California has 55 Electoral College votes. New York and Florida have twenty-nine. Texas is in the middle with thirty-eight. In recent years, we’ve had a series of very close presidential elections, including two contests where the winner actually lost the popular vote. The 2000 election turned on the outcome of Florida, while the 2004 election turned on the outcome of Ohio (but only because Bush won Florida). In 2016, Trump’s victory was a little more comfortable, but not by much. Had he lost Florida and one other midwestern state, he would not have been elected president.
The basic contours of the red/blue divide have remained largely consistent, with Florida being at the fulcrum that decides success versus failure. Trump’s success in Pennsylvania and the industrial midwest changed things up a bit, giving the Republicans a pathway to victory that didn’t absolutely require they win in Florida, but still left them with no margin for error without it.
For the Republicans, this has been possible because they could rely on Texas’s 38 Electoral College votes. Without them, there is no realistic scenario where they could win the presidency. For years, people have been predicting that a day would come when Texas becomes competitive, but most have seen that scenario playing out for the first time in 2028 or even later. In might be that the date will arrive earlier, perhaps as soon as 2020.
A new University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll buttresses that suspicion.
Half of the registered voters in Texas would vote to reelect President Donald Trump, but half of them would not, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
Few of those voters were wishy-washy about it: 39% said they would “definitely” vote to reelect Trump; 43% said they would “definitely not” vote for him. The remaining 18% said they would “probably” (11%) or “probably not” (7%) vote to give Trump a second term.
A scenario where half the voters say they will vote one way and half say they will vote the other way more than meets the definition of a competitive race. The president has to be alarmed to see that he’s actually behind 43 percent to 39 percent among people who claim to have already decided. He does better with those who are less certain.
This isn’t the only data point. Trump’s own internal polling from March showed him only two points ahead in Texas in a hypothetical matchup against Joe Biden. A late May/early June Quinnipiac poll showed Biden leading Trump in the Lone Star State by a 48 percent to 44 percent margin, and Trump only leading other Democrats narrowly and within the margin of error.
In the past, you might think that if Texas is competitive, the election is already lost for the Republicans, but that might not be the case in 2020. The state is changing demographically much faster than other states. Its electorate is getting more ethnically and racially diverse at a rapid rate, and it’s attracting a large influx of non-conservative people who are coming there for work. Add to that, that Trumpism doesn’t sell much better in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston than it sells in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Washington, DC. When all these factors are combined together, Texas could be leapfrogging other states like Georgia and Arizona that have been moving in the Democratic Party’s direction. It’s not impossible that Texas could decide whether or not Trump is reelected.
But even if that’s still not the likeliest scenario, it’s beginning to look like Texas will be a battleground state. The Republicans cannot afford to lose it and they’ll never be able to afford losing it. Once it goes blue, that is the end of the Republican Party in its current conservative movement iteration. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to play around with the Electoral College calculator and try to cobble together a plausible majority for the GOP without Texas.
This is why Republicans are starting to freak out.
Some Republicans have attributed the outcome last fall, in which the GOP also suffered losses in state legislative races, to [Sen. Ted] Cruz’s unpopularity and the resources invested by [Beto] O’Rourke and his allies, a feat Democrats are unlikely to repeat in a national presidential contest. Senior Republican strategists in Texas are warning against that line of thinking.
“Everybody thinks it was a Cruz-Beto thing. But it’s a mess,” a GOP adviser said, requesting anonymity in order to speak candidly. “Independents are behaving like Democrats — like they did in 2018.”
Senator John Cornyn of Texas has also been raising the alarm: “In 2018, we got hammered not only in the urban areas but in the suburbs, too.”
In 2018, the Texas GOP lost several seats in Congress and a bunch of state legislative seats, and that may have been the proverbial canary in a coal mine. I think they realize that a lot more is at stake here than just whether Trump can be reelected. They’re worried that no conservative Republican will be electable if they don’t fix the problems the polls suggest they’re about to experience.
The loss of Texas has the potential to change the political shape and future of the country like no other event. For that reason, it’s worth a heavy push by the Democrats.
4.5
So maybe Beto O’Rourke for Vice President?
That’s what he’s running for IMO.
If Biden is at the head of the ticket, they’re not going to put another white man in the VP slot. It’s not going to happen.
I think this is the only thing O’Rourke should be running for.
Preferably, he should be in Texas organizing the Democratic party, and becoming a new LBJ-type figure (at least in terms of political organization).
Cruz has gotten awfully interested lately in working with Democrats, even AOC. It’s obvious that he has decided to pivot away from the fringe. So this shift in my state is already changing our politics, however gradually.
I hope we can save our democracy from Trump in time to make this possible/relevant.
It’s not Strongman Trump.
It’s the Republican party.
Strongman Trump is just the most Republican of Republicans in all of history.
We need to kill the Republican party before a more competent most-Republican of Republicans can win the Presidency.
4.5
Thank you for brightening my day!
Well, yes, if the “conservative” mothership were to go Blue in a statewide election (in a prez election, no less) that would be like the Deathstar exploding. It would herald the end of the 40 year old “Conservative” Era and probably break the back of the “conservative” movement.
But events that cannot happen if an authoritarian, anti-democratic political party is to survive will not be allowed to happen, which means that our corrupt system of “law” will have to be employed by Repubs (as the current monopoly power-holder) to ensure that “conservative” dominance continues statewide. So Texas Repubs will have to deploy every vote suppression measure in their handbook, as well as employ an even higher level of digital lies and deceptions about policy and personality, 24-7, likely with even greater emphasis placed upon white identity as “American” identity. Reality simply will have to be annihilated. It will be a battle to the death by authoritarian forces who know that democracy would very likely spell the end of their monopoly power in Texas, and national power in DC.
Obviously the Voting Rights Act is now a dead letter (especially with the corrupt Barr as AG), but even if it weren’t, Texas is within the jurisdiction of the most rightwing federal appellate court in the nation, which has upheld every vote suppression tactic that Texas Repubs have adopted.
The national situation for the anti-democratic, minority faction “conservative” movement is that they control several enormous states where a statewide Dem candidate has the rock solid support of 46-48% of the voters (TX, OH, FL). Dems apparently cannot win statewide elections in those states, but they are jammed with Dem voters. Repubs have no large states (like NY or CA) where their party simply slaughters the opposition. As a rural, neo-Confederate minority party they can survive only by barely winning the states with actual large cities, and the voting rights of those urban (Blue) citizens are expendable, by definition—because the greater good of “conservatism” obviously must trump adherence to democracy. That is why ideologically corrupt neo-Confederate judges are so essential to the Repub game-plan going forward, and why those judges have been the utmost priority of Gravedigger McConnell.
4.5
I would like to see (somewhere) more granular analysis of how individual states are evolving, and why. You did a very nice job of explaining PA, and there have been a lot of good articles in the WaPo about VA. But what is happening in Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Arizona, etc., to move them from purple to red or blue? Why is my original home state of MO, which used to be a classic swing state, now ruby red?
If you want the tl;dr version, it’s mostly demographic combined with individual histories of the state (demographics can only do so much in context of a state that’s historically voted strongly for Republicans/Democrats).
Two most important demographics: age splits, and proportion of white population that holds college degrees.
You can see it visually here (only splits age/education, so one would have to explore individually proportion of each populations’ race):
That strikes me as reasonable. Missouri is still very predominantly white – just slightly less so than when I lived there a couple decades back. I get the impression that in spite of its rather impressive university system, that higher ed is just not a priority for a lot of folks in the state. Outside maybe the two largest metro areas, not really sure that there is much there for younger college educated people of any race or ethnicity. I live just south of the state. My state may be a retirement destination of sorts, and education was never much of a priority. The racial/ethnic makeup where I am at is very similar to Missouri. Been Red for Presidential elections since Bill Clinton, but until early this decade was purple for Congressional races and Blue more locally. We’re now as Red as you can get.
Operative word here is “if”. So let’s not get out over our skis. The republicans are just not going to let this slip away easily. All kinds of dirty tricks are in the offing.
Trump’s 2016 result minus Texas is 268 electoral votes. So he would need to pick up one more state. Is the argument that it’s impossible for Trump to pick up any state or am I missing something?
There are no possible states Trump could pick up, so yes that is the argument. He could pick up New Hampshire or Minnesota, but an environment whereby he loses Texas he is not winning NH or MN.
In the future Republicans might argue against the Electoral College. Even with Texas in the D column, MN, WI, OH, MI, and PA have a lot of white non-college voters and it’s possible if trends continue that Republicans will win the popular vote but lose the EC. Unlikely, and who knows what actions cause equal opposite reactions, but possible.