2018 United States Senate election in Texas

Based on Wikipedia: 2018 United States Senate election in Texas

The Night Texas Almost Turned Blue

For one electric evening in November 2018, something extraordinary happened in Texas politics. A lanky congressman from El Paso named Beto O'Rourke came within 215,000 votes of unseating Ted Cruz, making it the closest Senate race in Texas in four decades. In a state that hadn't elected a Democratic senator since 1988, this near-miss sent shockwaves through American politics.

The margin was just 2.6 percent.

To understand why this matters, you need to understand what Texas had become. Since 1990, the Lone Star State had voted Republican in every single statewide election. Presidential races, gubernatorial contests, Senate battles—all red, often by crushing margins. When George W. Bush ran for reelection as governor in 1998, he won by 37 points. That's not a victory; that's a demolition.

The Long Red Streak

Texas wasn't always Republican territory. For over a century after the Civil War, Democrats dominated the state. But starting in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1990s, conservative white voters migrated to the Republican Party. By the time Ted Cruz won his first Senate race in 2012, defeating Democrat Paul Sadler by 16 points, the shift was complete.

Democrats hadn't vanished entirely. They clustered in predictable places: the majority-Hispanic communities scattered across South Texas, the sprawling metropolitan areas of Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, and the border city of El Paso, perched on the western tip of the state like a blue island in a red sea. But these Democratic strongholds weren't enough to overcome the vast Republican advantages in suburban and rural Texas.

The 2016 presidential election offered an intriguing hint of change. Donald Trump carried Texas, but only by 9 points—a significant narrowing from Mitt Romney's 16-point margin four years earlier. Political analysts began whispering about demographic shifts, about growing cities, about a new generation of voters who didn't remember when Texas Democrats ruled Austin.

Still, when the 2018 election cycle began, forecasters labeled the Texas Senate seat "safe Republican." Ted Cruz, despite his polarizing personality, was a known quantity. He'd run for president in 2016, actually defeating Trump in the Texas Republican primary. His conservative credentials were impeccable.

Enter Beto

Robert Francis O'Rourke—Beto, as he'd been called since childhood, the Spanish nickname for Roberto—represented Texas's 16th congressional district, which encompasses El Paso. He was an unusual Democrat for Texas: Anglo, from a border city, fluent in Spanish, a former punk rock musician who'd later owned a small tech company. He had an informal energy that felt almost Kennedyesque.

O'Rourke made a strategic decision that shaped the entire race. He would visit all 254 counties in Texas, including the deep-red rural areas where Democrats usually didn't bother campaigning. This wasn't just symbolism. It was a theory of the case: that Democratic votes were being left on the table everywhere, that showing up mattered, that Texas wasn't as Republican as its recent elections suggested.

He also refused to accept money from political action committees, relying instead on small-dollar donations. This might have seemed like a quixotic gesture, but it turned into a fundraising phenomenon. In the third quarter of 2018 alone, O'Rourke raised $38.1 million—the largest quarterly haul by any Senate candidate in American history up to that point. That record wouldn't fall until 2020, when Jaime Harrison raised $57 million in his ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.

Combined, Cruz and O'Rourke raised $126 million. For context, that's more than the gross domestic product of some small nations, all spent on a single Senate race.

The Tightening

As 2018 progressed, something unusual happened. The race got closer.

Polling in June showed Cruz with a 49 to 44 percent approval rating among Texans—solid, but not commanding. More troubling for Cruz were his numbers among specific demographic groups. Only 29 percent of Hispanic voters approved of his performance. Among women, 37 percent. Among college-educated voters, 42 percent. These were the growing segments of the Texas electorate, the groups that were supposed to eventually turn Texas into a swing state.

O'Rourke's campaign generated enormous enthusiasm. He held rallies that drew thousands, events that felt more like rock concerts than political gatherings. His social media presence was omnipresent. Young voters, often the most difficult demographic to mobilize, seemed genuinely excited.

By autumn, national Democrats dared to dream. Maybe Texas really could flip. Maybe 2018 would be the year.

November 6, 2018

It wasn't.

Ted Cruz won. But the nature of his victory told a complicated story.

O'Rourke flipped seven counties that Trump had carried in 2016. Not tiny, insignificant counties either. Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth and surrounding suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, had been reliably conservative for decades. It went for O'Rourke. Williamson County, north of Austin, home to Round Rock and Georgetown—flipped. Harris County, encompassing Houston, the fourth-largest city in America—flipped. Fort Bend County, a fast-growing Houston suburb—flipped.

O'Rourke won 16 of Texas's 36 congressional districts, including three that were represented by Republicans. He carried the growing suburbs that demographers had long predicted would eventually turn Texas purple.

