The book was well received and led to several writing assignments in Public Opinion Quarterly and The New Republic on the role of voter turnout in the 1988 election.

Teixeira left consulting after several years and took a government job at the Economic Research Service, where he studied labor market issues, chiefly the so-called skills mismatch between low-skilled and high-skilled workers.

Afterwards, he moved to the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council, to start a political studies program.

In 1994, Teixeira went to work at another think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, to direct their politics and public opinion program, and he stayed there until 1999.

Teixeira has also been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, where he co-directed a joint Brookings-American Enterprise Institute project on political demography and geography, "the Future of Red, Blue and, Purple America", and wrote a series of reports with William Frey on the political geography of battleground states in the 2008 election.