WASHINGTON - Ahead of the election, President Donald Trump wagered that his anti-climate change, pro-fossil fuel messaging would be critical to winning oil and gas states like Texas.
During the last presidential debate, he pressed his opponent Joe Biden on how his plan to “transition” away from oil would affect workers on refineries and drilling rigs. In the summer, the president questioned how Texas polls could show a close race when he had done so much to help oil workers, claiming he had, “saved the oil industry.”
Trump proved himself to be at least half right when he handily won Texas Tuesday night, beating Biden by 6 percentage points. But was it his focus on oil and gas that gave him the edge, or some other factor, like his tax cuts or his effort to stack the courts with conservative judges?
On HoustonChronicle.com: Trump and Biden clash on climate in debate
Determining that from election results would prove difficult, as voters don’t explain why they voted for a candidate on their ballot. And exit polling didn’t address the question directly.
“Parsing out the individual effect of the energy vote” is going to be “tough,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.
If you look at the 10 Texas counties with the most oil production, Trump won most of them easily, taking 76 percent of the vote on average, compared to 53 percent statewide.
That might seem like an indicator Trump was right on the importance of oil to Texas voters. But the statewide count is skewed by Democratic leaning cities with large populations, like Houston, which came out heavily for Biden.
More: Read the latest oil and gas news from HoustonChronicle.com
If you look at rural counties at-large, Trump’s margin of victory was massive. For instance, in Briscoe County, near Amarillo, which has no oil and gas production, Trump won 88 percent of the vote.
Still looking for a clear answer, I turned to the exit polls. While pollsters didn’t ask voters how important Trump’s energy messaging was to them, they did ask their opinion on the importance on climate change - seemingly a hot button issue with oil voters.
But Texans didn’t show themselves much different than most Americans on the topic. Sixty percent of Texas voters said climate change was an important issue, with 69 percent of those voters casting ballots for Biden. That compared to 66 percent of voters nationally calling climate an important issue, with 68 percent of those voters supporting Biden - a marginal difference.
After Trump’s victory, a spokeswoman for his Texas campaign trumpeted the scale of their get out the vote operation, saying their “data-driven ground game cannot be matched by Joe Biden’s anemic efforts in the Lone Star State.”
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Data and analytics are the centerpiece of modern political campaigns, allowing candidates to tailor their message to individual communities and groups of voters through emails and online ads. Generalizations like Texans will vote for oil have gone out of vogue.
But still, it’s hard to rule out that Trump was onto something.
In La Salle County in South Texas, the eighth largest oil producing county in Texas, Trump beat Biden by 3 points. A traditionally Democratic area, Trump lost the county to Hillary Clinton by 12 points in 2016.
james.osborne@chron.com
Twitter.com/@osborneja
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November 06, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Reporter’s Notebook: Did oil doom Biden in Texas? - Houston Chronicle
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