2008 United States presidential election in Texas

Primaries

• 2008 Texas Democratic presidential primary and caucuses
• 2008 Texas Republican presidential primary

Campaign

Predictions

There were 16 news organizations who made state-by-state predictions of the election. Here are their last predictions before election day:

Polling

Main article: Statewide opinion polling for the 2008 United States presidential election#Texas

McCain won every single pre-election poll. The final 3 polls averaged McCain leading 52% to 41%.

Fundraising

Obama raised $20,424,500. McCain raised $17,990,153.

Advertising and visits

Obama and his interest groups spent $9,917,565. McCain and his interest groups spent $33,983. Both campaigns visited the state twice.

Analysis

Texas, split between the south and southwest regions of the United States, has become a consistently Republican state at all levels and is the home state of then President George W. Bush. Economically and racially diverse, Texas includes a very large swath of the Bible Belt, a region in which many voters, especially those in rural areas, identify as born-again or evangelical Christians, and tend to vote Republican due to their socially conservative views. Although once part of the Solid South, Texas has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

McCain did well throughout the state, winning the vast majority of counties by double digits. He took almost every county in Eastern Texas, including many traditionally-Democratic areas. All the suburbs of the major cities voted Republican by large margins. He also dominated the Texas Panhandle (including Amarillo), the Permian Basin (including Midland and Odessa) and the South Plains (including Lubbock), three of the most conservative regions in the country. He won these three regions by margins of three-to-one—his largest margin of victory in the entire country. These areas had been among the first in Texas where the old-line conservative Democrats started splitting their tickets and voting Republican nationally; some counties in this region haven't supported a Democrat since Harry S. Truman in 1948. King County, a thinly populated county near the Panhandle, gave McCain 92.64% of the vote to Obama's 4.91%, McCain's best margin in any county in the nation.

Despite the expected loss, Obama improved substantially upon John Kerry's performance in 2004, narrowing the margin of victory from 22.83% down to 11.77%. He was able to flip major urban counties such as Dallas, Bexar and Harris counties—home to the cities of Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston respectively. Dallas and Harris had been among the first areas of the state to turn Republican, largely due to an influx of Northern expatriates in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither county had supported a Democrat for president since 1964. Bexar had last gone Democratic in 1996. A strong turnout of minority voters gave Obama the edge in these three counties. Obama also performed strongly in Travis County, which contains the state capital and liberal bastion of Austin; El Paso County, which contains the city of El Paso, due in large part to heavy support by Hispanics; and many of the Latino-majority counties in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, which have strongly supported Democrats for decades. Although Obama lost Tarrant county, he did do well in the southern and eastern parts of Fort Worth and the eastern part of Arlington.

During the same election, incumbent Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn was reelected with 54.82% of the vote to Democrat Rick Noriega’s 42.84%. Libertarian Yvonne Adams Schick received the remaining 2.34%. Republicans also knocked off a Democratic incumbent from Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the state level, however, Democrats picked up three seats in the Texas House of Representatives and one seat in the Texas Senate.

Results

By county