Has Texas' Time To Turn Blue-- Or At Least Less Red-- Finally Come?

Last cycle, just as the elections were getting started, the DCCC vice chair for the Texas region resigned. Ben Ray Lujan and Nancy Pelosi both said they would get a replacement quickly. They never did. The DCCC left several districts on the table out of shear incompetence. But Democrats did turn 2 vulnerable districts blue despite that. Today there are 13 Democratic seats and 23 Republican seats in Texas. So far 4 Republicans-- Michael Conaway, Pete Olson, Will Hurd and Kenny Marchant-- have announced their retirements. Olson's Hurd's and Marchant's seats are all winnable. 9 seats are so politically backwards and so red that Trump could rape a 9 year old on live TV and they would all vote straight ticket GOP anyway. And one of those seats is the one Conaway is giving up.

In a solid wave election-- like the one shaping up against Trump and his enablers this year-- there are 8 Republican-held Texas House seats up for grabs. Here's the list, along with the incumbents and how they did in 2018:

• TX-06- Ron Wright (53.1%)
• TX-10- Michael McCaul (51.1%)
• TX-21- Chip Roy (50.2%)
• TX-22- Pete Olson (51.4%)
• TX-23- Will Hurd (49.2%)
• TX-24- Kenny Marchant (50.6%)
• TX-25- Roger Williams (53.5%)
• TX-31- John Carter (50.6%)

Look how close most of those races were. I'm certain that a competent DCCC-- instead of an incontinent one-- would have won at least half of them. Will 2020 will the year the Texas house delegation becomes 18 Democrats and 18 Republicans? If Bernie's on the top of the ticket, I'm certain that's exactly what would happen, even more certain if the ticket is Sanders/Warren. The latest polling (from Emerson, this week) shows Bernie beating Trump in Texas:

Unlike Status Quo Joe, Bernie would inspire a stampede of non-voters to come to the polls. It could be very useful for non-Blue Dog Democrats who Bernie will need to pass his agenda. Sean Trende, writing for RealClearPolitics noted that demographic shifts we've all been waiting for since the publication of John Judis' and Ruy Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002, are finally manifesting themselves. Trende wrote that "Texas’s 38 electoral votes are in jeopardy for the GOP."

Nationally, the 2016 election can be viewed as a contest that Democrats won in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, but lost in the rural areas.  In the lead-up to that election, prognosticators focused on changes in Democrats’ favor in the urban areas, but forgot just how many people voted in rural areas and small towns in many states. In particular, in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, the Democrats’ weakness in rural areas and small towns overwhelmed their strong performance in the larger cities. In the Midwest, a near-majority of the votes are still cast in rural areas, small towns and large towns. The notable exceptions are Minnesota, where over 60% of the votes are cast in metropolitan areas, and in Illinois, which is dominated by metro Chicago. Tellingly, these are the states that Trump failed to flip.

When people think of Texas, they think of rural areas. Cowboys on horseback, cattle roaming the plains, and giant ranches (complete-- for people of a certain age-- with J.R. Ewing in a Stetson hat). But while the Llano Estacado-- what we might call “stereotypical Texas”-- does cover a large swath of the state, it is relatively underpopulated.

The nature of rural America changes dramatically when one crosses the 100th meridian. Here, as famously described by John Wesley Powell, rainfall drops beneath levels required for reliable crop growth, so a flourishing rural population never took hold.  Unlike eastern states, states west of this longitude are better thought of as city states: Think of how Denver dominates Colorado, Phoenix dominates Arizona, Salt Lake City dominates Utah, and Las Vegas dominates Nevada.

Texas straddles the 100th meridian. Eastern Texas is actually an extension of the Deep South: It is wooded, humid, has a large number of small towns and cities, and has some rural African American population. The rest of the state, however, is more like New Mexico or western Oklahoma. Much of the land is given over to ranching, and few votes are cast there.

Instead, votes are cast in the major metropolitan areas. In 2016, the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas combined for a majority of the vote in Texas. Donald Trump very nearly lost these areas for the GOP for first time in recent memory, receiving just 48% of the vote there. Despite winning the popular vote nationally by larger margins than Clinton, Barack Obama took just 43% of the vote here in 2012, and 45% during his landslide win in 2008.

Another 17% of the vote was cast in the metro areas of large cities like San Antonio and Austin.  Obama narrowly lost these areas to Mitt Romney in 2012, but Hillary Clinton won them with 55% of the vote. Small cities like McAllen and El Paso contributed another 4%. All told, the large metropolitan areas cast almost three-quarters of the vote in Texas, and Hillary Clinton won them with 51% support, a five-point improvement from Obama. Trump more than held his own in the rural areas of the state and in the towns, winning almost 70% of the vote (roughly the same vote share as Romney had four years earlier). But it was the Trump collapse in the urban areas that dominate the state that made it a single-digit race.

Beto isn't all that progressive, but he ran to the left of his own record

...Two years later, Beto O’Rourke shocked the political world by holding Sen. Ted Cruz to a three-point margin of victory, while Democrats swept local offices and judgeships in Dallas and Harris counties and picked up long-held Republican seats in these areas. O’Rourke performed well by improving Democrats’ showings in the urban areas. He won the big metro areas outright with 52% of the vote and blew Cruz out in San Antonio and Austin by 20 points. Once again, the rural areas and the towns saved the Republicans’ candidacy. They cast just a quarter of the vote, but Cruz won them by a 2-to-1 margin.

Could a Democrat really win in 2020? It seems a stretch, but remember that Mitt Romney won Texas by 16 points, Donald Trump won by nine, and Cruz won by just three. These are not good trendlines for the GOP. States do shift their partisanship quickly at times. George H.W. Bush won New Hampshire by 26 points in 1988 and New Jersey by 14; in 1996 New Jersey went for Clinton by 18 points, while New Hampshire was a 10-point Clinton win. That same year, West Virginia was a 15-point Clinton win; eight years later George W. Bush won it by 13.

We might write off 2018 to the bad GOP year and Cruz’s unpopularity. But that requires ignoring some substantial evidence to the contrary. One has to ignore that John McCain won the state by double digits in a 2008 environment that was probably even worse for the GOP than 2018, while John Cornyn won re-election against a hyped Democratic opponent handily.

Most importantly, one has to ignore the nature of political coalitions in the Age of Trump. Trump has generally improved GOP fortunes in rural American and in the towns, and in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, all of which has generally helped the Republican Party.  But there is little doubt that the GOP has suffered substantial losses in the suburban areas that once formed the backbone of the party while doing little to advance its cause in the major cities.

Once one realizes that these urban/suburban areas cast a supermajority of the vote in Texas, one realizes quickly that the rural and small-town areas can’t keep the Republican Party afloat in Texas forever. I wouldn’t bet the farm, or the cattle ranch if one prefers, on Texas turning blue this cycle. But the state is not safe for Republicans in 2020 either, and it will likely be very competitve.

The Blue America thermometer above is for Texas races that pit a clear progressive against a clear conservative. I expect the number of candidates to grow over the next few months. But the ones on there now are excellent. This video of Ruy Teixeira was shot a full decade ago: