Will Texas Ever Turn Blue?
Republicans have been dominating Texas politics for decades. In fact, they haven’t lost a statewide election since 1994. But many Democrats think the tide is turning.
The main reason: Texas’s rapidly growing Hispanic community, which votes heavily Democratic. Hispanics already make up 40 percent of the population in Texas, and they’re expected to outnumber whites by 2020.
The only problem is their low voter turnout rate. For example, only 38 percent of Hispanics turned out to vote in Texas during the 2012 election, compared with the 48 percent statewide average for all ethnicities.
As a result, a team of former Obama staffers calling themselves Battleground Texas is currently trying to get out the Hispanic vote by registering new voters and getting them to the polls.
In 2012, Obama lost Texas by 1.2 million votes—4 million eligible Hispanics didn’t show up. If groups like Battleground Texas can improve Hispanic’s turnout rate, Texas might "turn blue," which would have a huge impact on the national electoral map. Democrats have already secured 242 electoral votes out of the necessary 270. Texas’s 38 electoral votes would push them over the edge, forcing the Republican Party to adjust their political alignment or become irrelevant.
And in the wake of Wendy Davis’s stand against an anti-abortion bill that will most likely pass in the coming days, orange-clad protestors have been registering Democrats on the steps of the capital building and stirring hopes for an energized Democratic Party.
However, critics point out that 62 percent of Texans support banning abortions after 20 weeks, which is the central part of the bill. As a result, Davis’s filibuster might have actually hurt Texas Democrats by prominently connecting them with the pro-choice movement in a pro-life state, when it might have been smarter to keep quiet on abortion and emphasize other issues like education or criminal justice that have broader appeal.
Furthermore, because Hispanics are predominantly Catholic, they are more likely to oppose abortion than other groups. This might draw them to the Republican Party, except that studies show Hispanics are more concerned about economic issues than moral issues when it comes to their behavior in the voting booth. Whether Hispanics continue viewing moral issues like abortion as separate from politics will be crucial to Texas’s political future.