BURKE — The results of election night hadn’t really sunk in for Bobby Dean, a lifelong East Texan, as he sat for lunch with a friend at a local cafe in the tiny town of Burke.

Burke is a community located in East Texas, a massive region home to nearly 800,000 people. East Texas stretches from Texarkana, which straddles the Texas-Arkansas border, through Miranda Lambert’s hometown of Lindale, to the boggy pinewood forests where Texi-Cajun cuisine was born.

More than a dozen lawmakers, from the state House to the U.S. Congress, represent a wide range of policy positions for this area, and most are Republican.

Republicans typically have no problem winning the public’s votes from outer regions like East Texas. This year, however, many in statewide races lost the midterms because of their messaging, which focused too much on culture-war social issues, according to rural voters interviewed by the Texas Tribune.

But not in East Texas. Diverging from most in their party, East Texas politicians held on to their positions by focusing their campaigns on policy and trust.

Republican candidates who won their U.S. House seats in the region typically saw a little more than 50% of the vote, with a few outliers like Congressman Tom Sell in Lubbock. But state House seats representing East Texas communities were won with between 65% and 80%.

Incoming freshman state representatives Rocky Thigpen, R-Lufkin, and Ray Callas, R-Beaumont, for example, each received close to 75% of the votes. Rep. Cole Hefner, R-Mt. Pleasant, a returning lawmaker, saw nearly 80% of the ballots cast for him. Even in Nacogdoches, where Talarico took 42% of the votes, state Rep. Joanne Shofner received 71%.