Few people were shocked Tuesday night when Texas has been called for former President Donald Trump. But how easily the president-elect now ran the Lone Star State showed massive Republican gains compared to just four years ago.

Trump won more than 56% of the vote in Texas, some of them 14 points higher than Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. In 2020, Trump defeated President Joe Biden by just six percentage points.

Such a seismic shift didn’t happen overnight — and, according to experts and Texas Republicans, it wasn’t a fluke either. Texas GOP Chairman Abraham George told The Texas Newsroom it took years of work.

“We went to work a lot in South Texas. We’ve done that over the next couple of years, probably the last four or five months, since I became president, one of my campaign promises was that we’re going to turn South Texas around,” he said.

That work paid off, as Republicans managed to flip 16 counties since the 2016 presidential election.

Kevin Kearns, a political scientist at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said he has noticed increased attention on the region from Republicans.

“Even here in Corpus Christi, we’ve periodically seen Governor Abbott come down and campaign,” said Kearns, who also pointed to Sen. Ted Cruz’s work in the area. “Even if you just looked at the political candidates coming to South Texas — meaning in the 2022 midterms — President Trump was here.”

It wasn’t just the Republicans’ frequent campaign stops in South Texas. GOP gains in Texas can also be attributed to the makeup of the region and the party’s messaging to voters there, according to Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s important to note, especially in South Texas, that we’re not necessarily talking about, you know, college-educated voters or even urban Hispanic voters,” Blank said. “We’re talking, in most cases, about non-college-educated suburban and often rural Hispanic voters who, by all accounts, were likely to lean Republican, regardless of their racial or ethnic identity.”

Voters without a college education, often referred to as the working class, have long been seen as a key voting bloc for the Democratic Party. But Blank said that, more often than not, the party is now seen as “reflecting the political tastes and preferences of a core group of college-educated voters.”

Blank pointed at Harris plan to give first-time home buyers $25,000.

“Well, that sounds pretty good. As long as you can find a house under $250,000. And that’s 10% of a down payment that hopefully you can then take out a bank loan at a very high interest rate,” he said.

But given house prices in 2024Blank said the program probably didn’t resonate with working-class voters who might not have saved enough money to take advantage of such a program in the first place.

That ties to a bigger issue voters were worried about this election: the economy.

“A lot of rural Texas is shifting red because the economy is less good,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “And the threats to it oil and gas the industry that people think comes from the Democrats causes communities to vote Republican.”

The change was not subtle. In Starr County, Biden beat Trump by five points in 2020. Four years later, voters there chose Trump over Harris by 16 points.

Rottinghaus said the biggest takeaway from this is how “ the economy transcends issues of racial attachment to the Democratic Party.”

Craig Goldman, former chairman of the Texas House GOP caucus and now congressman-electtold The Texas Newsroom that people in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley “realize that (Democrat) policies don’t favor them, and Republican policies, they’re more in line with and more in line with.”

Not long ago, Democrats seemed to to make gains in Texas. But after this election, Goldman said, “Texas isn’t getting any bluer. Texas is getting redder, and that’s evidenced by what happened in the Rio Grande Valley.”

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