Will Cities Turn Texas Purple?

Houston Skyline

Here in Virginia, while horrific gerrymandering has protected the Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly, in statewide elections it is seemingly becoming impossible for the GOP to win (this trend hopefully will continue and see Ed Gillespie go down to much deserved defeat).  Why?  The cities and urban areas no longer accept the GOP Kool-Aid and voodoo economics.   Some think a similar trend may be about to show itself in Texas where the progressive, modern cities are less and less friendly territory for the Christofascist and greed driven policies of the Texas Republican Party.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon which I hope will continue to play out. Here are highlights:

[A]s summer has turned to fall, Ms. Wendy Davis has entered new territory: Last week a poll by the Texas Lyceum, a nonpartisan, nonprofit educational institution, showed that Ms. Davis has narrowed that gap to just nine points, and pundits around the state are talking about a new momentum behind her. What happened?

The short answer is tactics. Ms. Davis’s campaign hasn’t been perfect, but she is dogged on the stump, and has stood up well to Mr. Abbott’s attacks.

Of course, Ms. Davis is still nine points back, and she has just five weeks to catch up. Which is why the longer explanation for her turnaround is more important, not just for Texas, but the country.

Many hoping to see Texas go purple point to the growth of its Hispanic community. And that’s part of it, but not everything. Population growth, soaring diversity and dense urbanization are also transforming Texas, much as they have done in Virginia and North Carolina.

Texas’ economy has been booming almost nonstop since 2000, and the state added 4.3 million people between 2000 and 2010. Americans came from every point on the map. Once a minority, the Hispanic population swelled, too, and will be the largest ethnic group in Texas this year (some say they could be the majority by 2020).

Yet there is far more to political change in Texas than the emerging Hispanic majority. Take greater Houston. The suburbs that once determined its voting patterns have become just one part of a megalopolis. Covering nearly as much territory as Maryland, the Houston area is the most diverse in America — even more so than New York or Los Angeles.  

Houston is not merely more Hispanic; the fastest-growing ethnic group is Asian. . . . And 98 percent of the population growth in the first 10 years of this century has been nonwhite.

The same trends are found in the Texas Triangle, an increasingly dense region bounded by Houston, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. It includes less than 20 percent of the state’s land but all its biggest cities. Conservative politicians do poorly in these settings.

The political shift is unmistakable. In Houston, 83 percent of residents favor a legal path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Six in 10 say abortion is morally wrong but oppose making it harder for women to get one. In August, an effort to repeal Houston’s new equal protection ordinance for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people failed.

Republican strength is on the wane in some of those key suburbs, too. The Republican margin in Fort Bend County shrank in 2012 from double digits to just six points.

None of this is to say that Ms. Davis will win — but she might. And four years from now, she, or another candidate, will have an even easier time. No, that dusky sky up there is not blue. It is still burnt orange — but with quite a bit of purple.