I've pulled all of the county by county Primary and General election results from 2000 - 2020 from the Texas Secretary of State and loaded them into my campaign finance tracking site (link in the comments below), and the thing that keeps nagging at me is 2008. 
2008 is this aberration in the numbers. 2008 had 22.58% of registered voters vote in the Democratic primary. For context, the next highest total is the 12.81% turnout we had in 2020. I've had people tell me it was the enthusiasm for Barak Obama, "and look how that turned out".
The Democrats dominated turnout in the 2008 primary, garnering 67.8% of those voting, or 2.8 million people. But Obama didn't win the Primary in Texas. He lost to Clinton by 100k votes. Clinton won 226 counties, Obama just 25 (3 counties didn't have any votes for a Dem).
If you look just at the 2008 Primary turnout, you might have assumed that Texas was about to go blue, that this surge of interest was going to carry the state into the General election. But let's consider what was going on in March of 2008.
For the first time ever, you had a black man win the Iowa caucus just a month earlier. It was becoming a real possibility that he could be the nominee of the Democratic party. That scared people.
Rush Limbaugh decided to encourage people to vote for Hilary Clinton in the primaries in something called "Operation Chaos". And honestly, a lot of Texans didn't need much encouragement to vote against the black man.
Across rural Texas in 2008, you still had a lot of small communities that had the old school Democrats in power. They voted pretty overwhelmingly for Hilary Clinton, in what feels like a last gasp, trying to stave off change.
Obama of course went on to win the nomination. And the numbers in the 2008 General election cratered, with Texas staying firmly Red, with 56% of the vote going Republican. What happened to the Primary excitement? A black man at the top of the ticket.
When you look at the trend of turnout in the primary vsthe general, you see a fairly common range. For the Dems, it's normally around 2 to 3.5, meaning if you got 1 million votes in the primary, you would get 2 to 3.5 mil votes in the general. That ratio was just 1.23 in 2008.
In counties all over the state, it appears those who showed up to vote for Hilary Clinton in the Primary either stayed home in November or switched to voting for the Republicans. I guess they couldn't stand to or never intended to vote for Obama.
If you pull out the Hilary Clinton voters from the 2008 Democratic primary and just look at the ratio Obama votes carried into the 2008 General, it is a very consistent with the broader trend at 2.59. Obama received 1,362,476 votes in the Primary, 3,528,633 votes in the General.
To illustrate that it wasn't just the Democrats, the Republican primary to general ratio in 2008 was 3.29. They haven't had a number that high since.
This implies to me that those who crossed over to vote in the Dem primary came back to R’s in November. In small towns all over the state, those old school Dems who just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a black president also voted R in November (and haven’t looked back)
In many parts of this state, a subtle and not so subtle racism simmers just below the surface. I think this is what manifested in 2008. The Democratic party in Texas has been digging out ever since.
The gains in 2018 gave new hope. The continuing trends in 2020 have me thinking that perhaps we are turning a corner, at least in our biggest counties.
But, there are gains to be seen even in the most rural, as people figure out the policies and agenda of those currently in power in our State don't really help them in their daily lives.
Are we ready to go blue? It all depends on you, your friends, your family, and your community. It takes capitalizing on momentum and turning out in November. We learn from the past to drive into the future. Let's go.
If you want to pull your own county, to see what the trends look like since 2000 (and the 2008 trend is pretty consistent across the state), here is the page I've put together.
datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/…
datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/…
