Exclusive | Did blue California exiles swing the Texas race?

For the better part of a decade, Texas drivers slapped a blunt message on their bumpers aimed at the moving trucks rolling in from the West Coast: “Don’t California my Texas.”By Tuesday night, the Lone Star State looked plenty Californian.Democrat James Talarico, a state representative and former public school teacher, knocked off Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race to replace Sen.John Cornyn.

Talarico’s win snapped a three-decade Republican lock on statewide office in Texas, and voters hadn’t sent a Democrat to the US Senate from Texas in 38 years.It wasn’t close.Unofficial returns showed Talarico with about 5.45 million votes, or 55%, against roughly 4.25 million, or 43%, for Paxton, a gap of about 1.2 million votes.

The AP called it around 10 p.m., and Paxton conceded within the half hour.The rout ran down the ballot, too, with Democrat Gina Hinojosa capturing the governor’s race.Now the question rattling Texas Republicans is whether the Golden State refugees they spent years courting, and sometimes even questioning, just flipped their state.The numbers are staggering.

Census figures show 77,161 people relocated from California to Texas in 2024 alone, making it the single busiest state-to-state move in the nation.That same year, roughly 556,156 Americans settled in Texas from other states while 483,476 left, for a net gain of 72,680.Stretch it out and the picture gets bigger.

Texas grew 15.8% between 2015 and 2025 (about 4.3 million), more than double the 6.2% national rate.The state now counts about 31.7 million residents.A Realtor.com analysis prepared for The California Post earlier this year pegged the California-to-Texas pipeline at roughly 1 million people between 2015 and 2025.And plenty of them apparently packed their politics along with the moving boxes.The Post surveyed 53 people who left California for Texas within the last 10 years.

Forty-two called themselves Democrats, six said they were Republicans and five identif...