{"id":13092,"date":"2023-08-05T16:11:35","date_gmt":"2023-08-05T16:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13092"},"modified":"2023-08-05T16:11:35","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T16:11:35","slug":"blue-texas-is-a-democratic-dream-shifting-left-is-a-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13092","title":{"rendered":"Blue Texas is a Democratic dream. Shifting left is a reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by David Byler <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

For\nthree years now, Texas Republicans have been taking on water. In 2016, Donald\nTrump won the state by nine points<\/a> \u2014 a seven-point decline from Mitt\nRomney\u2019s 16-point margin four years earlier. In 2018, Beto O\u2019Rourke came within three points<\/a> of winning a Senate seat,\nand other down-ballot Democrats got unusually close<\/a> to winning statewide offices.\nAnd over the past couple of weeks, Texas Republicans have lost some of their\nmost valuable politicians. Reps. Will Hurd, Kenny Marchant, K. Michael Conaway\nand Pete Olson all announced their retirement from the House. Hurd is the GOP\u2019s\nonly African American House member, and three of those four congressmen (Hurd,\nMarchant, Olson) leave flippable suburban seats open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now\nDemocrats are crossing their fingers about finally turning Texas blue, or at\nleast purple, in 2020. Turning Texas blue in the medium-term isn\u2019t a pipe dream\n\u2014 the Trump-era GOP doesn\u2019t play as well as the George W. Bush-era one did in\nan urbanized, diverse state such as Texas. But turning Texas truly purple by\n2020 is still a big lift. Democrats should probably think of it more as\npossible icing on the cake rather than a core part of their strategy in the\nnext election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When\nRepublicans nominated Trump in 2016, they assented to an electoral trade-off\nthat benefited Texas Democrats. Trump earned the votes of blue-collar whites by\ntemporarily chucking GOP orthodoxy on economic issues and moving hard to the\nright on racial and cultural issues. But by doing so, he alienated many of the\nwhite-collar suburbanites who once formed the backbone of the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And\nmany of those college-educated suburbanites are Texans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This\nmap, based on an updated version of these calculations<\/a>,\nshows the percentage of major-party voters who live in large cities in each\nstate. In Texas, about two-thirds of votes were cast in the Dallas, Houston,\nSan Antonio and Austin metropolitan areas. These urban areas (plus El Paso)\ndominate the state\u2019s politics. So while Texas is a Southern state, it\u2019s just\nnot as rural as Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and other\nstates where Republicans haven\u2019t suffered nearly as much damage in the Trump\nyears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Texas\nalso has a growing Hispanic population, which creates additional problems for\nthe GOP. Trump\u2019s candidacy didn\u2019t cause a surge in Hispanic turnout or a significant\nincrease in Latino support for Democrats<\/a>. O\u2019Rourke also did not\ngenerate a dramatic surge in Hispanic turnout<\/a> in 2018<\/a>. But Trump\u2019s election seems to have\nended \u2014 or at least put on hold \u2014 GOP attempts to expand beyond the roughly 25 percent to 35 percent<\/a> of the Latino vote that\nit seems to have locked down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put\nsimply, Trump gave Texas Democrats a way to grow their support \u2014 by gaining\nRomney-and-Bush-loving suburbanites \u2014 without giving Texas Republicans a\ncorresponding way to make up for those. The Bush-era Republican Party was\nbetter at winning Southern suburbs and at least seemed to want to reach out to\nLatinos. The Trump-era version can\u2019t or won\u2019t do the same, and that\u2019s turned\nTexas from an untouchably red state to the sort of light-red worry that\nprobably gnaws at Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But\nturning Texas purple by 2020 would be difficult. Texas\u2019s baseline partisanship\nis 11 percentage points more Republican than the nation \u2014 Trump won it by nine\npoints while he lost the popular vote by two. So it would take an 11-point jump\nto make it a truly purple state that perfectly reflected the nation\u2019s partisan\ndivide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\nsort of a jump isn\u2019t unprecedented: In 1988, New Hampshire<\/a> voted for George H.W. Bush by 26\npoints in 1988, only to give Bill Clinton a one-point victory margin in 1992\nand a 10-point margin in 1996. Iowa<\/a> went from favoring Barack Obama by six\npoints to favoring Trump by nine between 2012 and 2016. But most states don\u2019t\nmove that far in one cycle. Between 2000 and 2004, only two states \u2014 Alaska and\nVermont \u2014 moved left as much as Texas would have to in order to become a truly\npurple state. Between 2004 and 2008, the baseline partisanship of Arkansas and\nLouisiana shifted wildly right and Indiana, while Hawaii (Barack Obama\u2019s home\nstate) shifted hugely leftward. But none of the other 46 states covered the\ndistance facing Texas Democrats. In 2012, only one state shifted that far, and\nonly five did in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nexact counts here will vary depending on methodology (feel free to email me\nwith questions about my calculations), and reasonable people can set up\ndifferent criteria for when a state is and isn\u2019t purple. But the main point\nstands: An 11-point shift isn\u2019t impossible, but it wouldn\u2019t be normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This adds up to an unsatisfying conclusion for Democrats: Texas is worth investing in, but it probably won\u2019t be purple by fall of next year. If Democrats win the national popular vote by a solid margin, they could put Texas in play, just as Obama put red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina in play while winning the popular vote by seven points in 2008. But in 2020, a genuinely blue Texas \u2014 one where Democrats have an advantage and win more often than they lose \u2014 will remain a Democratic dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Byler is a data analyst and political columnist focusing on elections, polling, demographics and statistics. He joined The Washington Post in 2019. <\/em>Follow David <\/em><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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by David Byler For three years now, Texas Republicans have been taking on water. In 2016, Donald Trump won the state by nine points — a seven-point decline from Mitt Romney’s 16-point margin four years […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[85,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-13092","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\/13092","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=13092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13094,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13092\/revisions\/13094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}