“overrepresented”? Back in 1990, Democrat Ann Richards was trailing in the Governor’s race. Then her opponent made a rape joke–not recorded but reported. He lost. Ann said that he reminded many Texas women of their first husbands.
Sounds overstated. 538 currently shows about a 15% chance of Hillary taking Texas in their polls-only prediction, so, still some ways to go.
Still, a couple of weeks ago, the same source was giving her around a 5% chance. Personally, I’ll consider it a rather earth-shaking result if she reaches 30% before the election.
Somebody commented on the hidden danger of gerrymandering; it leaves you vulnerable to small shifts in voting patterns.
In an ideal gerrymandering program, you want to create an artificial majority for your party by creating as many districts as possible where you hold the minimum majority. Then you take whatever voters the opposing party has left and pack them into single-party districts. You want to end up with a map where you have a majority of districts where your party has a 51% majority (to the opposing party’s 49%) and a handful of districts where the opposing party has a 100% majority.
But your control is based on being able to hold on to your slim majority of 51% in your districts. A small voter shift of just two percent can destroy you.
Given these figures, it’s surprising that Texas is as red as it is. If these demographic trends continue Texas is likely to flip to blue within the next decade or so, which means the Republicans will never win another presidential election unless they manage to extend their present base.
I think there’s a misconception in the thinking that all Hispanics are staunch, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. As a group, they’re pretty traditional and conservative (in a broad sense, not a political sense), and the Republicans would find fertile ground there, if they could stop discriminating against them so much.
I caught that as well. If I had to guess I would imagine that the new registrations are probably a little of everyone but my gut tells me it’s enraged Latinos who have awakened and realize that they have a LOT of power in that state.
Here’s the thing: Texas has for a long time had a pretty strong Hispanic electorate, but this voting bloc and the GOP once had a pretty solid relationship. George W Bush won Texas with the help of Latino votes.
What’s changed is the radioactive candidate who’s at the top of the party now.
If there are states where stunning upsets could occur, Texas would be one of them. Arizona would be another. Even if they don’t change this year, I think this is an ominous sign for the republican party going forward. Texas and Arizona could become blue states within the next election cycle, and strongly so.
Texas resident and political junkie here. One thing about the Hispanic vote in Texas is that it’s much, much lower than white turnout. There are a lot of potential explanations for this, but it’s just been a fact of political life for some time that Hispanics don’t vote anywhere near their full potential in the state.
Another thing about the Texas GOP is that it has been traditionally much less antagonistic towards Hispanics than you might expect from such a conservative state. Texas and Mexico have a long history and the border has not been as sharply defined as you might expect. Witness, for instance, Rick Perry in 2012 defending in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants in the GOP primary. There are even a decent number of GOP officeholders of Hispanic descent.
Now that all said, there are a new generation of very conservative officeholders who are changing the traditional line (it’s never been exactly inclusive, but never actively hostile, at least not like this), and bunch of new Hispanic young people who are potentially more politically active than the older ones traditionally have been. There’s a potential for some change here.
Now all that said, the last time that a Democrat won a statewide office of any kind in Texas was in 1994, and it’s sort of a running bit of gallows humor among Texas Democrats after every election that in four years’ time the growing Hispanic population will surely get us a win. I sure hope to live to see it myself.
Fair enough. But once people start voting for the other party for whatever reason, especially if they’re young, that may set a new pattern, as happened in California.
I think you hit it on the head here. I grew up in Texas and still have a lot of family there. They are all Evangelical and have traditionally voted almost exclusively GOP. Not this time. They are either skipping that line (Dad, my brother, his wife, etc.) or in the case of those under 30, voting for HRC but not telling Mom, Dad and Grandpa.
While national Evangelical leaders like Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins have continued to stand by Trump prominent Southern Baptists like Russell Moore and Al Mohler have refused to do so. In fact Moore wrote a rather blistering piece last year about Trump and hasn’t changed his position.
There are approx 4 million Southern Baptists in the state of Texas. I expect a significant number find Trump an unacceptable option. In the piece linked above Moore indicates he will write in his choice since he won’t vote for HRC or Trump. It won’t surprise me if a significant % of Baptists in Texas do the same, vote for McMullin or simply don’t vote at all. If this happens and Hispanic and African American voters turn out in large numbers…? Well, I’m not crazy enough to say that will flip Texas blue but it sure could make things very very close.
Texas being largely Republican has long been one of my beefs with the state, but really, I remember Texas when it was a steady Democratic state, and it was pretty much the same place. It won’t really matter if it does turn blue.
I pointed this out in another thread, but I’ve lived in Texas my entire life (I’m 44), and this is the FIRST time that I can recall, and certainly the first time as a voting adult that I remember seeing TV ads for Democratic presidential candidates.
Plus, in most elections, the Republican candidate’s signs are everywhere, usually obnoxiously so.
Trump signs are as thin on the ground as Hillary ones, which seems somehow telling as well. I suspect only the arch-conservative types who are convinced that Hillary is the Anti-Christ and voting for Trump, odious as he is, is still preferable.
Remember the Good Old Days of 2013, when the Republican Party did an autopsy on itself, saying it had to cut out the overt bigotry? Turns out the voters in the party were in fact mad that the bigotry was so small.
Best of luck to any conservatives who believe that the GOP will drop the bigotry in the future just because of the mere fact that the party will die if it doesn’t. You’re setting yourself up for a world of disappointment.
To add, naturally it would be a good thing in national elections, what with its large number of electoral votes. But the citizenry would by and large be the same. They’re not turning liberal anytime soon.