Is Texas the next California? What’s behind Its blue shift — and whether it will last

"Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue." So said Senator Ted Cruz, who, starting in January 2027, will become the only Republican from Texas elected to state office, in a lengthy message published following the midterm elections.

According to Cruz, the results were a "blue tsunami" — a claim backed by the data. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, the Democrats won every state office up for election, from the governorship to the Railroad Commission. All of them switched from Republican to Democratic control. In addition, the party regained control of the state House of Representatives for the first time in more than two decades, although Republicans retained control of the state Senate by a 19-to-12 margin.

Now, the state that for years presented itself as the polar opposite of California or New York will be governed by Democrats at least until 2031.

The results may bring to mind the warning from Pat Buchanan, who in 2011 warned that when Texas became predominantly Hispanic, it would follow California's path and turn Democratic. At the time, the former advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan warned that it would mark the "end" of the Republican Party.

However, Buchanan made his prediction on the assumption that Hispanics would vote for the Democrats until the end of time. That notion was shattered just a few years later, when Donald Trump stepped off the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his first presidential bid.

Since then, with the sole exception of 2018, Hispanics have become more Republican with each election cycle. The peak came in 2024, when Trump won about half of the Hispanic vote in Texas. Furthermore, he became the Republican with the highest percentage of the Hispanic vote since such data has been collected.

So, amid all this confusion, the question about the future of one of the Republican strongholds is more timely than ever: Will Texas be the new California?

How did California turn blue?

Although it may seem strange from today's perspective, California was a staunchly Republican state during the latter part of the 20th century. Between 1952 and 1988 there were 10 presidential elections, in which Republican presidential candidates won the state nine times.

Since then, many have debated the factors that led California to turn blue.

Proposition 187

One of the most widely held theories is that of Proposition 187, a proposal by Republican Governor Pete Wilson that sought to deny public services such as education and nonemergency healthcare to undocumented immigrants. The initiative was put to a vote by Californians and passed in 1994 with 59% of the vote.

However, Proposition 187 was blocked by the courts. According to various analysts, the initiative sparked political activism among the growing Latino population, which turned out en masse to support the Democratic Party.

According to Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, this marked the beginning of the end for Republicans in California. "Republican support for anti-immigrant ballot initiatives and candidates ruined the GOP brand in the eyes of immigrants, their children and whites who were turned off by the nativist appeals – driving all of them into the arms of the Democrats who were pro-immigration," he wrote in an article titled "Proposition 187 Turned California into a Democratic State."

Until Wilson's initiative, Nowrasteh wrote, the GOP split the Hispanic vote with the Democrats in gubernatorial elections. In fact, Republicans won 46% in 1986 and 47% in 1990. In 1994, with the initiative already on the ballot, that support fell to 25%. Four years later, candidate Dan Lungren received 17%.

Several academic studies support this interpretation. One was written by James Monogan and Austin Doctor of the University of Georgia, in which they compared polls from California and Texas between 1990 and 1998. They found that, after Wilson embraced Proposition 187, the proportion of California Hispanics who identified as Democrats rose and never fell again, with a lasting effect of 7.1 points. In Texas, during the same period, that identification remained stable.

Nowrasteh himself finds a not-too-distant example in Texas. While Wilson backed Proposition 187, George W. Bush campaigned in 1994 with a pro-immigration platform. Four years later, in 1998, Bush won 50% of the Texas Hispanic vote, while in California, Lungren barely reached 17%. In other words, practically the opposite of what happened in 1990, when Texas Republican Clayton Williams won 27% of that electorate and Wilson won 47%.

Second theory: the impact of demographics and Reagan's amnesty

This is the explanation that inspired Buchanan's original prediction. In defending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Ted Kennedy assured the Senate that the legislation would not alter the country's ethnic composition. However, in California, non-Hispanic whites went from 76% of the population in 1970 to less than half in 2000 and to 35% in 2020.