Cruz, for his part, won only one county that had voted for Hillary Clinton: Kenedy County, a sparsely populated coastal region south of Corpus Christi with more cattle than people.

The geographic pattern was striking. O'Rourke dominated the cities and made significant inroads in the suburbs. Cruz held the rural areas and smaller towns. It was a preview of the urban-rural divide that would define American politics in the years to come.

The Last of the Blue Counties

There's a melancholy footnote to this race. Nine counties that voted for O'Rourke in 2018 would never vote Democratic in a federal Senate election again: Brewster, Frio, Jefferson, Jim Wells, Kleberg, La Salle, Nueces, Reeves, and Val Verde. These were largely Hispanic border and South Texas communities that had been Democratic for generations.

What happened? The 2018 race represented a high-water mark for Democratic enthusiasm, coinciding with the peak of anti-Trump energy. But it also came just before a significant political realignment among Hispanic voters, particularly in South Texas. Working-class Latino communities that had reflexively supported Democrats for decades began drifting toward Republicans, attracted by conservative positions on social issues and economic messaging.

By 2020 and 2022, some of these counties would swing dramatically toward Republican candidates. The Democratic coalition O'Rourke assembled in 2018 was real but fragile, dependent on specific circumstances that wouldn't repeat.

What It Meant

The 2018 Texas Senate race launched Beto O'Rourke into national prominence. He briefly ran for president in 2020, flaming out early but maintaining a passionate following. He ran for governor of Texas in 2022, losing to Greg Abbott by a more comfortable margin than his 2018 Senate defeat. The magic of that first campaign never quite returned.

For Ted Cruz, the narrow victory was a wake-up call. A senator who had once seemed invincible in his home state now understood that Texas was genuinely competitive. His political behavior in subsequent years—his response to the 2021 Texas power grid failure, his various controversies—would be shaped by the knowledge that he couldn't take reelection for granted.

For the Democratic Party, the race offered both hope and frustration. Hope because Texas really did seem to be changing, because the demographic trends were real, because O'Rourke's 2018 performance suggested that the right candidate with the right campaign could eventually break through. Frustration because "eventually" kept getting pushed further into the future, because each election cycle brought new reasons why Texas wasn't quite ready to flip.

The $126 million question remains unanswered: Is Texas a future swing state, or is it simply a state where Democrats occasionally come close before the Republican fundamentals reassert themselves?

The Money Race

One aspect of the 2018 race deserves special attention: the unprecedented fundraising. O'Rourke's small-dollar operation proved that a candidate could raise enormous sums without relying on traditional political action committees or wealthy bundlers. His $38.1 million quarter shattered records and demonstrated the power of grassroots enthusiasm in the social media age.

But it also raised uncomfortable questions. O'Rourke outspent Cruz significantly and still lost. If you can't win Texas with $70 million, what amount would be enough? The race suggested both the possibilities and limitations of money in modern politics. You can buy visibility, organization, and voter contact. You can't necessarily buy victory in a state where the partisan fundamentals lean against you.

Political scientists would later debate whether O'Rourke's spending actually helped down-ballot Democrats in Texas, who performed unusually well in 2018 congressional races, or whether all those resources would have been better deployed in more competitive states. There are no easy answers.

The Debates

Cruz and O'Rourke debated twice, on September 21 and October 16, 2018. These weren't the carefully stage-managed affairs that presidential debates have become. They were substantive, sometimes heated exchanges that highlighted the genuine ideological differences between the candidates.

Cruz, a former collegiate debate champion and Supreme Court litigator, was technically skilled but often came across as rehearsed and calculating. O'Rourke was more spontaneous, occasionally stumbling but projecting an authenticity that resonated with supporters. Political observers generally scored the debates as draws, with each candidate reinforcing the impressions their supporters already held.

The debates mattered less than the campaign's overall dynamics. By October, most Texas voters had already formed opinions about both candidates. The race had become a referendum on Trump, on the future of Texas, on whether the state's changing demographics would translate into changed politics.

Looking Back

Six years later, the 2018 Texas Senate race looks like a turning point that didn't quite turn. O'Rourke proved that Democrats could compete in Texas, that the old assumptions about safe Republican dominance needed revision. But Cruz's victory, however narrow, preserved Republican control of the seat. Texas remains red on the electoral map.

Perhaps the most significant legacy of the race is psychological. Democrats now believe Texas is winnable, even if they keep losing. Republicans now know Texas requires defense, even if they keep winning. Both parties have adjusted their strategies accordingly, investing resources and attention in a state that was once ignored as a foregone conclusion.

The 2.6 percent margin haunts both sides. For Democrats, it represents agonizing proximity to victory. For Republicans, it represents the margin of safety that might not always be there. In American politics, where close races are remembered as much as landslides, the night Beto almost won Texas has become part of the permanent landscape.