Texas, huh? Except few live in the country - not enough to decide an election.

Ex-burbs, sure. Smaller townish places in flyover country, okeydoke. The 60 counties they mention here would've been about 720,000 votes total (assume that was his total take, not margin over Hillary - quick skim would give her about 20% avg in these counties). Texas has 28 million people - 9 million voted in 2016. So Trump got 8% from these barren nonwhite counties.
But also, for "conventional wisdom" what effect does 5 terms of Republican Bushes in the White House from 1981-2009 have on party affiliation from an already conservative state?

And then how to square sincere "country mice" intent with laws predicted (intended?) to keep up to 600,000 minorities from voting? Note item #1 from this ProPublica piece:

1. Lawmakers drew some districts that looked like Latino majority districts on paper — but removed Latinos who voted regularly and replaced them with Latinos who were unlikely to vote.

along with $22 needed for a birth certificate required to vote - more problematic in a poor rural county:

5. Texas passed a voter-ID law with requirements that would make it disproportionately difficult for African Americans and Latinos to vote.

(I expect with ICE raids & threats of raids, plus stories of citizens held several weeks anyway, plus a harsh sentence for an ex-con who mistakenly thought she could vote won't exactly encourage various groups to take a chance on voting:

Texas Woman Sentenced To 5 Years For Illegal Voting : The Two-Way ...

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/.../texas-woman-sentenced-to-5-years-for-illegal-voting

Mar 31, 2018 - Crystal Mason is a convicted felon. "She didn't understand! She was never told she couldn't vote," her lawyer said.

Here are 6 diverse examples of voters turned away for insufficient ID under the new 2016 laws.

And then there's the issue of registration & finding/training registrars - probably tougher for sparsely populated counties:

In Texas you can check online to see if you’re registered, but you can’t actually register online and some 3 million Texans are eligible to vote but not registered. Complicating matters, according to a new piece in the magazine “The Nation,” is a labyrinth of laws putting up barriers so difficult to surmount that nobody wants to invest in helping more voters register.

Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for the Nation and author of “Give Us The Ballot,” says one voter registration worker told him that registrars need a Ph.D in “voter obstacle-ology” to register voters in Texas.

“It really is the most difficult state in the country to register voters,” he says.

Texas is the only state that requires registrars to be deputized by the county they live in, but it only holds trainings once a month. For example, a registrar in Bexar County standing outside the AT&T Stadium after a Spurs game would only be able to register San Antonians and other Bexar County residents – and not anyone from nearby Austin, New Braunfels or San Marcos.

What effect does packing the Supreme Court have? well, the law was decided as unreasonable, but...

Earlier this month a federal district judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, struck down the law, slamming it as a cynical ploy on the part of Republicans to fend off the growing strength of the minority electorate in Texas by “suppressing the overwhelmingly Democratic votes of African Americans and Latinos”. She linked SB14 to a long history of racial discrimination in state elections spanning back generations, and declared the new law to be an unconstitutional poll tax.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, who signed the ID bill into law, at a fellow Republican’s campaign event. Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP

But last week, in the early hours of 18 October, when most Texans were sleeping, the US supreme court snuck out a one-line judgment that allowed the voter ID restrictions to be applied this election cycle. Without any explanation, a majority of the justices effectively threw Eric Kennie and many thousands of others like him – particularly black, Hispanic and low-income Texans – into a state of democratic limbo.

Republicans would love us to accept that these results are just the will of those fine upstanding (True American!!!) rural mice, but the amount of time they spend queering the scales indicates it's not quite a free expression of will.