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Texas was majority Democrat back in the 90s.

But a big part of the Republican turn was White Flight. The converts included Phil Gramm, John Connally, Rick Perry, and John Cornyn. And the agency of that transition was none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, a Connecticut transplant who took over the Harris County Republican Party in 1963. Great book on the subject - Family of Secrets, by Ross Baker - that gets into all the messy details of the Texas transition from Blue Dog Democrat to Saudi Republicanism.

The gerrymander of 2003 leveraged a slim majority in the legislature into a permanent majority of Safe Seat districts. But the bulwark of that gerrymander was the partisan nature of the state's Oil & Gas Industry. Practically overnight, you had guys like Ross Perot and T. Boone Pickens forced to bend the knee to a new set of Wall Street backed financiers or risk losing their empires to the all powerful Texas Railroad Commission's new owners.

The modern Texas Democratic Party is based in college aged professionals and service-sector minorities, mostly clustered in the big urban enclaves of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso. As soon as you get outside those dense, ethnically diverse cores, you end up in a vast rural wilderness where a handful of powerful landlords effectively control the state.

Beto O'Rourke was right in his initial prognosis - Texas wasn't a Republican state, it was a non-voting state. But as Democrats have galvanized liberal voters in the cities, Republicans have found an enormous pool of disaffected and easily mobilized conservative voters in the exurbs and industry towns. Voter rolls swelled between 2008 and 2024, but Republicans met Democrats vote-for-vote with their GOTV efforts.

The idea that you could flip the whole state with just Harris County didn't bare out in practice.