This op-ed was originally written by Dr. Michael O. Adams for the Defender.
In the last week of July, the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University asked 500 Black Texans who had voted in recent elections a question that political scientists usually avoid asking directly. Does the Democratic Party in Texas take Black voters for granted? Seventy-seven percent said yes. Three in four Black Democrats said yes.
Asked whether Jasmine Crockett’s race had cost her the Senate primary among non-Black Democrats, 80% said it had. Those are not the numbers of a satisfied constituency.
Then we asked whether the primary result had changed their likelihood of voting in November. Seven percent said they were less likely to vote. Thirty-two percent said they were more likely. Sixty-one percent said it made no difference.
In our final statewide poll in late October, Black likely voters favored James Talarico over Ken Paxton by 82% to 16%. On Nov. 3, they did better than that: The New York Times’ validated estimate of the Texas electorate puts Black Texans at 91% to 8% for Talarico, a 16-point shift from 2024, with the 2024 erosion among Black men erased.
Harris County cast 1,383,128 votes, more than its entire turnout in the 2022 midterm, and gave Gina Hinojosa a 29-point margin. Fort Bend cast 331,449 votes, gave her 23, elected Dexter McCoy county judge by about 20 points, and put a Democratic slate in at roughly 60%. Without Harris and Fort Bend, there is no statewide sweep, the first since 1994.
To anyone who studies Black politics, none of this is a contradiction. It is the oldest pattern in the field. Michael Dawson called it linked fate: The recognition that what happens to Black people as a group shapes what happens to any individual Black person, so that the group’s interest is the individual’s interest at the ballot box, whatever the individual’s grievances with the party that claims to represent it.
Ismail White and Chryl Laird have shown that the mechanism is as much social as it is psychological. Black voters hold one another to the norm of group loyalty, and the norm holds even when the party does not deserve it. The Center’s survey measured the grievance and the loyalty in the same sample, two months before the vote. The returns measured the behavior.
What the pattern does not mean is that the grievance was empty. Black Texans did not ask the party for gratitude. They told us in plain terms that they expect reciprocity, and the bill for Tuesday is now due in three places.
The first is appointments. Governor-elect Hinojosa will make thousands of them: To boards and commissions, agency leadership, and judicial vacancies, and every one that needs Senate confirmation needs two-thirds of a Senate that is still Republican, 19 to 12, which is to say nine Republican votes.
Black Texans will learn more from the first hundred names she sends to the Senate than from any speech.
“Black turnout did not hold because the party earned it. It held because the alternative was Ken Paxton, whom 83% of Black Texans viewed unfavorably, and a President whom 89% did. Loyalty sustained by the other side’s candidates is loyalty on loan.”
Dr. Michael O. Adams
The second is Harris County. The state takeover of the Houston Independent School District is carried out by the Commissioner of Education, a gubernatorial appointee. The county’s election administration disputes run through the Secretary of State, another appointee. Flood funding runs through a budget the Democratic House writes, and the Republican Senate rewrites. Every file between Austin and Houston changed hands on Tuesday.
The third is the agenda Black voters told us drove the vote: The cost of living, health coverage in the state with the highest uninsured rate in the country, public schools, and public safety. Medicaid expansion alone would cover more than a million working Texans, and a disproportionate share of them are Black Houstonians. It needs seven Republican senators. Black Houston should know their names.
There is a second lesson in the numbers, and it is for the party. The Crockett primary was the test case for a theory that Black voters would stay home if the party passed over a Black candidate. The theory failed. But our data say why it failed, and the reason should worry Democrats more than the theory did.
Black turnout did not hold because the party earned it. It held because the alternative was Ken Paxton, whom 83% of Black Texans viewed unfavorably, and a President whom 89% did. Loyalty sustained by the other side’s candidates is loyalty on loan. And the first repayment is already on the table: Every Democratic statewide winner this year is white or Latino, and the Speaker’s chair in the Texas House, which Senfronia Thompson of Houston announced Friday she has the votes to claim after 53 years in the chamber, is the one position at the top of Texas government the Black part of the coalition can hold in January. How the party treats that claim will tell Black Houstonians more than any speech.
Barbara Jordan went to the Texas Senate in 1966 as the first Black woman to serve there. Sixty years later, the margins in her Houston neighborhoods helped send a Texas Democrat to the United States Senate for the first time since 1988. The Center that bears her name will return to Black Texas voters next year and ask the same question we asked in July. The answer will tell us whether anything changed.
Michael O. Adams is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Texas Southern University and founding director of the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center. Election figures are unofficial returns and New York Times Voter Trends estimates as of November 9, 2026. The Black Texas Voters Survey (500 respondents, July 27 to August 1, margin of error 4.38 points) and the Center’s statewide surveys are at jordanresearchcenter.org.