Democrats’ chances hinge on finally winning a county that for years has been trending purple.
For much of her life, Liz Slack voted Republican up and down the ballot.
A longtime resident of Collin County — the hometown of U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton — Slack said she looks like a typical conservative: a Baylor University alum who goes to Bible study every week.
But as the GOP became more hardline over the past decade, she felt her center-right values — which she said did not change — grow increasingly distant from the party she’d long supported. Slack stuck with Republicans in 2016 and 2018. But as the Trump era wore on, she began to evaluate her votes race-by-race, and ultimately cast ballots for the top two Democrats in 2024: Kamala Harris for president and Colin Allred for U.S. Senate. This fall, she’s planning to vote for James Talarico.
That growth has enabled Collin County’s shift from Republican stronghold to purple. For much of the 21st century, Collin County voted for the GOP at higher rates than the state as a whole did. But by the 2020 presidential campaign, Collin County crossed the rubicon, voting to the left of the state for the first time in decades, while still supporting Republican candidates. In 2018, when U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz won the state by less than 3 percentage points, he held Collin County by about 6 percentage points.
Six years later, Cruz won his Senate race by a much larger 8-percentage point margin. But he only won Collin County by 5 percentage points.
Ross Hunt, a GOP operative in Dallas, said Collin County’s purpling has come from its economic opportunity, driving people to move there for jobs over ideology.
“Collin is sort of a dark horse county for the Democrats,” Hunt said. “Collin County used to be so red, and they’ve taken advantage of the fact that many of the immigrants into DFW have been motivated by economic factors.”
Republicans cautioned against solely blaming transplants for Collin County’s shift.
Williams, the former Collin County GOP chair, pointed out that in 2018, exit polling showed that Democrat Beto O’Rourke won the native Texan vote, while Cruz won transplants en route to his narrow victory.
“Everybody blamed the people from California,” Williams said. “But if you looked at the data, it wasn’t the people from California. It was the natives that voted, for a variety of reasons. Some of the greatest patriots I’ve ever met are people who came from California, and they knew exactly why they left and where they were going.”
Even Paxton, whose father was in the Air Force, spent part of his childhood in California, before he would later move to Texas and eventually base his law practice in McKinney.
South Asian blowback
Democrats also believe the party is poised to make gains with the county’s significant Indian and Muslim American communities — though doing so could be an uphill battle.
Texas Republicans have traditionally overperformed with South Asians relative to the bloc’s voter trends in the rest of the country. The GOP over several years has in particular made significant strides with Indian American voters, the most frequently Democratic group nationally among Asian American voters. Trump narrowly won several Asian-heavy precincts in Frisco in 2024, according to VoteHub, after a campaign in which the Collin County GOP hung Trump-Vance signs in Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati and Tamil. And the Texas GOP chairman from 2024 through earlier this year was Abraham George, an Indian American and a former Collin County GOP chair himself.
Polling from Asian Texans for Justice, a nonpartisan statewide organization working to build Asian political power, found that there has been a significant shift toward the GOP in Texas since 2022. Forty percent of Asian Texans identify as Republicans, according to the organization’s 2026 polling, while only 31% consider themselves Democrats — close to the inverse of where Asian Texan partisanship stood in 2022.
But Collin County’s South Asian community has been at the center of a massive wave of hate from right-wing activists and influencers in places like Frisco, where city council meetings have become derailed by anti-Indian racism during public comment. Those sentiments have in many cases been echoed by GOP officials. Few, if any Texas Republicans, have explicitly condemned the recent wave of anti-Indian racism that has stemmed from policy concerns about H1-B visas.
Those tensions were inflamed in September, when, in the aftermath of an improbable University of Texas football win, Republican railroad commissioner nominee Bo French posted a photo of mostly South Asian students storming the field in Longhorn orange, writing “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The post fueled a political fire storm, causing multiple people from his own party to call for him to apologize — which he never did.
Already, Sutka said, early voting data shows increased turnout in neighborhoods with significant Indian populations.
Nabila Mansoor, the Asian Texans for Justice executive director, said she expected heightened political activity in Collin County given the wave of anti-Indian hate — a trend that could resonate beyond 2026 as the community, like the county itself, continues to grow.
Anne Bramlett, a senior in Lavon, is one such longtime Collin County voter who has moved away from the GOP. Bramlett considers herself a lifelong Republican, but has not voted straight ticket in years over frustrations with the GOP’s stance on Medicaid funding, a critical lifeline for her adult son with autism who lives in a Medicaid waiver group home. She plans to vote for Talarico for Senate and Democratic governor nominee Gina Hinojosa, but also her local Republican state representative, Candy Noble. Further down the ballot, she was still deciding.
“Locally, I’ve always voted for the Republicans in the commissioners’ court and judge [races],” Bramlett said. “But I’m kind of straying away from that too. I’m just looking carefully at what they say and what they believe.”
Her husband, Bramlett said, is a Republican and Trump voter who is torn over the U.S. Senate race. He won’t vote for Talarico given the Democrat’s positions on social issues like abortion. But he is concerned about the allegations of corruption and infidelity surrounding Paxton, Bramlett said, and he might skip the race altogether.
Source: Texas Tribune BY Gaby Birenbaum
Photo: People gather at the Collin County Republican Party Labor Day picnic in Plano on Sept. 2, 2023. Azul Sordo for the Texas Tribune
