Texas Sings The Blues

Democrats, reports the Economist, “think they might win Texas in 2020.”

Demographers, being mostly Democrats, credit Donald Trump.

One of them, he’s from Rice University in Houston, claimed that Donald Trump was the “worst thing that ever happened to Texas Republicans”:

“Mr. Trump has alienated many white Republican women in Texas, and has also pushed away Hispanics, who account for around 40 percent of the state’s population. … According to a recent poll by the University of Texas and Texas Tribune, more Texans say they would sooner vote for a candidate running against Mr. Trump than re-elect the president.”

But even those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome are forced to concede that,

“Long after Mr. Trump leaves office, demographic change in Texas will continue to exert an influence on the fortunes of Republicans, as the Hispanic population grows, millennials vote in increasing numbers and people continue to move to Texas from other states, bringing their more liberal politics with them.”

Yes, the country as a whole is moving leftward. And it’s not Donald Trump—although a border wall and a moratorium on immigration would have helped mightily. As the Economist attests, “Americans are more in favor of ‘big-government’ policies today than at any point in the last 68 years.”

The “public mood” in America is decidedly with statism and leftism.

Ultimately, even blame-Trump demographers must, on occasion, crunch data accumulated over decades and admit that, a “blue Texas” must be chalked up to demographic “changes,” which denote the swamping of the native population by a politically monocultural immigrant cohort:

“Those who foresee a ‘blue Texas’ point to demography as the primary reason for the state’s supposed [Democratic] competitiveness. While increasing turnout among minority and young voters has helped Democrats rack up big margins in cities, moderates in the suburbs—especially women—have been moving leftwards too.”

“Texas is more racially diverse and younger than the country at large. Non-whites lean heavily Democratic and young Americans are the most Democratic generation of all.”

As an example of what women and a minority-majority transformation do to elections, look no further than California’s Orange County, whose tipping point was reached as late as 2016.

Imagine that! The iconic place that had “incubated Barry Goldwater’s conservatism and was home to Richard Nixon”! As late as 2016, “The OC,” dubbed “Goldwater Country,” “had last backed a Democratic presidential candidate in 1936, when they voted for FDR.”

“But the fortress has fallen to shifts in the population. Orange County, which used to be the color of pith, is now minority majority with 34 percent of its population Hispanic and 21 percent Asian. Its voter registration reflects the change. It is 35 percent Republican, 34 percent Democrat and 27 percent independent, the definition of a competitive district.”

Mass migration (and school indoctrination) has turned the California home of Barry Goldwater conservatism into Democratic stomping ground.

And it’ll do the same to Texas. In truth, the “worst thing that ever happened to Texas Republicans,” aside the women’s vote, is mass, chain migration.

So, Texas might be poised to tip—all the more so since six of the state’s Republican incumbents have announced their retirement.

On the positive side, the new voting groups are notoriously tardy. Not I, but the leftist Economist gripes that non-whites and the young (categories not mutually exclusive, naturally) are “less likely to find their way to the polls.”

To retain their traditional strongholds, Republicans, who’ve done next-to-nothing to stem the tide of immigration, must now rely on the tardiness of the New Americans as an election strategy—in other words, on the propensity of the young and the diverse not to … show up.

That’s some election strategy.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
WND.COM,
October 24