For proponents of this theory, the decisive blow came in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Specifically, the law combined penalties for employers who hired undocumented immigrants with an amnesty for those who had been living in the country since before 1982. Thus, it is estimated that some 2.7 million people obtained legal residency, and more than half lived in California.

Former Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who represented Southern California for three decades, went so far as to claim that "California was devastated by the consequences of that amnesty."

However, some studies have qualified the impact of IRCA. A study by Matt Barreto, Ricardo Ramírez and Nathan Woods concluded that IRCA beneficiaries were not the driving force behind the increase in the Latino vote in Southern California in the late 1990s.

According to Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, California's Hispanic voters were naturally going to lean toward the Democrats. In an article published in the City Journal, she argued that the shift would have occurred with or without Wilson's initiative.

Third theory: Reagan won the Cold War and lost California

The latest theory comes from William Voegeli, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, who offers a different explanation in an essay published in City Journal. According to his analysis, demographic changes do not explain the root of the issue.

According to Voegeli's theory, the key to California's political shift was the end of the Cold War. This event reduced Pentagon spending from 5.7% of GDP in 1985 to 2.7% in 1999. According to journalist Dan Walters, cited by Voegeli, those cuts triggered California's worst recession in half a century and the exodus of about 1.5 million people, many of them defense workers and their families. Without those voters, the GOP ceased to be a contender in the southern part of the state — and, with it, in all of California.

The Opposite Path of Texas

While California was shifting toward the Democrats, Texas was heading in the opposite direction. On Nov. 8, 1994 — the very same day that Californians approved Proposition 187 — George W. Bush defeated Democratic Governor Ann Richards. From then until Tuesday, no Democrat had ever again won a state election in Texas.

Over the years, the state's Republicans held up California as an example of what not to do. In 2018, Governor Abbott campaigned with the slogan "Don't Turn My Texas into California."

Two years later, it welcomed the newcomers with a warning on Twitter, now X: "Remember those high taxes, burdensome regulations, & socialistic agenda advanced in CA? We don’t believe in that. We believe in less government & more individual freedom. If you agree with that you’ll fit right in," the governor wrote.

At the same time, demographics were moving in the direction Buchanan had anticipated: in 2022, Hispanics became the state's largest demographic group, accounting for 40.2% of the population. However, the votes did not follow the script. Far from swinging en masse toward the Democrats, the Hispanic vote shifted to the right with the arrival of Trump. In Texas, the Republican share of the vote rose from nearly 34% of that electorate in 2016 to about half in 2024, with historic gains in the Rio Grande Valley.

An irreversible trend or a protest vote?

Returning to the message posted by Senator Cruz on social media, he cited the cost of living, the war in Iran and tariffs as the main reasons for the defeats across the country. However, he primarily lamented the party's loss of support among young people, Hispanics and rural voters — all key components of the coalition that returned Trump to the White House in 2024.

At this point, the main difference from California is that, in the Golden State, the shift from red to blue was gradual, slow and occurred election by election, until Democrats finally came to dominate the state.

In the case of Texas, the trend was the opposite. In 2024, Republicans had their best election in the state in more than a decade. Trump defeated Kamala Harris by a margin of nearly 14 percentage points — the largest in a presidential election since 2012.

Therefore, while historic, it is unclear whether Texas' shift toward the Democrats will be permanent or part of an irreversible process. The results came as part of a major "blue wave" that gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress.

As for the Hispanic vote, a poll by Univision and YouGov showed that 65% of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 would do so again.

Therefore, regardless of what one might speculate or analyze, the only solution is to wait.

Will Texas become a Democratic state? Was this result an exception? The most accurate poll on the state's future will be published in two years. The 2028 presidential election will be the first real test to determine whether Texas is changing political colors or whether, in reality, Tuesday, Nov. 3, was a mirage for the Democrats — a rare exception in a very difficult year for the Republican Party.

For now, Senator Cruz has already chosen his response: "But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. Texas will be red again. Texas is still Texas."