The big asterisk next to Trump’s ‘highest vote in the history of Texas’ claim
OK, fine. I’ll address President Trump’s justification for the Texas Republican Party’s plan to shift five House seats from Democrats to the GOP.
It was offered in a phone interview with CNBC and host Joe Kernen.
“I won Texas — I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know,” Trump said, “and we are entitled to five more seats.”
“I don’t know,” Kernen replied. Trump (calling him Brian, perhaps confusing him with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade) suggested he run it past the fact-checkers, giving the always accommodating Kernen a chance to complain about how fact-checkers had given Joe Biden a pass while scrutinizing Trump closely.
There was some irony to his doing so! After all, the reason that Trump was the focus of so many fact-checks relative to Biden was that Trump was so much more likely to present false facts than his successor/predecessor. Just like Trump’s historic vote total in Texas was a function of the state’s much larger population.
It is true that Trump got more votes in Texas than any candidate in history. You can see that below, using data from U.S. Election Atlas.
But that is in large part because there are more people living in Texas than ever before and, by extension, more people casting votes than in any prior election in the state.
As a result, his was not the largest margin of victory in Texas. That honor goes to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection bid. Bush got fewer total votes, but won by a larger vote count.
If we consider margins of victory in terms of the percentage of votes cast, Trump fared unusually poorly in the state. He had the 27th highest percentage-point margin of victory in 2024, substantially behind Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 victory.
This context is beside the point for Trump, just as population growth was beside the point of his first-term boasts about the number of people working. It was true that more people were employed than at any prior point — but it was also true that the population was larger than it had ever been. During Biden’s administration, the number of people working kept setting new records, too, but this was not presented by Trump as a demonstration of his excellence at managing the economy.
Nor did Biden take advantage of his unusually strong performance in Texas — the second-highest vote total on record! — to demand that the state redraw its House boundaries to offer more seats to the Democratic Party. After all, the point of House seats is to reflect local, constituent preference, not statewide opinion on the chief executive.
For Trump, though, everything is a referendum on him — unless the numbers are bad.