Firstly, let’s dispel the common myth that Texas is entirely populated with gun totin’ trump votin’ rednecks. The thing is that Texas is really big and there are lots of counties that have small populations but still count towards the total vote… however the four biggest cities (Dallas, Houston, Austin, & San Antonio) all voted for Hillary in 2016 as did almost all of the southern counties in Texas. Unfortunately as I mentioned… Texas is really big, and republicans have crammed the big cities into single counties so all they have to do is make it harder to vote in just those counties and Texas swings towards gun totin’ trump votin’ rednecks. Yeehah!
So republicans have been in charge of Texas for quite some time and have consistently done things to make it harder for democrats to change that including gerrymandering. Also, you can vote with gun permit but not a student ID, there is no online voter registration, you must be deputized to register voters, voters under 65 can’t use fear of covid to vote by mail. If you don’t know why all of the above favors republicans then you have not been paying attention. (Hint, it’s about stopping young people and people of color from voting for some unknown reason).
However the most obvious and egregious one happened yesterday.
Our delightfully evil state Governor, Republican Greg Abbot, just issued a proclamation that there can be only 1 ballot collection box per county. So if you’re not a Texas local you’re probably thinking “that sounds OK” … and for all the gun totin’ trump votin’ small population counties that is fine. Many of them only have ~2000 voters so all good. However, due to aforementioned gerrymandering, Travis county contains the entirety of Austin, nearly 1.3 million people. Harris county contains Houston which is 4.7 MILLION PEOPLE FOR ONE BALLOT BOX! To put that number into perspective, 4.7 million people is more people that 25 of the other states have. It’s more people than the 5 smallest US states combined! It’s also ~1770 square miles of land to cover for that 1 ballot box, again this is because of excessive gerrymandering to make sure those blue voting big cities only have a tiny impact on Texas as a whole.
I should point out the number of ballot boxes were already embarrassingly small for those two counties to stop those nasty democrats from actually voting with Travis only having 4 and Harris having 12 but at least they were spread out so everyone could get have one nearish.
So yeah. Trump may win Texas for the same reason he won it in 2016. Cheating. Yay.
For reference, this is a link to the polling results by county in 2016. Most of the blue standalone spots are the big cities.
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/texas/