Not disagreeing but FWIW Texas has been turning purple [1] for some time now. I suspect 2021 numbers will make it even more purple as COVID drove a lot of people to Austin. I have to wonder if another factor is that Texas has it's own independent power grid and they for the most part do not tie into the rest of the US grids to let other states absorb some of their pain. [2]
No, Austin built a tech industry and couldn’t fill all those jobs with conservative Texans, so they had to use money to attract liberal techies from other states.
Not that Austin was very conservative before COVID, well, you probably knew that.
imo it was housing prices that drove people to places like Texas where a large house is much more affordable. COVID just made that move much easier to do with remote working
[1] - https://purplestatesofamerica.org/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection