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This Is Why Texas Is the Next Georgia
A good number of hard core Democrats have been working hard to turn Texas blue. There are some demographic studies that indicate that Texas will be blue around 2024 or so just due to GOP voters dying off and being replaced by younger non-white voters. The analysis about Georgia is helpful as to how to speed up the process
Link to tweet
The threshold factor for determining how likely a state is to flip from red to blue is the composition of the population and the demographic trends of that population. Largely overlooked in the celebration of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory was the fact that he got 47 percent of the vote in Georgia although he had removed staff from the state and stopped advertising there. Obama lost the Peach State by 205,000 votes, and there were nearly 1 million people of color who were eligible to vote but didn’t cast ballots. You didn’t have to be great at math to see that increasing the number of voters of color was the path to making major change in Georgia.
Texas at the start of this decade is actually even more promising than Georgia was at the start of the last decade. The Lone Star State has the second-largest pool of nonvoting people of color of any state in the country (second only to already-blue California), and the number of potential voters of color far exceeds the margin of difference in statewide elections. Joe Biden lost Texas by 631,221 votes, and despite the record turnout on both sides, 4.5 million eligible people of color still did not vote, according to exit polls and Census data. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid by 215,000 votes in an election in which 5.4 million people of color didn’t cast ballots. The still-untapped potential in Texas is enormous, which is exactly why the conservatives work so hard to suppress the vote there.
Texas at the start of this decade is actually even more promising than Georgia was at the start of the last decade. The Lone Star State has the second-largest pool of nonvoting people of color of any state in the country (second only to already-blue California), and the number of potential voters of color far exceeds the margin of difference in statewide elections. Joe Biden lost Texas by 631,221 votes, and despite the record turnout on both sides, 4.5 million eligible people of color still did not vote, according to exit polls and Census data. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid by 215,000 votes in an election in which 5.4 million people of color didn’t cast ballots. The still-untapped potential in Texas is enormous, which is exactly why the conservatives work so hard to suppress the vote there.
I was pleased to see that this article discusses the Texas Organizing Project. TOP helped elect a friend to be the first African American district attorney in my county (thank you George Soros for funding this)
Texas is blessed to have Level 5 Leaders as well. Two of the key ones are Michelle Tremillo and Brianna Brown, the executive director and deputy director of the Texas Organizing Project. The fact that you probably haven’t heard of them is actually a testament to their Level 5 humility. Like Stacey, they are maniacally focused on “doing the work,” and have built TOP into a relentless and effective civic engagement machine that has helped tip electoral outcomes in cities and counties across the state. As graduates of elite universities, they each could have had far more lucrative and prestigious professional careers, but they have made meaningful life decisions to focus their energies and talents on the cause of transforming Texas.
Texas has so many Mexican Americans and African Americans (a combined 53 percent of the state’s population) for a reason—the land there used to belong to Mexico and was annexed into the United States through war and bloodshed in the 1840s so that the residents of the state could continue to hold Black people in chattel slavery. Just as Abrams’s success is rooted in Georgia’s civil rights history, it is not inconsequential that Mexican-American and African-American daughters of Texas are leading an organization that is entrenched in and driving change.
Texas has so many Mexican Americans and African Americans (a combined 53 percent of the state’s population) for a reason—the land there used to belong to Mexico and was annexed into the United States through war and bloodshed in the 1840s so that the residents of the state could continue to hold Black people in chattel slavery. Just as Abrams’s success is rooted in Georgia’s civil rights history, it is not inconsequential that Mexican-American and African-American daughters of Texas are leading an organization that is entrenched in and driving change.
Texas will turn blue and after this happens, the GOP will not be able to win the electoral college
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We've been waiting since Ann Richards and Lt. Gov. Bullock to turn blue again.
