Texas
Presidential
Bell County is home to the cities of Killeen and Temple, which house a handful of colleges. Trump won it in 2020 by 8.7 points, but the county has seen a rapid blue shift in recent years. Democrats making inroads on the outskirts of the two main cities will likely hand them Bell sometime this coming decade
Bowie County is home to Texarkana, borders Arkansas and Oklahoma, and last went Democratic for President for Bill Clinton. Trump, in stark contrast, won it by over 43 points. While Texarkana has some minority-dominant Democratic precincts, the rest of the county is solidly red
Denton County is one of the two newly competitive suburban counties north of Dallas and Ft. Worth. After winning it by double digits for decades, Biden held Trump to an 8-point margin here. Democratic strength is concentrated in the SE and in Denton
Jim Wells County was one of the handful that Trump flipped in South Texas. He won it by almost 10 points, mainly thanks to Republican margins in Orange Grove and decreasing Democratic margins around Alice. Republicans have seen successes in the county in statewide races in Jim Wells since Trump's victory
Val Verde County went from a narrow Trump win in 2016, to a 10-point Trump win in 2020. The majority of the county's population is clustered around the city of Del Rio, across from Mexico's Ciudad Acuña. Trump made significant gains around the city, but Biden strangely gained ground in the sparsely populated northern end of the county
Williamson County is one of the main suburban counties adjacent to Austin, and flipped to Biden in 2020. The small portion of Austin in the county, Round Rock, Cedar Park, and other adjacent communities pushed the county narrowly over the line for Biden, unlike Hays to the south that luched left in 2018 and never looked back
Zapata County is the one South Texas county that Trump flipped in 2020, after it went for Clinton by double digits. Its flip is up there with the shock of Miami Dade also swinging hard to the right. Zapata has gone red downballot since this 5-ish point win, with Abbott and other Republicans winning it in 2022
I actually had family that used to live in Zapata
Texas's 74th HD is a seat to watch on election night 2024. Democrats have seen a plummet in their vote share since the onset of the Trump-era, and this narrow Biden seat might serve as the canary in the coal mine for how Biden will perform with Hispanics. Legislatively, Democrats hold the seat, and are likely to outrun Biden due to the effect of Hispanic surnames
Congressional
Cameron County is the largest county in the new TX-34, and has been reliably blue federally since 2008. Double-bunked Congresspeople Flores (R) and Gonzales (D) both ran for this seat, and despite Flores's recent special election upset, she lost the seat, losing Cameron County by almost 9 points. Brownsville and Harlingen in particular anchored the seat in the Democratic column