Texas midterm elections Tarrant County Democratic gains, Digi Mart USA News (Tarrant County, Texas): On the day early voting began in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and both main party candidates for the Senate rallied their supporters in Fort Worth. Tarrant County, home to more than two million people, was pivotal to the midterm elections in a state long seen as a conservative stronghold.
The local Republican chair called Tarrant “the largest red county in America” and said the party intended to make it “inhospitable for Democrats,” pointing to tactics such as gerrymandering voting districts and restricting ballot stations. Yet on Tuesday, Tarrant County voted Democratic, with voters rejecting Republicans from top to bottom of the ballot.
Texas voters removed Abbott, sent Democrat James Talarico to the Senate, and handed the Democratic Party scores of key posts. Allison Campolo, the county’s Democratic Party chair, said, “We’ve worked so hard for this moment and got way more than we predicted.
It’s surreal but very exciting.”
The result marked a significant shift for a county that backed Joe Biden six years ago but otherwise mostly favored Republicans further down the ballot. The source attributes the change to Donald Trump’s unpopularity, which it links to inflation and the Iran war, as well as the intensity of his immigration crackdown and open racism displayed by some MAGA-aligned figures.
Bo French, a former county chair known for bigoted social media posts, lost the statewide election for railroad commissioner, a post his party had held for more than three decades. Tarrant’s top executive position also flipped to Democrat for the first time in 40 years, when the first Black woman elected as county judge ousted a Trump supporter who had promoted unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.
The county judge chairs the body that sets the budget, imposes taxes and oversees jails.
Tarrant has changed substantially since the turn of the century, when it was almost two-thirds white. Whites now make up four in 10 residents, while Hispanic, Asian and Black populations have grown rapidly and turned out in large numbers for Democrats.
Hispanics became the biggest ethnic group in Texas four years ago and backed Trump two years ago, but the source reports anger over his immigration crackdown among Hispanic residents in Tarrant.
Nydia Cardenas, a 40-year-old Stanford engineering graduate, won a seat on the county commissioners court by almost four percentage points, a seat her party had lost by 18 points four years earlier. That leaves one Republican alongside four Democrats on the body that runs the county.
Campolo said the biggest challenge was overcoming the narrative that Tarrant was a red county and Texas was a red state. “Now we’ve shown this is very much not the case, I think it can stay a blue state,” she said.
The source notes that the Democrats must still soothe voter concerns and restore faith in politicians if the gains are to last.
