The differences are more environmental than anything else. However, here are some factors:
* Remember, this has been the land of Tom DeLay, a homegrown poison who stopped at nothing get whack-a-loons into office, starting right here at home. Texas therefore was at the forefront of that special late-20th-century wingnuttery, and that's what has become the new normal. Many Texans don't remember what it was like to have sane, functioning politicians.
* Education, education, education. As in, TX is no place to brag about it. In many areas, critical thinking is a dirty word. Add to it that one of the favorite GOP places to poison the well has been school boards, and you've got a mess.
* TX is a culturally libertarian hotspot, though not right or left. However, Rethugs are great at playing to that demographic even though they are anything but libertarian.
* Culturally, Texans, even left Texans, are something of a different breed. We see a rural/city divide among Dems in other states too, but here it's far more a universal rural mindset - in part because so much is rural, and in part because a lot of Dems even living in or close to cities own guns, hunt, ranch or farm or are connected to those who do, etc. Property and water rights are also huge here, culturally, whether among the right set who want gub'mint out of their land and Medicare, or among the left folks who are trying to keep fracking out of their back yard, run off the land tax leeches (and they're BAD here - got a field so overgrown with cedar that you can't even afford to yank it out and burn it? They'll be happy to hit you with timber taxes for all that "valuable" wood, dontcha know!), etc.
* The massive oil, gas, and chemical industries here are politically as well as environmentally toxic. Mix that with a volatile job market in those industries and execs who love anti-regulation propaganda, and you have a lot of brainwashed workers.
* A population that's as widely/thinly spread as there is in TX, with little access to news (for example, even in my area only 45 minutes from a major city, there are a lot of places where you can't get phone or cel service, cable, or Internet) and having mostly poor quality news (my area has a 4-page paper covering local news and sports published once a week, and you have to PAY in many instances to insert any opinion or wider-ranging pieces), becomes an echo chamber of misinformation, rumor, exciting but false conspiracy theories, and tempting propaganda. But there's a lot of radio, and who has the most channels and strongest transmitters? Christian and right-wing talk. If people talk to the same 8 people every day for years at a time, and everyone has a 9th grade education, and nobody has a flipping clue about what's really going on, what do you think will happen?
* A very strong military presence means strong support for anything military-related.
Lots of other factors as well, but I have to stop somewhere. However, XT could turn blue. When you talk actual values with a lot of people here, they're libertarian left. But they're so conditioned to think of themselves as GOP or Conservative Lib, they are horrified at the thought at first.
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