In 2008, Barack Obama lost the state of Texas in his first presidential bid by 946,584 votes, carrying 43.8% of the vote.

On Tuesday, Democrat Beto ORourke lost his long-shot bid for Texas governor by nearly 900,000 votes. With nearly all the ballots counted, he carried the exact same share of the vote as Obama did 14 years ago.

Election night offered some scattered good news for Texas Democrats. They staved off Republican threats in two South Texas congressional districts. ORourke, on paper, continued a trend of narrowing Republican Gov. Greg Abbotts margin of victory in gubernatorial races from the 20-percentage-point pummeling Wendy Davis suffered in 2014 to about 11 percentage points.

But the election also made a more painful reality obvious for Democrats: They still havent managed to turn the state purple.

Weve made almost no progress, said veteran Democratic strategist Colin Strother. In 126 years, at this pace, well be at parity. The math just doesnt work.

Democrats running statewide slipped in key areas where they needed to make gains. Youth turnout lagged. Margins in key urban areas, including Dallas and Harris County, where Houston is located, appeared to shrink compared with ORourkes margin against Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. The rural voters ORourke worked so hard to win over continued to reject him .

Perhaps most painfully for Democrats, outgoing President Donald Trumps unexpected Republican in-roads in 2020 in heavily Hispanic and historically Democratic South Texas appeared to hold steady.

For more than a decade, Democrats have contended that the conservative establishment is out of sync with majority-minority-population Texas. As the states browner, blacker and more progressive working-class youth reach adulthood, the argument goes, theyll gradually replace the older, whiter conservatives, shifting the electorate leftward.

ORourkes near-miss race against Cruz four years ago prioritized get-out-the-vote efforts and drove record turnout. Though ORourke lost, his 2.6-percentage-point margin of defeat was so close that it felt like victory for a party used to losing by landslides in the state. His unexpected popularity also helped flip two U.S. House seats and 13 more in the Texas Legislature, cowing Republicans into an unusually tame legislative session.