A few hours before the polls closed on Nov. 3, I found myself at a local coffee shop, pondering outcomes and tempering expectations. On one hand, I felt better about our chances of finally sending Donald Trump a clear, anti-authoritarian message than I had at any time over the past decade. On the other, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I lived in Texas, and we hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988 or elected one to any statewide office since 1994.
Over my 46 years — and especially the 30 or so I’ve been paying attention to politics in the state I’ve always called home — those of us who hang out on the left side of the political aisle have been told, repeatedly and with the evidence to back it up, that a non-Republican simply can’t win statewide office in Texas. It’s impossible. A pipe dream.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling a strange sense of optimism. Things just felt different this time. And that feeling didn’t come from the cable news pundits or podcast hosts predicting a blue wave, but from the organizing work that’s been happening on the ground here for years, and from the conversations I keep having with regular Texans.
For the weeks leading up to the election, I wore a “Veterans for Talarico” T-shirt just about every day. I expected my fair share of shitty comments and eye rolls from strangers in deep red Texas, but they never really materialized. A few years ago, any piece of gear promoting a Democrat or criticizing the president would have drawn plenty of negative attention. By October, crickets.
Well, not exactly crickets, since “crickets” implies silence, and strangers kept stopping me to say they loved the shirt. That gave me the natural opening to ask if they’d voted yet, and the answer was always either “yep, voted early” or “not yet, but I’m definitely going.”
I know there’s nothing scientific about tallying reactions to a T-shirt in Travis and Williamson counties, but the shirt wasn’t the only reason I felt hopeful. Back in March, I attended training to become a volunteer deputy registrar and volunteered a few times over the spring and summer with Powered by People, the voter registration group Beto O’Rourke built out of the volunteer network from his near miss against Ted Cruz in 2018. Many of the volunteers were college-aged kids or retirees. As a middle-aged man with a job and kids of my own, I wasn’t able to contribute as much as I would have liked, but luckily, there was no shortage of people willing to spend their days on college campuses and at festivals, talking to would-be voters and getting them registered.
The other reason I was feeling hopeful is that I know a lot of people here. And while plenty of them are lifelong Republicans, they’re nothing like Donald Trump. They aren’t cruel or crude or selfish or greedy. They’re good people. Maybe some of them held their noses and looked away from much of the madness over the past decade (and that obviously has consequences), but they didn’t embrace it. And they don’t appreciate being lied to by a president who stormed back into office on promises to fix the economy and stay out of new wars, only to tax American consumers through tariffs and promptly start a new war.
“I know a lot of people here. And while plenty of them are lifelong Republicans, they’re nothing like Donald Trump.”
Several of my Republican friends even told me they were planning to vote for a Democrat for the first time in their lives. They talked about how much they liked James Talarico and respected him for focusing on issues that actually affected them instead of getting dragged into the mudslinging. But even after hearing all of that from Republican friends and family, a big part of me still didn’t believe any of it would matter. History would just keep repeating itself in the Lone Star State, no matter how good the Democratic candidates were, how bad the Republican candidates were, or how blatantly corrupt and out of control Trump got. Texas is a red state.
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
I can’t really say I woke up to a new blue state Wednesday morning, since that would suggest I’d gone to bed. My wife was flying out early that morning to visit her parents, and I had to be up around 2:30 a.m. to drive her to the airport. Sometime between watching the red wall in Texas collapse one brick at a time and waiting on results out of Michigan, I realized it was well after midnight and I’d probably be better off just staying up.
I wasn’t really surprised that Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate seat (though I wouldn’t have gambled on a 13-point margin), but the rest of the state’s results were another story. Lieutenant governor, attorney general, the state House, comptroller, railroad commissioner, agriculture commissioner... it just kept going. But maybe the biggest surprise of all was Gina Hinojosa, a state representative who was barely known outside of Austin, beating three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. And not just beating him, but doing it soundly, to become the first Latina governor in Texas history and the first woman and first Democrat to hold the office since Ann Richards.
