More in Common’s Threads of Texas project found seven distinct groups of Texans; we explored how they’re distributed geographically and within the state’s Latino community
By Colin Woodard
On the eve of the 2024 election, political observers are rightly focused on the seven battleground states where the presidency will be decided: three Blue Wall states touching the Great Lakes plus Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. Texas only gets a passing look because some polls show Sen. Ted Cruz might be vulnerable to defeat by his Democratic rival, Colin Allred. But in the medium- and long-term, what political direction residents of the rapidly changing Lone Star State decide to go could be most consequential development for mid-21st century presidential politics. In short, if Texas “goes blue,” Republicans will likely find themselves locked out of the White House.
In the first decade of this millennium, Democrats thought Texas might be on the cusp of change. Central to their hope was that El Norte was rapidly growing, primarily via an expansion of Tejano – that’s native, multi-generational Texas Norteños — and other Latinos’ population. Together with the blueward shift of Texas’s major metro areas – in 2020 Joe Biden won the counties containing Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin and even Fort Worth – Democrats hoped they could tip this regionally-divided state into their camp. Hispanics now make up a plurality of Texas’s population – 40.2 percent compared to 39.8 percent who are white – and eight-in-ten are of Mexican origin.
But their hopes were dashed by the realization that 2020 witnessed a staggering flip to Trump in rural El Norte, the American Nations regional culture where people of Hispanic descent comprise nearly half the population. Clinton won these counties by nearly 40 points in 2016, and Obama won them by 42 in 2008. But in 2020, Trump won them by just over 10, a shocking 48.7 point swing. In the most rural subset of the region’s counties – those that don’t have a single town (or cluster of towns) with 10,000 people – Trump’s margin was +18.5, an unheard of 75.6-point swing in his favor compared to 2016.
This 2020 ola roja was overwhelmingly concentrated in South Texas, especially the Lower Rio Grande Valley, a Tejano stronghold where Spanish is the mother language of a supermajority of the population, and has been since Europeans first colonized it more than three centuries ago. One rural county there – Zapata – flipped red for the first time in a century, and Biden’s margins of victory were blunted from El Paso to Brownsville (where I lived for a time). In the 2022 midterms, Republicans flipped one of the Valley’s four U.S. House seats – Texas’s 15th – with an almost nine-point margin of victory, along with two of that area’s seats in the state legislature. In one of these, an area around impoverished Rio Grande City, Democratic incumbent Ryan Guillen had switched parties to hold onto his seat after a GOP gerrymander.
“Friends, something is happening in South Texas, and many of us are waking up to the fact that the values of those in Washington, D.C., are not our values, not the values of most Texans,” Guillen had said. “The ideology of defunding the police, of destroying the oil and gas industry and the chaos at our border is disastrous for those of us who live here in South Texas.”
Something is most definitely happening in South Texas and among Tejanos generally, but what? We’ll be looking at this very closely in the coming months, but for starters we turned to our friends at More in Common, the international civic non-profit, and their Threads of Texas model of the state’s electorate. Like their national Hidden Tribes model – which we parsed here – Threads of Texas created segments based on underlying values, with special focus on people’s stance toward change and understandings of what it means to be Texan. Drawing on moral foundations theory and powered by a statewide surveys of some 4000 Texans in 2020 and 2021, More in Common identified seven Texan tribes: Lone Star Progressives, Civic Pragmatists, Rising Mavericks, Apolitical Providers, Die-hard Texans, Reverent Texans, and Heritage Defenders. You can read about them all in summary form at their project site, or in detail in their full report (pdf).
With More in Common’s kind permission, we asked their pollsters, YouGov, to determine how the Threads of Texas were distributed across the state’s three primary American Nations cultural regions: Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and El Norte. (A tiny slice of the northernmost part of the state was first colonized via the Midlands settlement stream, but it’s too tiny to have a meaningful sample size in even a relatively large statewide survey like these were.) We also looked at differences between how Hispanics and non-Hispanics distributed between the regions.
Our top-level findings are in the figure at the top of this post. As you can see, Greater Appalachia – which includes Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth, but also vast swaths of rural North Texas and the Hill Country — is the most polarized of Texas’s regions, with the largest shares of Lone Star Progressives (who, not surprisingly, embrace change and pluralism, but feel alienated from the state), Heritage Defenders (the most ethnonationalist and reactionary cohort) and Reverent Texans (who are faith-oriented and patriotic). At this top-level, the Deep South and El Norte don’t vary that much from one another or Texas as a whole, though both have fewer Lone Star Progressives and El Norte has more Die Hard Texans (more on that in a moment.)
