Students, booming suburbs swung Hays vote to Democrats

Catherine Wicker had to go about registering Texas State University voters much differently this year.

Typical get-out-the-vote events were out the window with the coronavirus pandemic. Outside organizations were prohibited from holding voter registration events on campus.

Wicker, a graduate student in public administration, said her efforts with the national nonpartisan organization Campus Vote Project had to evolve. Passing around clipboards wouldn’t work. Sharing pens was too risky.

But an even greater challenge was finding where to meet her fellow Bobcats while many of the university’s 37,849 students attended classes remotely.

“Taking voter registration to them was a lot of what we did this cycle,” Wicker said of the effort, which included going farther out into the community than just the campus. Volunteers set up where they knew many students work, such as San Marcos Premium Outlets. They headed into apartment complexes known to have heavy concentrations of students.

In the end, Wicker said, volunteers were able to register 1,200 new voters in Hays County. While it is a small fraction of the nearly 108,000 people who voted in this month’s election, the voting power of Texas State University played an outsized role in Democrat Joe Biden winning by nearly 11 percentage points in a county that hadn’t favored a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992.

An American-Statesman analysis of precinct level voting data showed that the areas surrounding the campus and in San Marcos bent heavily for Biden.

Biden ran up the score on President Donald Trump in and around the San Marcos campus by margins that were generally above 60 percentage points. In one student-housing heavy precinct east of campus along Aquarena Springs Drive, Biden won by nearly 70 percentage points, the highest margin in Hays County.

While Trump generally won in the more rural western reaches of Hays County, his margins of victory were far slimmer than the wallopings delivered in San Marcos.

A heavily Democratic student body and an exploding population along the Interstate 35 corridor that leans progressive is fueling Hays County’s dramatic shift toward the left in recent years, county political leaders say.

“Pretty much what we’re seeing is the bedroom community aspect of Travis County,” Hays County GOP Chair Bob Parks said. “Williamson County also had a little bit of a change there with more Democrat votes, and Hays County is the same way. There’s a lot of bedroom communities that are close and contiguous with Travis County. As you know, Travis County is our liberal bastion.”

Changing demographics

While the running narrative is that Democrats in Texas failed to meet lofty expectations — gaining little to no ground in the state Legislature and underperforming in the Rio Grande Valley — they continued to make inroads in places like Hays County. There, Biden topped Trump by nearly 11 percentage points. Just four years earlier, Trump narrowly won the county, and in 2012 voters favored Mitt Romney by 10 percentage points.

In many other counties surrounding larger urban areas, Republican margins of victory continued to narrow. Williamson County flipped to blue, as did Tarrant County by a razor-thin margin. Many reliably red counties, such as Collin and Denton counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, voted for Trump but in margins far narrower than in 2016.

Unofficial precinct-level results showed eastern Hays County and especially the Interstate 35 corridor leaned toward Democrats. That area includes Kyle, Buda and San Marcos. Western Hays County favored Republicans.

“What you had here is very massively changing demographics, a lot of people moving into this county,” said Donna Haschke, chair of Hays County Democrats.

The populations of Buda and Kyle have exploded in recent years. Kyle saw its population jump nearly 66% since 2010 to an estimated 39,857 in 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, Buda’s population more than doubled from 6,492 to 14,503.

“A lot of them come from — surprise, surprise — Austin,” Haschke said.

Hays County’s estimated population of 230,191 is up 47% since 2010. Census data show adults between 18 and 24 make up a disproportionate number of new residents, probably driven in part by Texas State University.

And population growth in minority communities has far outpaced overall population growth in the county, with the Black population nearly quadrupling while the much larger Hispanic community has nearly doubled to 92,274 people, according to the Census Bureau.

“My sense is if you look at that data, it is a combination of people that are ... connected with the Austin economy but in a lot of cases can’t afford to live here,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. “They can’t afford to live in the central city but are economically and culturally linked to urban Austin.”

But even with demographic gains that tend to favor Democrats, Hays County had a mixed bag of winners in down-ballot races, such as incumbent Republican Sheriff Gary Cutler and Tax Assessor-Collector Jenifer O'Kane, who narrowly beat their Democratic challengers.

Parks, the head of Hays County’s GOP, said students played a role in that.

“It is somewhat unfortunate in that we have university students who are here in Hays County for no other reason than to go to school and as soon as they graduate they are leaving Hays County,” Parks said. “They don’t have really any interest in down-ballot stuff. They don’t have any interest or knowledge of down-ballot stuff. They don’t care about county judges and that sort of thing.”

Wicker, the Texas State graduate student involved in get-out-the-vote campaigns, said the lack of candidate outreach to the student community fuels a lack of connection. She said that led many students to reject incumbents.

“Stop just coming to campus just to ask for a vote,” she said. “Make sure you are doing this year-round. Not all young people people are going to vote blue.”