Winds of political change in Williamson County?

In 2014, Jimmy Flannigan spent much of his first campaign for an Austin City Council seat block-walking in his neck of the capital city, a section tucked away in the southern bend of Williamson County.

"I would say who I was and what I was running for and people would say, 'Is it safe for you to knock on my door?'" Flannigan told the American-Statesman on Thursday. "And I would say, 'Don't you know this neighborhood went for Barack Obama (in 2012)?'"

Flannigan, a Democrat and a Williamson County resident, lost that 2014 election to a Republican. But two years later, he ran again for the council and won, even as Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump by 10 percentage points in Williamson County.

On Tuesday, Democratic Beto O'Rourke led Republican incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz by a narrow margin in the county. While Cruz won re-election in the statewide race, O'Rourke's success in Williamson County garnered attention. It marked the first time since Texas saw a mass exodus from the Democratic Party in the 1980s and 1990s that a federal candidate received the majority of the vote in a county that has for decades been the conservative bright red foil to the midnight blue liberalism in Austin.

Interactive map: See how precincts in Travis and Williamson counties voted on statewide and local races.

To some in Williamson County, O'Rourke's victory is nothing more than a flash in the pan, one fueled by popular sentiment for a charismatic candidate. But with Austin's economic boom pricing some residents out of the expensive urban center, sending them to cheaper housing pastures in the northern or southern suburbs, the 2018 general election could signal a change in the political course of the conservative stronghold.

To be sure, Williamson County voters elected a solid-red candidate in Bill Gravell to be their next county judge. There also were at least 11,000 more voters in the county who opted for a straight GOP ticket than backed a purely Democratic one. And most of the county's voters backed Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick while also favoring Republicans in 11 of 13 local partisan races.

Still, Democrats notched some notable outcomes.

Democrats James Talarico and John Bucy III won their Texas House races in District 52 and District 136, respectively. And, like O'Rourke, Democratic congressional candidate MJ Hegar led in Williamson County, but lost her race to a Republican incumbent, Round Rock's Rep. John Carter.

Locally, Democrat KT Musselman won the race for Precinct 1 justice of the peace, and Democrat Stacy Hackenberg edged Judy Hobbs, the longtime justice of the peace in Precinct 4, by 57 votes in eastern Williamson County.

"When we saw those numbers come in, don't get me wrong, we were leaping for joy, but it wasn't entirely out of surprise; it was a culmination of years of work to get to where we were," said Manny Garcia, the Texas Democratic Party's deputy executive director.

This election cycle, the Williamson County Democratic Party made a concerted effort to reach out to the southern hump of the county, where many precincts went for Clinton in the 2016 election.

"We targeted the areas where we had big wins," said Sharon Covey, coordinating campaign manager for the county's Democratic Party. "That is in the southern part of the county. We did the usual thing — texting, wrote them postcards. We stayed with that group and went back to them” throughout the campaign.

Kim Gilby, Williamson County Democratic Party chair, said its momentum started to build the month after Trump's election. Party meetings had rarely drawn more than a couple of dozen attendees until December 2016, when about 200 people showed up, she said.

While the trickle-down effect of a highly appealing candidate such as O'Rourke might have played a role in helping Democrats win in Williamson County, Gilby said she thinks the party's success derived from a combination of factors.

"When you take everything — the grassroots organizing, the amazing slate of candidates that we had and all these people that feel like they need to speak up, they need to vote and we need to make a change — that's why we're looking at blue Williamson County right now," Gilby said. "It's like putting together a puzzle and getting that last piece in there, and we're just getting started."

Even with a targeted approach, Democrats made gains across most of Williamson County. An analysis of voter data showed that in all but four of the county's 89 precincts, the Democrat at the top of the ballot, O'Rourke, posted better results than Clinton did in 2016.

Winds of political change

While on-point campaigns and compelling candidates played a part in the Democrats' resurgence in Williamson County, outside observers said broad changes to the area's makeup are generating an increasing wind at the Democrats’ backs.

Since 2010, Williamson County has seen its population grow by about 125,000 people, according to 2017 estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau. In that time, Leander’s population nearly doubled to 49,234, Cedar Park saw its population grow by 55 percent, and about 24,000 new residents came to call Round Rock their home — a 24 percent increase.

"All of southern Williamson and parts of Round Rock are changing rapidly," said city of Austin Demographer Ryan Robinson. "They are no longer suburbs. They are urbanizing."

Suburbs across the nation are seeing rapid growth, and generally minority groups are at the forefront of that population growth, said Steve Murdock, director of Rice University's Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. Birth rates for Hispanics in the U.S., Murdock said, have outpaced the birth rates for non-Hispanic whites. But in Williamson County, the growth in minority populations is not as apparent.

U.S. Census Bureau figures show that Williamson County’s population explosion is fueled by domestic migration, with 87,065 new residents moving there from elsewhere in the U.S. The bureau has yet to analyze exactly where those new residents come from, but Lloyd Potter, director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Development at the University of Texas-San Antonio, predicted that most arrive from California, New York, Illinois or Florida, all states that historically lean further to the left than Texas.

And proximity to liberal Austin might be an attraction for some arrivals.

“For somebody thinking about moving to Texas that has a more progressive orientation, they would probably think Austin is not so bad,” he said.

To Potter, that means a change in the traditional political philosophies of many voters. Those born and raised in an area tend to inherit the political leanings and voting habits of their parents, he said, but an influx of new residents means an influx of political ideas.

"If you have a population largely growing from people moving there, that growth potentially is going to change how the area votes," Potter said.

While much of Williamson County's growth results from people coming from out of state in search of employment opportunities, there also are those leaving Austin behind.

Michael Li, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the two state House districts that flipped to Democrats on Tuesday with Bucy's and Talarico's victories were in districts drawn to be advantageous to Republicans.

But those district boundaries have become less friendly to Republicans because of explosive growth and the addition of tens of thousands to Williamson County’s voting rolls.

“It is a harbinger of Central Texas becoming more like Austin,” Li said. “Travis County was like a bubble, and now the bubble is expanding outwards.”

The gains by Democrats this year in Williamson County don't faze Gravell too much. Gravell, the Republican elected to run the county's Commissioners Court starting in 2019, said more than a blue wave, what he saw was a "green wave of money," referring to the large sums raised by O'Rourke's and Hegar's campaigns.

"What I see that happened is that tons of money from outside of Texas decided to come into Texas and buy an election," Gravell said. "And they were successful in some spots, and they failed miserably in others. ... There are some parts where we lost, but in Williamson County, we still won 76 percent of the races we were in. Those are good numbers."

Beyond O'Rourke's fundraising prowess, Gravell said, his ability to galvanize voters helped the Democratic Party win in Williamson, including in some down-ballot races, but he predicts it will be a one-off situation unless Democrats can continue to find charismatic candidates.

Gravell said he also thinks voters aren't necessarily as concerned with political parties so much as candidates, noting that about 65,000 people cast a straight-party Republican ballot in Williamson County, but his total vote count added up to more than 103,000.

Still, Gravell said he thinks the GOP will need to evaluate what it did and didn't do well this election cycle and figure out how that might shape future campaigns. The party could even learn a thing or two from some of the innovations used by O'Rourke's campaign, such as text messaging and direct digital marketing. And perhaps, he added, it could reflect on its attitude.

"I do believe that Republicans in part became complacent and perhaps arrogant, and I think they've been put in their place," Gravell said. "We all have."

American-Statesman data reporter Dan Keemahill contributed to this report.