That picture changes dramatically when looking at only self-identified Hispanic respondents. First, there is a much smaller share of the population in those two wings – about a third fewer Lone Star Progressives and just over half as many Heritage Defenders as amongst Texans as a whole; Reverent Texans are also substantially reduced among Hispanics at 15% of the population instead of 22%. Two of the tribes are substantially larger in the Hispanic community, the ones More in Common calls Rising Mavericks and Die-Hard Texans. We’re going to focus on these two groups, which broadly speaking track by generation.
Rising Mavericks, More in Common reports, are “youthful and strong willed” with “multi-faceted views and an idealistic outlook on the future of the state.” They’re indeed young – 66% are under 24! – and they’re pretty comfortable with a changing Texas. They’re proud of Texas – which they’d like to see be open to everyone — but have no qualms about looking at the dark side of its (white supremacist, slaveholding) past. This group includes just 8 percent of non-Hispanic Texans, but 19 percent of Hispanics. (Given that about 60 percent of Texas Hispanics are 25 or over, perhaps a third of young Tejanos belong to this one group.) Nearly 60 percent of all Rising Mavericks are Hispanic and bilingual, 35 percent are immigrants, and one in five are students. They’re not super ideological – about a third are Democrats, a fifth Republican, and 23 percent independent – and 42 percent report not having participated in any civic activities in the past year. In political terms, this is a persuadable group, and there are a number of elements that work in Democrats’ favor. This segment strongly adhered to the values of “fairness” and “care” and believe Texas’ future is in knowledge-based industries not oil and gas. At a time when Trumpists are demonizing immigrants, 68 percent of Rising Mavericks say immigration is good for Texas and 63 percent have positive feelings toward undocumented migrants.
Notice also their regional distribution. They make up 14 percent of the overall population in El Norte and 16 percent of that section’s Hispanics. That’s a moveable cohort that deliver decisive margins in close Congressional and state legislative races. They make up an even bigger share of Hispanics in Deep South and Greater Appalachia, but a smaller portion of the overall electorate in those states because Hispanics don’t constitute a supermajority in those regions.
The Rising Maverick’s parents and grandparents are more likely to be Die-hard Texans, the other group where Hispanics dominate, at 53 percent of the cohort. Die-hard Texans’ “most characteristic feature is attachment to their Texan identity,” feeling “strongly that to be truly Texan, one has to be born and raised in Texas” and “seeing the world through the lens of Texans-versus-non-Texans or Texas-versus-everyone else.” As one Millennial Hispanic woman member of this tribe put it to More in Common’s pollsters: “There is no such thing as a white Texan and a non white Texan. Either you’re Texan or you’re not.” They’re older — 55 percent are aged 35 or older and 93 percent are over 25 – and they’re also the least educated of the tribes, with only 11 percent having a college degree. Almost a quarter live in rural areas, compared to 13 percent of Rising Mavericks. Twenty-five percent are immigrants, but almost half are multigenerational Americans, with every grandparent born in the U.S.
Politically this group is also disengaged. Seventy-two percent didn’t vote in 2016 — though those who did went 2-1 for Trump – and only 7 percent cast a ballot in the 2018 midterms. They’re also split between the parties — 37 percent identify as Republicans, 23 percent as Democrats, 24 percent as independents – and ideologically. They overwhelmingly want Texas to be a place for people of all races and backgrounds to feel they belong, and they score even higher on the moral values of “care” and “fairness” than Rising Mavericks. Unlike the Mavericks, they also value “authority” and “purity” and want the state to proudly uphold “its traditional values.” This is clearly also a persuadable group, oriented toward tradition, but with the belief that Texas’s rightful tradition is inclusive.
Only 7% of non-Hispanic Texans belong to this “Die-hard” tribe, but the proportion is twice as high among Hispanics (14%) and jumps to 16% in Texas’s El Norte section, where it is evenly matched with Rising Mavericks. (Only 10% of non-Hispanics in El Norte belong to this group.) In South Texas politics, this is likely a major swing group.
Thanks to More in Common for allowing us to access their data, to their partners, YouGov, for crunching the numbers, and to John Liberty at Motivf for the graphics. Those interested in how values-based segmentation interacts with the American Nations regional cultures may want to read our prior analysis of the distribution of the Hidden Tribes.
— Colin Woodard is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
