{"id":13090,"date":"2023-08-05T16:10:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-05T16:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13090"},"modified":"2023-08-05T16:10:04","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T16:10:04","slug":"is-demography-destiny-in-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13090","title":{"rendered":"Is demography destiny in Texas?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Elaine C. Kamarck<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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President Trump\u2019s less than enthusiastic reception in El Paso, Texas,\n along with the announcements by four Texas Republican congressmen that \nthey will not be running for re-election, has drawn attention to the changing demography of that state<\/a>. Back in the 19th<\/sup>\n century a French sociologist first said \u201cDemography is destiny.\u201d And so\n it is, albeit over the long run. Demographic change is slow, even \nglacial. But at some point demography becomes<\/em> destiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could we be on the verge in Texas?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some time now, Texas has been a proud Republican stronghold, \namongst the reddest of the red states. It hasn\u2019t voted for a Democrat \nfor president since it went for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Even the presence \nof a popular four-term senator from Texas (Lloyd Bentsen) on the \nDemocratic ticket in 1988 did not help. The Democratic candidate for \npresident, Michael Dukakis, lost by nearly eight points and won only 111\n electoral college votes. Since then Democrats have pretty much written \nTexas off. No Democrat has won a statewide office there since 1994. \nSince 2002, Republicans have controlled the governorship and both houses\n in the state legislature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a funny thing happened in 2018. A young congressman named Beto \nO\u2019Rourke challenged incumbent Senator Ted Cruz and came within striking \ndistance of winning. He instantly became a national figure (and \ninstantly decided he should be president.) But perhaps we should come \nback to demography. O\u2019Rourke\u2019s success probably had as much to do with \ndemography as with with his own talents. While O\u2019Rourke was running a \nclose but losing race against Cruz, Democrats were picking up \ncongressional seats in the Dallas suburbs (where Pete Sessions lost his \nseat) and in the Houston suburbs (where John Culberson lost his seat.) \nAnd they were picking up state legislative seats and closing the margins\n between themselves and the Republican winners statewide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No wonder four House Republican incumbents from Texas have already announced they won\u2019t run in 2020<\/a>. Will Hurd (23rd<\/sup>\n district), the only black Republican in the House, announced he won\u2019t \nrun again after squeaking back into office in 2018 with a 0.5 percent \nmargin. Kenny Marchant (24th<\/sup> district), won with only 3 percent of the vote in 2018 compared to his 17 percent margin in 2016, and Pete Olson (22nd<\/sup> district) won with only 5 percent of the vote in 2018 compared to 19 percent in 2016. The fourth retirement, Mike Conaway (11th<\/sup>\n district), is the only one retiring whose district doesn\u2019t show signs \nof a Democratic resurgence (he won by a huge margin); but Conaway, a \nfixture in the House, has decided that life in the minority is not much \nfun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what\u2019s happening in Texas? Are we finally seeing the maturation of\n the nation\u2019s largest minority group? The 2018 Texas electorate \ncontained more Latino voters than ever before. And as I have noted \npreviously in Democracy Journal<\/a>,\n \u201cAccording to CNN exit polls, Latinos were 17 percent of the Texas vote\n in 2014, 24 percent of the state\u2019s vote in 2016, and 26 percent in \n2016. In addition, in Texas, as elsewhere in the nation, younger voters \nwere heavily Democratic. Fully 39 percent of the voters in the Texas \nexit poll were under the age of 44, and 61 percent of Texas voters 45 \nand older. O\u2019Rourke won the younger voters, and Cruz won the older \nvoters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These trends are likely to continue. It\u2019s probably safe to say that nothing President Trump has done as president has increased<\/em> his popularity among Latino voters. In fact, it is most likely the opposite, as his chilly reception in El Paso<\/a> illustrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the Latino population in Texas has grown from 25.5 percent in 1990 to 39.6 percent in 2018.[I] Many of these people are citizens and voters. The Census estimated that the median age<\/a> of Latinos.[I] in Texas in 2018 was 28.9 years old and the median age of the non-Latino population was 38.9 years old. The one thing we know about voting behavior is that people do tend to vote more as they age. So, the large number of young Latinos means that their turnout will, almost surely, increase as they get older.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If, in the next decade, Texas tips from red to purple to blue, Donald\n Trump will become known as the Pete Wilson of Texas. Wilson was a \ntwo-term governor of California who supported a 1994 ballot proposition,\n Prop 187, that would prohibit illegal immigrants from receiving any \nsocial services. The initiative passed but was ruled unconstitutional \nand never went into effect. And as my colleague Vanessa Williamson has noted<\/a>,\n the lasting legacy of Pete Wilson\u2019s Prop 187 was to mobilize Latino \nvoters and push them into the arms of the Democrats. With one exception,\n California hasn\u2019t had a Republican governor since and the state is \nsolidly blue. Hard to imagine today but California used to be a \nRepublican stronghold in presidential elections. The last Republican to \ncarry the state was George HW Bush in 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2020, Republican Senator John Cornyn (Texas) is up for \nre-election. Two strong potential candidates, Beto O\u2019Rourke and Julian \nCastro, have (thus far) decided to pass up the race in favor of quixotic\n races for the presidency. That\u2019s too bad for the Democrats, as 2020 \ncould be the year when demography becomes destiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[i]<\/a> Source: U.S. Census.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ii]<\/a> Counting the total Hispanic and non-Hispanic populations irrespective of race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elaine C. Kamarck<\/a> is a Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies program as well as the Director of the Center for Effective Public Management<\/a> at the Brookings Institution.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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by Elaine C. Kamarck President Trump’s less than enthusiastic reception in El Paso, Texas, along with the announcements by four Texas Republican congressmen that they will not be running for re-election, has drawn attention to […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[85,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-13090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-politics","9":"tag-texas"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13091,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13090\/revisions\/13091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}