The Most Conservative Cities in Texas (2026 Rankings)

This ranking uses one number and nothing else: the share of the total 2024 presidential vote that Donald Trump received in the county each city sits in. There is no index, no weighted formula, and no survey behind it. Texas does not publish presidential results by city limit in any statewide dataset, so the county is standing in for the city, and in some places it stands in badly. We took every Texas city of 50,000 or more residents, kept only the cities that sit entirely inside a single county, and sorted what was left by the county’s 2024 Republican vote share.

Stated precisely, the headline claim is this: these are the Texas cities of 50,000 or more, wholly contained in one county, whose counties gave Trump the largest share of the presidential vote in 2024. That is a narrow claim, and it is a checkable one.

The top 10

Four things about that table before anyone quotes it.

• Waxahachie and Waco should be read as tied. They are 0.23 points apart here. Ellis County’s own canvass includes an uncertified write-in line that Wikipedia and the academic datasets exclude from the denominator; count it and Ellis lands at 64.88%, six hundredths of a point from McLennan. Whether McLennan has an equivalent line is unverified; the county does not post its November 2024 canvass in a form we could retrieve.
• The percentages are share of all votes cast in the presidential race, write-ins included. Third-party and write-in ballots run from 0.85% of the vote in Grayson County to 1.24% in Galveston County, so Republican and Democratic shares do not sum to 100. Outlets using the Associated Press four-candidate denominator show figures a few hundredths of a point different; neither is wrong, they are different denominators.
• Watch the county names. The city of Sherman is in Grayson County. Sherman County is a separate county in the Panhandle that voted 93.59% Republican. The city of Tyler is in Smith County; Tyler County is a separate East Texas county at 86.51%. There are also a Houston County and an Austin County unrelated to the cities of those names.
• We stopped at 10 on purpose. Ranks 1 through 7 all clear 69%, and then there is a 4.2 point drop to Waxahachie. Keep going down the full list and you eventually reach counties Kamala Harris carried, including Dallas at 37.96% Republican and El Paso at 41.79%. Publishing those under a headline about conservative cities would be indefensible, so we did not.

How we ranked this

County results. MIT Election Data and Science Lab, County Presidential Election Returns 2000 to 2024: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ. Every figure was cross-checked line by line against the county table at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas, and they match vote for vote. The source of record behind both is the Texas Secretary of State’s canvass at results.texas-election.com. We spot-checked one county against its own official canvass report: Montgomery County reports Trump 221,964, Harris 82,277, 307,258 ballots cast, an exact match (elections.mctx.org). We did not open all 254 county canvasses, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Population. U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates for incorporated places, July 1, 2025: census.gov subcounty file for Texas. Exactly 76 Texas cities hit 50,000 on that file.

City to county matching. The Census Bureau’s 2020 place-by-county reference file (st48_tx_place_by_county2020.txt) plus the county-part breakdown inside the population estimates file, which reports each city’s population split by county.

Two limitations you should weigh before treating any of this as a city measurement. First, the vote is from November 2024 and the population figures are from July 2025. Sherman, Rockwall and Waxahachie were all under 50,000 at the 2020 census and qualify here only on the newer estimate, which means the number one entry on this list is a function of which population vintage you use. Second, and more important, this measures counties, not cities. A city can vote very differently from the countryside around it, and there is no public statewide dataset of Texas presidential results drawn to municipal boundaries that would let us check.

Where the county proxy breaks down

The clearest example sits below the cut. Cameron, Hidalgo and Webb counties in South Texas flipped narrowly Republican in 2024, at 52.51%, 50.98% and 50.69%. On a pure county sort, Brownsville, McAllen, Edinburg, Mission, Pharr and Laredo all land in the middle of the full list. We cannot validate that. Cameron and Hidalgo counties include a great deal of territory outside those city limits, and the cities may have voted differently from their counties in either direction. Webb County is the opposite situation: Laredo holds the large majority of the county’s residents, so there the county figure is close to a city figure by default.

It runs the other way too. Pasadena appears far down the full list at 46.40% for one reason only, which is that Harris County as a whole went Democratic. That number describes Harris County. It does not describe Pasadena. This is why the county caveat is not boilerplate at the bottom of the page.

The cities that had to come out

Of the 76 cities at the threshold, 39 were removed because their city limits cross a county line, leaving 37 in the dataset. A single county’s vote share cannot honestly be pinned to a city that sits in two or three counties, so those cities were dropped regardless of size. That removed all five of the largest cities in Texas.

Excluded, largest first: Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Corpus Christi, Plano, Garland, Frisco, Grand Prairie, Amarillo, Mesquite, Midland, Round Rock, Lewisville, Carrollton, Abilene, Pearland, Odessa, New Braunfels, League City, Richardson, Leander, Baytown, Mansfield, Longview, Flower Mound, Cedar Park, San Marcos, Missouri City, Pflugerville, Rowlett, Celina, Wylie, Texas City, Burleson, Port Arthur, Grapevine, and Wichita Falls.

Some of those absences are conspicuous. Amarillo is split between Potter County, which voted 71.63% Republican, and Randall County, which voted 79.69%. Midland is split between Midland County at 79.83% and Martin County at 87.61%. Those are among the strongest Republican county numbers anywhere near this dataset, and both cities are missing purely because of where a county line falls. Their absence is not a statement about the cities. It is a statement about what the available data can and cannot support.

Wichita Falls, and why we pulled it

Wichita Falls was in an earlier draft of this list at 71.45%, which would have placed it fifth. Wikipedia’s municipalities list and the Census Bureau’s 2020 place-by-county file both show it in Wichita County alone. The Census Bureau’s population estimates file does not: it splits the city into a Wichita County part of 101,949 and a Clay County part of 2. A polygon check against current Census boundaries agrees, showing roughly 54 acres of the city inside Clay County. Two residents out of 101,951 is not a meaningful distortion, and Clay County voted 89.51% Republican, which would push the number up rather than down. But our stated rule is that multi-county cities come out, and a rule the page does not follow is exactly the problem we are trying to avoid. So it came out.

What this list is not

It is one measurement of one election in one year. It is not an index of religiosity, gun ownership, tax policy, local ordinances, or culture, and no such factors were collected, estimated, or weighted, because we have no defensible dataset for any of them at the city level. Nothing here explains why any county voted the way it did.

What we can say is what the voting data shows. None of the counties above 69% in this dataset contains one of the five largest cities in Texas, and the qualifying cities attached to them range from 52,417 people in Sherman to 273,071 in Lubbock. Further down, 21 of the 37 cities in the dataset share a county with at least one other city on the list, which is why 37 cities produce only 25 distinct scores. That is a pattern in county returns, and it is worth noting as one.

If you live in one of these cities and want to do something about the next set of numbers rather than read about the last set, Young Republicans of Texas has 22 chapters around the state, several of them in the cities above. Our chapters page will tell you which one is closest.