I’ll leave what all of this means for Texas to the pundits. All I’m really qualified to talk about is what I saw with my own eyes, and what I didn’t see: the blind spots and biases in my own vision.
I’ve written before about an encounter with a white, middle-aged, tattooed police officer who saw my “Veterans Against Trump” shirt and started walking toward me. I assumed I was about to get into an argument, and instead he gave me a fist bump, thanked me for my service, and said he liked the shirt. And yet I keep falling for the same biases and stereotypes I’ve built up in my head. Every time I run into someone from the same demographic as that officer, some part of my brain assumes he’s a Trump supporter. Which is funny, because middle-aged, white, tattooed, bearded Texas guy looks a lot like what I see in the mirror every morning.
A few days before the election, I was at Lioness Books, a woman-owned independent bookstore in Leander, dropping off a box of books for the owner, Sarah Ambrus. My co-editor Rachel and I had just finished editing and publishing “Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival,” our third protest poetry anthology, and Lioness has carried all three. While I was there, I mentioned to Sarah how much I’d loved a poem called “Our National Anathema” by a poet named Biff Rushton. Sarah asked if I wanted to meet him, since he lived only about 10 minutes away. Of course I did.
When he walked in, my first thought was: Well, if I’d seen this guy in public with no context, I’d have filed him away as a Trump supporter, too. He was anything but. This was the guy, after all, who wrote one of my favorite protest poems in a book aimed very specifically at the Trump administration. We talked for a while about books and the election and expectations, and we both landed in about the same spot. Cautiously optimistic, but not overly confident.
I know how ridiculous it is to mentally lump people who look exactly like me in with MAGA when I’m certainly not MAGA myself. It’s funny how I’ve convinced myself just how open-minded I am. And I do try. But like most of us, I still walk around filing people into neat little stereotypical groups without even thinking about it.
After Texas flipped, I wanted to know more about what had actually happened, and whether my stereotypes held any water, so I went digging through The New York Times’ Voter Trends data. Some of it let my snap judgments off the hook. Sixty-three percent of white men who voted in the U.S. Senate race in Texas still went for Paxton. White voters between 45 and 64, the demographic I’m now a part of, went Republican 64% of the time. So the part of my brain that files every bearded, middle-aged white dude away as part of the problem turns out to be statistically correct two out of three times. But white men also moved 19 points to the left compared with how we voted in the 2024 presidential election. And 1 out of 3 is still a lot of people I’m getting wrong.
“First-time and young voters showed up. People changed their minds — a lot of them, in every group, including about one-third of the guys who look like me.”
The bigger story might be less about how white people voted and more about how everyone else did. Hispanic Texans make up about 40% of the state’s population, and the fatal error Republican strategists made was assuming that after 2024, those voters belonged to them. Instead, Hispanic voters swung 46 points and went for Talarico, 72% to 27%. It turns out that people who gave you a shot at fixing the economy aren’t going to be cool with you immediately making everything worse and then sending masked agents into their communities to disappear their friends and relatives.
And then there was maybe the most encouraging number of all: People who didn’t vote at all in 2024 made up about 15% of the electorate and broke for Talarico by more than 40 points. Those are exactly the folks Beto and his army of volunteers have been out there educating and registering for years.
The wave that swept across Texas was definitely blue and definitely huge. People on the left who were angry showed up. Some people on the right who were angry stayed home. Some who were pissed enough switched sides. First-time and young voters showed up. People changed their minds — a lot of them, in every group, including about one-third of the guys who look like me.
But driving home from the airport Wednesday morning, I didn’t know any of that. I don’t pull many all-nighters anymore, and the exhaustion was starting to creep in, but I felt strangely energized. As I pulled into the driveway and headed inside to wake the kids up for school, I looked to my left and saw that the sun was just starting to show itself as a thin purple line on the eastern horizon.
Nick Allison is a writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in HuffPost Personal, Slate, CounterPunch, The Fulcrum, The Chaos Section, and elsewhere. He does his level best to avoid all things social media, but you can occasionally find him on Bluesky or follow his mostly nonpolitical Substack, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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