Analysis: Is Texas political sentiment changing?
The number of registered voters in the state today — 16,211,198 — is about the size of the state’s entire population in 1990.
This is not the same place it was, in lots of ways.
That Texas was making a turn from midcentury to modern, a transition captured in some ways by the race for governor between Ann Richards, who was talking about “a New Texas,” where people who weren’t white and male could participate in politics and business and culture on an equal basis, and Clayton Williams, the Midland oilman who died last week, whose appeal was to return Texas to a nostalgic idea about the good old days.
The Texas we’re living in now has almost twice the population of the Texas those two sought to govern. Still, Texas politics then and Texas politics now have something in common: uncertainty.
In 1990, Texas was in transition. Democrats had the majority of the seats in state government, but their power was eroding quickly and the political pendulum was swinging to the Republicans. When the elections were over, Richards had won, along with fellow Democrats in most of the other statewide seats. But Republicans won some, too, including Phil Gramm, reelected to the U.S. Senate, and Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rick Perry, who beat Democrats to become treasurer and agriculture commissioner.
In 2020, the Republican hold on state government that began in the 1990s is beginning to shrink; in 2018, Democrats snatched two congressional seats from the GOP, along with a dozen seats in the Texas House. On top of that, the Republicans who swept into statewide offices won by tighter margins than usual. The current election cycle is an acid test of sorts — to determine whether 2018 was a sign that the pendulum is moving again, or whether it was just one of those things.
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/02/21/texas-political-sentiment-changing/
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