MCKINNEY — For much of her life, Liz Slack voted Republican up and down the ballot.
A longtime resident of Collin County — the hometown of U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton — Slack said she looks like a typical conservative: a Baylor University alum who goes to Bible study every week.
But as the GOP became more hardline over the past decade, she felt her center-right values — which she said did not change — grow increasingly distant from the party she’d long supported. Slack stuck with Republicans in 2016 and 2018. But as the Trump era wore on, she began to evaluate her votes race-by-race, and ultimately cast ballots for the top two Democrats in 2024: Kamala Harris for president and Colin Allred for U.S. Senate. This fall, she’s planning to vote for James Talarico.
“It’s kind of funny, because in my mind, I don’t know that I’ve accepted that I’ve switched,” Slack said. “The other night at dinner, one friend was like, ‘You’re a Democrat now. Just accept it!’”
Slack is among a cohort of voters the GOP has struggled to retain in recent cycles — college-educated, suburban women. The party has been able to withstand the bleeding in Texas by picking up new cohorts, especially non-college educated voters of color. But as corporate relocations and booming growth make Texas’ suburbs larger and more diverse, the voting trends in places like McKinney are enormously consequential for both parties as they battle for control over a red state whose hue has become dangerously pale for Republicans this cycle.
Nowhere are the patterns of suburban growth and political transformation more on display than Collin County — where Paxton got his political start as a state representative in 2003 and eventually rose to serve as attorney general. While nearby Tarrant County has long been considered the Texas bellwether, statewide Democrats are bullish about their chances of winning there, as their candidates have in recent cycles.
Instead, Talarico’s path to victory may require doing what no federal Democrat has done since 1970 when Lloyd Bentsen defeated George H.W. Bush in his first Senate run: win Collin County.
For Paxton, the results will be a testament to how the area has shifted as its most famous politician’s career has grown, with some of his most ardent supporters and passionate detractors having been along for the ride.
The dueling campaigns recognize the importance of the county too. Collin County is the most populous county in America that a statewide Democratic candidate has never won this century. Talarico kicked off his final statewide tour in Plano on the eve of early voting, one of several visits he’s made to the county this cycle. Paxton, meanwhile, was at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Allen on the first day of early voting, a town he hit in February, May and August.
“For 10 years, it’s been getting a little purpler,” said Shelby Williams, a former Collin County GOP chair and Plano City Council member now running for County Commission, who noted that Republicans spent years turning Collin County from blue to red decades ago. “If we can take it from them, they can take it right back from us. And we’re watching that unfold election cycle after election cycle, chipping away a little bit.”
Driving that political swing is massive growth and a more diverse population.
The county’s population has more than doubled since 2000, climbing to nearly 1.3 million. And it’s not slowing down any time soon. Four of the five fastest-growing cities in the nation are located in Collin County — Celina, Princeton, Melissa and Anna.
Over half of the population has at least a bachelor’s degree, and the median household income is $121,600 — second highest in the state.
Perhaps most importantly, Collin County has become one of the most diverse places in Texas — about 45% white, 23% Asian, 17% Hispanic and 12% Black. It is home to the state’s second largest Asian population, a group where Republicans have made significant gains in recent cycles. This year, however, anti-Indian rhetoric among GOP candidates has emerged as a flashpoint in the race, which could play a meaningful role as to whether the county swings blue.
“Collin County’s been moving towards a blue county for a while now, and that had a lot to do with our population growth,” said Jeremy Sutka, the Collin County Democratic Party chair. “There’s already a path that was heading there. What’s happening in 2026 is really a matter of whether or not we can accelerate that path.”
The politics of growth
Situated between downtown Dallas and the Red River, Collin County metamorphosed from a wheat and dairy farming community to a key part of the metro economy as the region boomed and suburbanized in the second half of the 20th century.
By 2000, the county had nearly 500,000 residents and, like suburbs across the state, was firmly Republican.
In the past quarter century alone, the county has continued to explode with growth. Through a combination of good schools, abundant housing and attracting the corporate headquarters of companies including FedEx, Frito Lay and Toyota North America, Collin County has transformed from a collection of commuter towns into an economic engine in its own right.
That growth has enabled Collin County’s shift from Republican stronghold to purple. For much of the 21st century, Collin County voted for the GOP at higher rates than the state as a whole did. But by the 2020 presidential campaign, Collin County crossed the rubicon, voting to the left of the state for the first time in decades, while still supporting Republican candidates. In 2018, when U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz won the state by less than 3 percentage points, he held Collin County by about 6 percentage points.
Six years later, Cruz won his Senate race by a much larger 8-percentage point margin. But he only won Collin County by 5 percentage points.
Ross Hunt, a GOP operative in Dallas, said Collin County’s purpling has come from its economic opportunity, driving people to move there for jobs over ideology.
“Collin is sort of a dark horse county for the Democrats,” Hunt said. “Collin County used to be so red, and they’ve taken advantage of the fact that many of the immigrants into DFW have been motivated by economic factors.”
