Can Kamala Harris Turn Texas Blue?

“I do not think that Texas will be in play. At all,” Eshbaugh-Soha told Newsweek.

“This does not mean that Harris will avoid Texas. She will visit, to raise money and generate some exposure for herself and her campaign,” he added. “There is nothing in the mix that indicates future performance will be any different from past performance; I don’t see anything that may shake up the presidential vote in Texas.”

Eshbaugh-Soha said that one issue which could harm Harris is that voters in Texas may still associate her with the record breaking levels of illegal migrant crossings seen at the border during the Biden administration.#

Harris was personally tasked by Biden to find a solution for illegal border crossings at the southern border in January 2021. Trump and other Republican figures are already using Harris’ record on illegal migration to suggest she is unfit to be president.

“Harris to improve vote share in Texas, she has to nullify the border issue. About half Texas voters think the border is a crisis,” Eshbaugh-Soha said. “If Texas voters assign any blame on the border to the Biden Administration, and I suspect they do, then Harris has to work around this first.

“I think the Harris campaign has a good strategy:tout the immigration bill that Trump torpedoed earlier this year, and use that as a framework for her immigration policy. Instead of trying to fend off attacks related to the border over the past few years, she can go on the offensive, and basically give the voters a blueprint of specifics that she supports, thinks that will solve the problem, and let the voters decide.”

Kimi Lynn King, a University of North Texas political science professor, said that while Harris in enjoying a “bump” in her White House bid, it is unclear how that will help shift the narrative in Texas, a state where “pundits have been predicting since 2006 that there was going to be a purple wave.”

“In 2022, up and down the statewide ballot, solid red candidates like Governor [Greg] Abbott and indicted and impeached, but not convicted, Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoyed double-digit victories over Democrats,” King told Newsweek.

Mark Jones, professor of political science and fellow in political science at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas, added: “At the present time, while Harris is likely to make the race more competitive than it would have been had Biden been the Democratic nominee, I don’t see Harris doing much better than Biden did in 2020, and thus a Trump victory in the mid-to-high single digits is the most likely scenario today.”

According to forecasters Race to the White House, Trump has an average lead over Harris in Texas of nearly 12 percentage points.