Texas Voting Registration Volunteers
George Will: If Trump Is Nominated, The GOP Must Keep Him Out Of The White House
Democrats have long talked about Texas’ changing demographics, and the possibility of turning it Blue sometime in the future. That future is always farther away than we’d like, but the numbers are the numbers. And while Republicans have always scoffed and laughed at the notion, George Will becomes the first prominent Republican to raise the alarm, citing numbers pulled up by the state GOP’s former chairman, saying Texas might “turn Democratic sooner than most people thought.”
The fact that Republicans have won every Texas statewide office since 1994 — the longest such streak in the nation — gives them, he says, “a false sense of security.” In 2000, Republican candidates at the top of the ticket — in statewide races — averaged about 60 percent of the vote. By 2008, they averaged less than 53 percent. And Republican down-ballot winners averaged slightly over 51 percent.
Texas is 84.7 percent urban, and has four of the nation’s 11 largest cities—all solidly Democratic.
Dallas has gone from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic. A recent poll showed Harris County (Houston), which is 69 percent minority, with a majority identifying as Democrats. The San Antonio metropolitan area is about three-quarters minority. Travis County (Austin, seat of the state government, the flagship state university, and a burgeoning tech economy attracting young people) voted 60.1 percent for Barack Obama in 2012.
Asians are the state’s fastest growing community of color, and Latinos could upend things if only they’d frigging vote.
In the 2014 gubernatorial election, Hispanics were 25 percent of Texas’s registered voters but only 19 percent of turnout. Two years later, Hispanics are 29 percent of registered voters. Now, suppose the person at the top of a Republican national ticket gives Hispanics the motivation to be, say, 25 percent of turnout. Although it is, Munisteri says, “theoretically possible” for Texas Republicans to win by increasing the white vote, this “political segregation” is, aside from being morally repulsive, politically “a sure-fire long-term losing proposition.”
Not-so-fun fact: Texas Latinos are the worst-performing political demographicanywhere in the nation. Then, of course, there’s the simple Electoral College math:
The “blue wall” — the 18 states and the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic in at least six consecutive presidential elections — today has 242 electoral votes. Texas, which is not a brick in this wall, has 38 electoral votes. After the 2020 census, it probably will have 40, perhaps 41. Were Texas to become another blue brick, the wall — even if the 2020 census subtracts a few electoral votes from the current 18 states — would have more than the 270 votes needed to elect a president.
So what does Will and his former GOP party chair propose? They don’t propose anything. It’s a cold-sober look at the demographic reality Republicans face. The solution remains unspoken because it remains unspeakable, particularly in the Age of Trump: reorient the party away from its racist, xenophobic, Southern white base. The RNC tried that four years ago. Four years later, it’s birther Trump. Yeah, that’s not going to happen, and Will doesn’t even bother devoting column inches to the notion. Why would he waste his time?
Thus, he’s left with counting demographics, and the picture for Republicans is bleak. Texas will flip. The flip will happen sooner if someone can figure out how to get Texas Latinos to vote, or it will happen later if no one does. But in either case, it’s going to happen.
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