Texas has fallen. For the first time since 1994, the state that gave America George W Bush, Rick Perry and Ted Cruz has elected a Democrat governor and a Democrat senator. Republicans lost every statewide office on the ballot: governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner and the Railroad Commission, every one of them held by the party since the 1990s.
President Trump’s Iran war drove this disaster. As did the high gas prices that resulted from it. Yet there was another crucial factor at play, and one the British Right must take notice of: demographics.
In 2010, white Americans made up 45.3 per cent of Texas. By 2025, that number fell to 37.3 per cent. Hispanics now make up 40.9 per cent of Texans, the largest group in the state. Of the four million people Texas added between 2010 and 2020, 95 per cent were not white. Nearly one in five Texans, 5.8 million people, was born abroad, up from one in six a decade ago.
As the cliché goes, demographics is destiny. In both Britain and America, white voters are far more right wing than ethnic minorities. The national exit poll figures from last night show Republicans winning 55 per cent of white men, against just 13 per cent of black men and 6 per cent of black women. Democrats took 56 per cent of Latino men and 66 per cent of Latino women. White women narrowly favoured the Democrats. Britain shows a similar pattern: in 2024, Labour led the Conservatives by seven points among white voters, but by 29 points among ethnic minorities. 68 per cent of black voters supported Labour in 2024; just one per cent voted for Reform UK.
If you go to parts of Dallas today, one might think you are in Delhi. The Muslim population of Texas has also increased dramatically in recent years. In Dallas–Fort Worth, the population originating from Muslim-majority countries more than doubled in the last decade, rising from about 79,000 in 2014 to more than 159,000 in 2024 (five times the growth rate of the population as a whole).
One cannot ignore this shift. Certainly the Democrats haven’t. For years, they have openly anticipated demographic change turning Texas blue. Back in 2013, Julián Castro, then the Democratic mayor of San Antonio, declared: “It’s going to become a purple state then a blue state because of the demographics.” Hillary Clinton made the electoral calculation explicit in 2016: “If black and Latino voters come out and vote, we could win Texas.” That August, Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa went further: “If we can get Hispanics to vote in this state, it would be impossible for the Republicans to elect anyone.”
In Britain our ethnic demographics have transformed at a faster rate, as I have been trying to put to figures on the British Right over the last few years. The white British population has declined from 87 per cent in 2001 to 74 per cent in 2021, and the Boriswave will only have accelerated that decline. By the mid-century it is likely we will become a minority. Today, white Brits are barely a majority of births. This will have downstream effects on politics.
For all the MAGA slop about how “Europe has fallen”, Americans might want to look closer to home, specifically to California.
The state that gave America Nixon and Reagan, California voted Republican in nine of the ten presidential elections between 1952 and 1988. Reagan carried it with 59 per cent of the vote in 1984. No Republican presidential candidate has won it since 1988. This is not because the water supply became tainted with progressive chemicals — the voters simply changed.
In 1986, Reagan signed an amnesty for nearly three million illegal immigrants, more of whom lived in California than in any other state. Four years later, George HW Bush signed legislation sharply increasing legal immigration, including by creating the infamous H-1B visa.
White Americans made up 67 per cent of California in 1980. That figure has since fallen to around 35 per cent.
Reagan’s amnesty should haunt the modern Right. In Britain, the Labour government recently announced that hundreds of thousands of third world migrants who came in under Boris Johnson will be on the path to citizenship in the next few years. That choice will cost the taxpayer dearly. It will cost the political Right more in the long run.
Texas was not the only place where demography impacted the election. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a 42-year-old son of Egyptian immigrants who has links with the Muslim Brotherhood (though he denies any association) beat Republican Mike Rogers 52 to 46. El Sayed is the first Muslim to be elected to the United States Senate.
Dearborn, the first Arab-majority city in America, queued round the block on Tuesday for El Sayed. Michigan has more than 310,000 residents of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry and more than 200,000 Muslim voters. I spent a few days in Dearborn before the election and asked Muslims how they could stomach voting for a candidate who called himself the “lion” for gay rights. In the end, ethnic loyalties and Gaza trumped all else.
El-Sayed reminds me of the pro-Gaza independents elected to our own Parliament in 2024. The British Left assumes that immigration will keep supplying it with voters. However, those voters may increasingly prefer parties that openly champion their own ethnic and religious interests. In America, the same pressure can play out within the Democratic Party, with candidates such as El-Sayed challenging the old establishment from inside. In Britain, it can mean abandoning Labour altogether. There are 3.9 million Muslims in England and Wales, 6.5 per cent of the population, up from 4.9 per cent in 2011. This will in no way help Nigel Farage.
I do not deny that Iran was the overarching reason the Republicans were routed. Trump won in 2016 and 2024 as the candidate who would end the forever wars. And yet, much like Boris Johnson did in Britain, he betrayed his base.
Following Trump’s Middle East adventure, Christopher Caldwell presciently warned of “the end of Trumpism”. Writing in The Spectator, he put the betrayal plainly: “Trump is now carrying out the policy of the very think-tankers and democracy-spreaders he rose to power by promising to fight.”
The British Right failed this test in real time. Within days of the first strikes, Nigel Farage said it would be “worth” Britain joining in and that we should “do all we can” to help American forces. Kemi Badenoch mocked Starmer for being “too scared” to intervene. Both had reversed within a fortnight, and both then claimed they had never backed joining the war in the first place. The war has proved to be equally unpopular in Britain and such hawkish instincts from Farage and Badenoch could prove just as electorally disastrous for them in the future.
This was Trump’s version of the Conservatives’ defeat in 2024. Voters who had been promised nationalism, whether control of Britain’s borders or an end to America’s forever wars, and an improvement in their living standards found themselves paying more and being betrayed.
The British Right must learn from this. That means refusing to import Trump’s corruption, excuse his failures or follow him into wars its own voters never wanted. Farage should remember how quickly the Conservatives squandered the coalition they built in 2019, the strongest the Right had assembled in decades: they betrayed the voters they had while transforming the electorate they would one day have to face.
Demographics are everything, and time is running out.