a difference eight years makes (1984)! Texas is by default the biggest state in the Bible Belt, and Reagan got 63% of the vote despite having no ties to Texas. Younger voters (late-wave Boomers and early-wave X) were much more R than D -- probably about R+20. About 1.6% of the electorate, almost entirely over 50, passes into electoral oblivion each year, and older voters of 1976 who were about D+20 were about 12.8% less of the Texas vote. That explains about 3.2% of the difference. Another demographic trend was that Mexican-Americans tended to leave Texas for California, where economic opportunities seemed better. Most importantly, the Religious Right tied its claims to moral truth to unbridled capitalism, which pushed a conservative Democratic state toward the plutocratic wing of the GOP. This is particularly so in both the Deep South ancestral to most of eastern Texas and the Mountain South ancestral to central Texas to an extent not so true in, for example, New England.



OK, Ronald Reagan had a well-organized, lavishly-funded Presidential campaign; he had a personality far more ebullient than that of Walter Mondale, who seemed to win the Democratic nomination for President for "long and distinguished service to the Democratic Party"

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Bill Clinton billed himself as "the Man from Hope", a town not far from the Texas state line in Texarkana. He was a near-Texan geographically, and it is telling that he won the Texas counties on the Arkansas and Louisiana state lines. Although not a part of the Religious Right, he was as good a cultural fit as any Democrat since Carter in 1976. He still lost Texas by 5% in 1996 (which has a lower vote share for Ross Perot and less influence of the third-Party nominee, and in which a former resident of Texas was not the Republican nominee) so I am using it. Clinton and Carter seem similar ideologically, but even though winning 377 electoral votes, Clinton did not win Texas.



Clinton regained some rural counties of central and western Texas and some counties holding some significant rural areas, like Cameron (Brownsville and Harlingen), Nueces (Corpus Christi), El Paso (El Paso), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin). The cultural shift toward the Religious Right and its reactionary agenda on economics and personal life was largely intact in Texas enough to make Texas straddle 400 electoral votes for the Democratic nominee. It was not enough. Rural Texas was shrinking, and the giant or near-giant cities of Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth were growing fast with the Democrats failing to keep up.