In a county that’s been trending further toward Democrats over the past several years, the Nov. 5 election results were a mixed bag for both parties.
On the whole, Republicans successfully defended a number of San Antonio-area seats in hard-fought races, and picked up power on the San Antonio-based Fourth Court of Appeals.
But some unusual ticket-splitting at the federal level — which has only become more clear with the release of precinct-level data in the weeks after the election — makes it harder to distill which direction the county is headed.
Vice President Kamala Harris carried Bexar County with 54.9% of the vote, a smaller margin than Democrats’ recent presidential and gubernatorial nominees, which reverberated down the ballot in a number of key races.
At the same time, Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate, Colin Allred, who roughly performed on par with his party’s past standard bearers — came closer than other members of his party in traditionally Republican territory, even flipping a Northside county commissioner precinct.
Local strategists, including San Antonio political data guru Bert Santibañez, of the Democratic firm Flagship Campaigns, helped us break down the presidential and U.S. Senate race results by state House district and county commissioner precinct for a closer look at how key areas performed. You can see much more detail in the maps prepared by Flagship Campaigns below.
Here are some of the San Antonio Report’s top takeaways from an unusual Nov. 5 election in Bexar County.
1. A Democrat cracked the lone GOP-held county precinct
In recent years, Bexar County’s Precinct 3 on the North Side has been the only precinct to reliably send a Republican to the five-member commissioners court. It’s also been trending away from the GOP in statewide and presidential elections over the past few election cycles.
As in past years, the Republican who represents Northside’s Precinct 3, Commissioner Grant Moody, ran well ahead of his party’s nominees at the top of the ticket, fending off Democratic challenger Susan Korbel by more than 10 percentage points.
But Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate, Colin Allred, carried Precinct 3 with 50.3% of the vote, to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s 49.7% — though Cruz ultimately won the Senate race by roughly 9 percentage points.
Republicans still won Precinct 3 at the presidential level, with President-elect Donald Trump taking 52% of the vote. (Trump won Texas overall by about 14 percentage points.)
San Antonio political strategist Kelton Morgan, a Republican, said he wasn’t worried about the precinct moving away from the GOP.
“What that means to me is that women [rejected] Ted Cruz, especially white suburban women who live between the two loops,” Morgan said. “To the extent there was a swing voter in this election and this part of the world, that’s probably who it was.”
2. Trump made a breakthrough on the South Side
Before this election, state House Rep. John Lujan (R-San Antonio) was the only member of his party to win in House District 118 in recent memory, relying on a personality-driven campaign to help the former San Antonio firefighter outperform Texas GOP leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott.
“I have always lost John Lujan’s district. So has [U.S. Sen. Ted] Cruz and [U.S. Sen. John] Cornyn and every other statewide candidate,” Abbott said at an October campaign event. “The only person who can win that race as a Republican is John Lujan.”
This year, however, President-elect Donald Trump also carried the district with 52.4% of the vote — an even higher margin than Lujan’s 51.7%.
Santibañez said that’s a “sea change” for a district that’s long been considered a Democratic stronghold, and under its current lines, would have supported President Joe Biden by roughly 2.7 percentage points in 2020.
Those numbers comes as Trump massively outperformed his 2020 results across South Texas this year, and has been making gains with Latino voters in the state’s urban centers as well. House District 118’s population is about 64% Hispanic.
As with Precinct 3, however, Morgan said that doesn’t necessarily mean the district is shifting its preference from one party to the other.
“Presidential vote versus local is never a terribly accurate metric, but it’s woefully out of whack in the Trump era, when none of the usual dynamics seem to apply,” Morgan said.
3. Colin Allred outperformed the rest of his party
Democrats continued to win big in Bexar County, but the party’s U.S. Senate candidate, Colin Allred, ran a campaign that resonated with a much broader swath of voters than Vice President Kamala Harris and other local Democrats in Bexar County.
Allred openly courted the political middle, ran ads touting his efforts to secure the border and avoided being seen with his party’s national leaders early in the race.
As a result, the former NFL linebacker carried Bexar County with 58.2% to Harris’s 54.9% — a roughly 11,600-vote margin. Allred also won traditionally Republican Precinct 3, and was the only member of his party to win House District 118.
Allred also performed exceptionally well in House District 121, trailing U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) by 357 votes, while Democrats didn’t come close in that district at the presidential level, or in the hard-fought state legislative race between Marc LaHood (R) and Laurel Jordan Swift (D).
“Allred’s success compared to Harris and other Democrats highlights opportunities [for his party] to target split-ticket voters and expand appeal in suburban and urban precincts,” Santibañez said.
Sheriff Javier Salazar, a Democrat, also performed better than Harris in Bexar County, winning a third term with roughly 57% of the vote.
Salazar had aligned himself closely with the national party in recent months, even earning a coveted speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
4. Democrats’ female candidates had a tough night
Democrats were unsuccessful in two high-profile state House races, where female candidates’ performance more closely mirrored Harris’s than Allred’s.
In House District 118, Allred carried the district while Democrat Kristian Carranza took 48.3% of the vote, and Harris took 47.6%.
In House District 121, Democrat Laurel Jordan Swift and Harris each took 47.5% of the vote, while Allred was much closer, trailing Cruz with 49.8% of the vote.
In each race, 21 Bexar County precincts voted for both Trump and Allred.
Santibañez said that outcome emphasizes the importance of tailored messaging and turnout efforts “to ensure down-ballot candidates can leverage momentum from federal races.”
5. Low overall turnout in blue counties
Despite rapid population growth and a 9.7% rise in registered voters since the last presidential election, Bexar County cast fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020.
“There are somewhere between 130,000 to 140,000 people in Bexar County that should have voted,” said Morgan, who chalked it up to Democrats’ lack of interest in the presidential race. “Turnout should have been north of 65% and it was south of 57%.”
That lack of enthusiasm wound up costing local Democrats three contested seats on the San Antonio-based Fourth Court of Appeals, which hears cases from 32 counties across South Texas and the Hill Country.
Democrats on that court typically run up the score in Bexar County and Webb County enough to offset losses in the redder territory.
“In a normal-looking presidential year, the Democrats should have won all of those seats,” Morgan said. “In this year, because there were 140,000 votes short in Bexar County, and another 28,000 or so short in Webb County, the Hill Country counties were enough to offset that so that all of those Republicans won.”
Bonus: A new top voting location
For years, Bexar County’s busiest early voting location has been Brook Hollow Library, located on the North Side between the two loops, just east of U.S. 281.
This year it was overtaken by two other polling centers. The busiest location was Encino Branch Library, which has also been a top performer in recent years, and is located north of Loop 1604 on U.S. 281.
But the second-busiest location this year was Northwest Vista College. Located on the county’s outskirts by the Alamo Ranch expansion, that location became more popular, as the far Northwest side experienced explosive growth.
