This past Labor Day weekend, I ventured to central Texas to learn if Texas, the red foil to blue California, could be turned Democratic by Silicon Valley technologists taking a newfound interest in US elections.

The US Senate contest between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke drew the bulk of the headlines, but the action was further down the ballot, and offered intriguing hints of a stalwart red state inching into battleground territory.

First, let’s catch up with some of the characters from our earlier story. Tech for Campaigns, a San Francisco nonprofit that focuses on state legislative elections, deployed several thousand Silicon Valley volunteers across America. They won all the Texas legislative races they targeted (eight flipped, and one defended), a big validation of their tech meets down-ballot candidate strategy. The MapTheVote app developed in conjunction with Texas Democrats to register voters will be deployed elsewhere in the country in future elections. The group now counts nearly 10,000 volunteers, up from 4,500 in July.

Vote.org, which had been focusing on registering Texans before the midterms, deployed an innovative and controversial online registration strategy, allowing Texans to fax in voter registration forms via Vote.org’s website. In my previous piece, I’d reported about the various mailing and envelope-stuffing hacks that Register2Vote, another voter registration organization, had used to streamline a very clunky and analog registration process. The two organizations teamed up, and together faxed in more than 2,000 completely electronic applications to various Texas counties before the Texas secretary of state halted the effort. The challenge came down to one word in the Texas Election Code: “copy.” The code requires any faxed form to have an accompanying “copy” mailed in within four days. Vote.org took that to mean a printed version of its online form; the secretary of state says it means an ink-on-paper original (a rather novel interpretation of “copy”). An effort to give Texans fully online voter registration is stalled. “I think we all want the same thing, which is online voter registration. Hatred of paperwork is bipartisan,” said Vote.org’s founder, Debra Weaver.

Buoyed by such efforts, turnout for the midterms in Texas was historic—8.3 million voters out of 15.8 million registered showed up, a turnout rate of 52 percent. That almost equaled the 9 million Texans who voted in the 2016 presidential election, and nearly doubled the 4.7 million voters who showed up in the last midterm. Texans, by and large, came out.

Voters showed up, but then hit the gerrymandered wall, particularly in races for the US House of Representatives. The results from the central Texas districts around Austin are a case study. In the 21st district, where I rode shotgun with Democrat Joseph Kopser’s campaign, the huge swath of Hill Country went reliably red, diluting the urban blue of parts of Austin and San Antonio. In a district that Trump won by 10 percentage points in 2016, Kopser lost to Republican Chip Roy by a much narrower margin—less than 3 percentage points. Next door, in the 35th district, which was designed as a concession to the Democrats, Lloyd Doggett won by a massive 45 percentage points (as he’s won since 2012 when the district was created).