I happened to wear a blue shirt today, and a student asked me if I was wearing it because Texas turned blue. (She was just curious.) That was definitely not the reason; the reason is that I need to do laundry, and the clean shirt I still had was blue. But it's a sign of how interesting this midterm election was that it's in the air; I haven't come across people talking about an election so much since Trump's first win.
Here in Texas, James Talarico (D) beat Ken Paxton (R) for the Senate. That wasn't really surprising; Paxton is not widely liked, even by Republicans, because he is widely regarded as corrupt. You can tell that by the fact that in the lead-up to the election there were an astounding number of political advertisements about how it's important for Republicans to remember that they aren't only voting for the person but for the party. If Paxton had won, it would have been a narrow victory. The surprise was that Talarico beat Paxton by quite a lot. This is surprising. Talarico is also not very widely liked; he is widely seen as an opportunist and as a bit smarmy-televangelist in his approach to things. But Democrats were much more willing to turn out for Talarico than Republicans were to turn out to Paxton, and the result was a very solid Democratic victory, by percentage of actual votes. But notably, the total votes for all candidates was less than Ted Cruz alone got 2024 (by a lot). (And as I have noted before, Ted Cruz is literally famous for being difficult to like; Republicans back him because he is seen as generally delivering on what he promises, and perhaps a little bit because he drives Democrats crazy.) There was not much enthusiasm for voting in the Texas Senate race this year.
The truly astounding thing is that Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott. Abbott had seemed completely unassailable. He is a paraplegic with excellent business connections and a Hispanic wife and a daughter who are very popular, running as a Republican in a very Republican state. In every election to this point, he has absolutely blown away the Democratic contenders. He is very hard to run against. But he was beaten soundly by Hinojosa. Hinojosa is not completely unknown, but compared to Abbott she might as well have been. She was a very good campaigner. I would be skeptical of the idea that Talarico's campaign contributed much to his success, but I think Hinojosa's probably helped at least a little. She's a charming person who ran on education and the economy; I doubt the former had much of a role to play, but the latter might. I think Abbott's loss was primarily a combination of two things, however: Paxton massively dragging down the Republican vote and Abbott doing relatively little to campaign. Some people suggest that high gas prices and the Iran war, on the national stage, were also contributors, and maybe they are partial contributors, although I don't think they dominated here. The election was Abbott's to lose, and Abbott lost it; it was not purely his fault, but it was his responsibility to adjust to the conditions.
Texas has what is known as a 'plural executive'. The Governor is not powerless, but the Texas Constitution deliberately limits the Governor's power; the Governor is not even the most powerful political office in the state. The Lieutenant Governor is, however unintuitive that may seem. The Democrats won that office too, with Vikki Goodwin beating the Republican incumbent, Dan Patrick. That is the election loss that the Republicans will find painful; the Lieutenant Governor guides the legislative agenda and controls key committee appointments in the legislature. In Texas, the state legislature is king; while there are checks and balances of a limited sort, the entire state is set up so as to make it difficult to mount any opposition to state law. The party that controls the state legislature, which is now the Democrats, can mostly do whatever it wants.
In principle, if Democrats govern moderately, they could keep many of the offices across the country that they have won this election for a long time. I don't think they will be able to keep Texas, either Senate-wise or Governor-wise, for very long, even if they do govern moderately (which I do not expect, based on their recent track record). Texas in some sense turned blue, strikingly so, but it's been a weird election. The Democrats seized the offices in a moment of Republican weakness and stupidity, but this is not quite the same as Texas actually 'turning blue' if we turn and look at the voting population rather than the offices. As noted above, this was an extraordinarily weak turnout for Texas Republicans, in which the Republican Senate candidate was actively despised as corrupt by significant portion of Republicans. The Republicans are all still here, though. There has also not been a huge surge in the Democratic population of the state. That the Republicans lost, and lost so badly, is a sign that even in our polarized times, political parties cannot treat themselves as entitled to votes.