The Texas electorate is changing – but could Biden really flip the state?

Texas’s 24th congressional district is in many ways a microcosm for this entire election.

An expansive sprawl of suburbia that connects the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, it has for the past 15 years been dominated by conservative politics. The incumbent Republican congressman Kenny Marchant has held the district since 2004 but his retirement, announced to little fanfare last year, has sparked a political turf war that crystallizes Texas’s rapid diversification and the bitter politics that underpin it.

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When Marchant, now 69, first won here he carried the area with a decisive 64% of the vote, and those margins continued for over a decade. But in 2018, two years into the Trump era, he clung to his seat in Congress by just 3%.

Now, in 2020, this race for the 24th district is a tossup, making it a perfect second stop in the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series, in which I am traveling the country with film-maker Tom Silverstone.

“As soon as Trump was elected folks needed to feel as though they were doing everything they could to make sure that they save their communities and this country,” says Candace Valenzuela, the Democrat running here. “We knew Donald Trump would be disastrous for the state of this country, and I think that movement here is gaining speed because Trump shows himself to be more and more derelict of his duties.”

The tight race here is an indication not only of some suburban voters’ distaste for some of the more extreme moments of the Trump presidency, but also of Texas’s evolving electorate. This district, like the state as a whole, is becoming increasingly diverse. By 2022 Hispanic Americans will become the majority in Texas, in the 24th district they now make up almost 25% of the population.

There are two opposing visions of the suburbs described in this election. For Donald Trump, a now archaic depiction of neighborhoods under threat from change: “If he [Joe Biden] ever got to run our country, our suburbs would be gone,” he said during the first presidential debate. For Biden, an increasingly realistic assertion that suburban life is no longer a relic of white communities in the 1950s but dynamic and multicultural: “He wouldn’t know a suburb unless he took a wrong turn,” Biden retorted in the same debate.

Valenzuela herself is emblematic of a wave of young, dynamic and diverse candidates running down the ballot for the Democrats this year. If she wins she will become the first Afro-Latina elected to Congress in an election year that has seen the highest number of black women running for office in US history. She battled homelessness as a child and first held political office on the local school board.

Her Republican opponent Beth Van Duyne, a former mayor of the city of Irving, is also an emblem of the current state of her party. In 2015 Van Duyne drew national controversy for falsely suggesting that a local Islamic tribunal could lead to sharia law, and for passing an entirely symbolic but deeply divisive city ordinance supporting “American Laws for American Courts”.

Van Duyne won’t speak to me, however, and there’s little mention of this divisive past on her campaign site. Initially her office says they have no in-person events for me to attend the week I’m in town. But given she’s posting images on social media of her out and about meeting residents I suggest to her campaign manager this is a false justification to deny an interview request. He denies it and adds via email: “I am pleased we did not accommodate whatever garbage hit piece you are producing.” Van Duyne later describes me as a “liberal hack reporter” on Twitter.

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Battle for the suburbs: can Joe Biden flip Texas? – video

Members of the county Republican party here are more accommodating, however. And Rick Barnes, president of the Tarrant county Republicans, argues that Trump’s presidency has actually brought people together in this district as he expresses confidence in Van Duyne’s ability to win the seat. He cites the president’s ongoing war against professional athletes taking a knee during the national anthem as a prime example.

“It probably speaks to suburban voters more than anybody,” Barnes says. “Telling anybody that it’s OK to kneel to the US flag is not a good conversation for suburbanites at all. Around here everyone I talk to says good riddance, we don’t need to continue to watch pro sports.”

Barnes hasn’t watched any professional sport other than golf since Colin Kaepernick took up his first protest. But outward political sentiment is mainstream in sports now, with NBA courts and player jerseys emblazoned with social justice messaging.

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At Texas Woman’s University, a nearby college campus, the Latinx voter advocacy group, Jolt Action, is trying to capitalize on surging participation from young people by registering first-time voters. The organization was founded shortly after Trump won in 2016 and says it helped to boost youth turnout statewide by 500% in 2018 and Latino early turnout by 250%. Young Latina women voted at a 25% higher rate than their male counterparts.

“We want to make sure that Texas understands that the next chapter of Texas history will be written by black and brown women that are leading the charge on civic engagement,” says Antonio Arellano, the group’s young, charismatic interim director.

“The Latino community in Texas has been terrorized for the last decade by our statewide officials, by the federal government. Our communities have come under direct attack,” he says, pointing to a 2019 white nationalist terror attack against the Latino community in the city of El Paso in south Texas, where a lone gunman took 23 lives.

But voter registration here is made more complicated by the pandemic. A once bustling campus is now sparsely populated, and Texas’s antiquated voter registration system makes the job even harder. I watch volunteers from Jolt sign up fewer than 10 new voters in one session. But, says Arellano, every vote will count in a presidential race that is tightening by the day.

Voter suppression is also rampant in the state of Texas, which has some of the harshest voter ID laws in the country and last week moved to curtail early voting by limiting mail-in-ballot drop-off sites to one per county (Tarrant county alone has a population of 2.1 million people.)

But the enthusiasm among the younger voters we do speak to here is palpable. Many are first-generation immigrants and are motivated to turn up by Trump’s hardline immigration policies that have seen children separated from their families and the partial construction of a wall at the southern border.

“It breaks me,” says one first-year student as she registers to vote. “My mum crossed the border herself.”

It’s clear that candidates like Valenzuela empathize with such views.

“When you grow up as a person of color in Texas, there’s a lot to love about Texas,” she says. “But you are also very much used to many political officials not caring about your wellbeing to the point of even villainizing you in order to make their own political points.”