Texas Just Turned BLUE! The GOP Refuses To Admit What Happened
The most humiliating result of the entire midterm blowout may have come from Texas. Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, while James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton for the state’s U.S. Senate seat. Two of the most recognizable Republicans in Texas were rejected on the same night.
Texas wasn’t the only disaster, but it may be the result Republicans have the hardest time explaining away. Democrats also won both chambers of Congress and broke through in Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina and House districts Donald Trump carried by double digits in 2024.
Preliminary exit polling suggests Latino voters moved sharply toward Democrats, while heavily Hispanic portions of Texas recorded enormous movement away from the Republican margins seen in 2024. That doesn’t prove Texas is permanently blue, but it destroys the assumption that recent Republican gains with Hispanic voters were guaranteed to last.
Trump responded by arguing that he wasn’t personally on the ballot and Republicans would have won in a landslide if he had been. He accepted the election outcome, but rejected the idea that the losses represented a verdict on him or his administration.
That is the total denial at the center of this story: not denial that the results happened, but denial that Trump’s leadership and candidate choices contributed to them.
If Trump’s coalition only appears when Trump is physically on the ballot—and his endorsements cannot transfer that support to Abbott, Paxton or congressional candidates—Republicans have no reliable national plan for what comes after him.
