Winning in the Lone Star State: Key Insights on Texas Voters

A Democratic President hasn’t won Texas since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat governor in over 30 years. However, this past weekend just days before early voting opened for the primary, liberal champion AOC declared at a San Antonio rally that it’s inevitable that Texas will turn blue… and it’s just a question of when. What do you think?

Texas these days is like that 2015 #TheDress meme. People look at Texas and they see different colors. Red, Purple, Blue and a variety of “shades of”. The political fate of Texas seems to be dependent on the set of eyes of the person you talk to…

This ain’t our first rodeo

At Resonate, the Texas color confusion doesn’t surprise us. In a Resonate all-hands meeting in the summer of 2016, we pulled up our presidential prediction map informed by the real-time online behavioral activity of the U.S. electorate online. The map that day had Texas in blue. This naturally led to some employee buzz like, “are we sure that’s right?” and “let’s double check that”. We checked our machine learning algorithms, trained with proprietary behavioral data from the largest independent voter research study married with data from tracking tens of billions of web events per day, and sure’nuff, Texas was blue….

Now, this happened during the election’s summer season, a quieter time in the cycle ahead of the debates and before some other huge news broke in the fall of 2016 that impacted the November results. It didn’t take long for our map to course correct based on the online behavioral shifts seen in Texas voters in the weeks that followed that summer day, which placed Texas back in the red and ultimately helped Resonate accurately predict the 2016 election. However, even six years ago there were enough Texas voters demonstrating online behavior that proved a very important fact: Texas is a political battleground.

Winning in the Lone Star State in 2022: The Primaries

With the primaries on March 1, the political shade of Texas is not as important right this minute. To secure the primary, campaigns should be aggressively targeting known midterm voters from their own party, i.e. registered, party-affiliated voters with a track record of voting in midterms.

For Texas Republican campaigns, Resonate algorithms have identified 2.2M Texas Republicans online who are frequent midterm election voters.

Heading into the primaries, our algorithms show — not surprisingly — Texas Republican midterm voters view progressive liberals as the biggest threat to the U.S. Below are a few more concerns this segment has right now based on their recent behavior online.

Source: Resonate Ignite Platform, February 2022

For Texas Democrat campaigns, Resonate algorithms have identified 2.7M Texas Democrat voters online who are frequent midterm election voters.

Heading into the primaries our algorithms show these Texas Democrat midterm voters view Russia as the biggest threat to the U.S. Below are a few more concerns this segment has right now based on their recent behavior online.

Source: Resonate Ignite Platform, February 2022

Winning in the Lone Star State in 2022: The General

Looking past the primaries, Texas campaigns should not be asking whether Texas is Red or Blue. They should be asking: where and who are the niche swing voters with the potential to determine if Texas is Red or Blue come November 8?

Resonate algorithms have identified 1M Texas swing voters online who are frequent midterm election voters.

Below are some basic demographics of this pivotal voter audience.

Source: Resonate Ignite Platform, February 2022

Heading into the primaries our algorithms show these Texas midterm swing voters view environmental threats, like climate change, as the biggest threat to the U.S., followed by immigration and the mainstream media.

Source: Resonate Ignite Platform, February 2022

All the above voter audiences, and thousands more niche online voter segments, are available for immediate targeting and deep analysis. What audiences do you need to reach? Where do you need to build support in advance of your primary or general? Resonate is here to help!