Republicans cautioned against solely blaming transplants for Collin County’s shift.
Williams, the former Collin County GOP chair, pointed out that in 2018, exit polling showed that Democrat Beto O’Rourke won the native Texan vote, while Cruz won transplants en route to his narrow victory.
“Everybody blamed the people from California,” Williams said. “But if you looked at the data, it wasn’t the people from California. It was the natives that voted, for a variety of reasons. Some of the greatest patriots I’ve ever met are people who came from California, and they knew exactly why they left and where they were going.”
Even Paxton, whose father was in the Air Force, spent part of his childhood in California, before he would later move to Texas and eventually base his law practice in McKinney.
South Asian blowback
Democrats also believe the party is poised to make gains with the county’s significant Indian and Muslim American communities — though doing so could be an uphill battle.
Texas Republicans have traditionally overperformed with South Asians relative to the bloc’s voter trends in the rest of the country. The GOP over several years has in particular made significant strides with Indian American voters, the most frequently Democratic group nationally among Asian American voters. Trump narrowly won several Asian-heavy precincts in Frisco in 2024, according to VoteHub, after a campaign in which the Collin County GOP hung Trump-Vance signs in Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati and Tamil. And the Texas GOP chairman from 2024 through earlier this year was Abraham George, an Indian American and a former Collin County GOP chair himself.
Polling from Asian Texans for Justice, a nonpartisan statewide organization working to build Asian political power, found that there has been a significant shift toward the GOP in Texas since 2022. Forty percent of Asian Texans identify as Republicans, according to the organization’s 2026 polling, while only 31% consider themselves Democrats — close to the inverse of where Asian Texan partisanship stood in 2022.
But Collin County’s South Asian community has been at the center of a massive wave of hate from right-wing activists and influencers in places like Frisco, where city council meetings have become derailed by anti-Indian racism during public comment. Those sentiments have in many cases been echoed by GOP officials. Few, if any Texas Republicans, have explicitly condemned the recent wave of anti-Indian racism that has stemmed from policy concerns about H1-B visas.
Those tensions were inflamed in September, when, in the aftermath of an improbable University of Texas football win, Republican railroad commissioner nominee Bo French posted a photo of mostly South Asian students storming the field in Longhorn orange, writing “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The post fueled a political fire storm, causing multiple people from his own party to call for him to apologize — which he never did.
Already, Sutka said, early voting data shows increased turnout in neighborhoods with significant Indian populations.
Nabila Mansoor, the Asian Texans for Justice executive director, said she expected heightened political activity in Collin County given the wave of anti-Indian hate — a trend that could resonate beyond 2026 as the community, like the county itself, continues to grow.
“It’s been really heartening to see how activated the community has [be]come, and then how how quickly the South Asian community got together to really fight against some of these forces that were infiltrating those communities and trying to prevent some of this racist rhetoric that you’re seeing come out of these places out in North Texas,” Mansoor said. “
Split-ticket voting
On a September block walk in Frisco with Brittany Black, a Democratic candidate for a Collin County statehouse district Trump won by 16 percentage points, the evidence of recent transplants was everywhere; window and car decals for non-Texas sports teams covered the neighborhood.
Black said corruption rose to be the district’s number two issue over the summer — a trend that has inspired her to tie Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House over bribery allegations and ultimately acquitted by the Texas Senate, into her discussion of her race as much as possible. She thinks the top of the ticket frustration with Paxton in his home county can trickle down the ballot.
“I’ve heard a lot more people than ever saying that they’re just not going to vote,” Black said. “They’re just like, I can’t bring myself to vote for a Democrat, but I can’t vote for this guy either.”
That attitude could contribute to significant levels of split ticket voting — a phenomenon that could end up keeping downballot Republicans safe. Sutka said, for example, he drove by a house in downtown McKinney that had yard signs for both Talarico and Republican county clerk Stacey Kemp.
Anne Bramlett, a senior in Lavon, is one such longtime Collin County voter who has moved away from the GOP. Bramlett considers herself a lifelong Republican, but has not voted straight ticket in years over frustrations with the GOP’s stance on Medicaid funding, a critical lifeline for her adult son with autism who lives in a Medicaid waiver group home. She plans to vote for Talarico for Senate and Democratic governor nominee Gina Hinojosa, but also her local Republican state representative, Candy Noble. Further down the ballot, she was still deciding.
“Locally, I’ve always voted for the Republicans in the commissioners’ court and judge [races],” Bramlett said. “But I’m kind of straying away from that too. I’m just looking carefully at what they say and what they believe.”
Her husband, Bramlett said, is a Republican and Trump voter who is torn over the U.S. Senate race. He won’t vote for Talarico given the Democrat’s positions on social issues like abortion. But he is concerned about the allegations of corruption and infidelity surrounding Paxton, Bramlett said, and he might skip the race altogether.
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