Blue Texas is a Democratic dream. Shifting left is a reality.
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 earlier. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke came within three points of winning a Senate seat, and other down-ballot Democrats got unusually close to winning statewide offices. And over the past couple of weeks, Texas Republicans have lost some of their most valuable politicians. Reps. Will Hurd, Kenny Marchant, K. Michael Conaway and Pete Olson all announced their retirement from the House. Hurd is the GOP’s only African American House member, and three of those four congressmen (Hurd, Marchant, Olson) leave flippable suburban seats open.
Now Democrats are crossing their fingers about finally turning Texas blue, or at least purple, in 2020. Turning Texas blue in the medium-term isn’t a pipe dream — the Trump-era GOP doesn’t play as well as the George W. Bush-era one did in an urbanized, diverse state such as Texas. But turning Texas truly purple by 2020 is still a big lift. Democrats should probably think of it more as possible icing on the cake rather than a core part of their strategy in the next election.
When Republicans nominated Trump in 2016, they assented to an electoral trade-off that benefited Texas Democrats. Trump earned the votes of blue-collar whites by temporarily chucking GOP orthodoxy on economic issues and moving hard to the right on racial and cultural issues. But by doing so, he alienated many of the white-collar suburbanites who once formed the backbone of the party.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/09/blue-texas-could-happen-probably-not/
