5: India

The state that was the home of LBJ, Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Governor Ann Richards hasn’t elected a Democrat for state-wide office for over 30 years. ........ James Talarico, who won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for November’s Texas Senatorial race .................. Talarico, a virtual political nobody six months ago, appears to have a good chance of winning that contest. ............. a state’s politics often follow economics. And whatever else you may say about Texas, its economic growth over time has been impressive. Its share of national GDP has trended strongly up: ............. Texas’s economic growth is a major reason Democrats perennially hope that they will someday turn the state blue. For in modern America rich states tend to vote Democratic, while poor states vote Republican: Think Massachusetts versus Mississippi. So as Texas grows richer and more sophisticated, won’t it eventually free itself of rabid, backward-looking Republicanism? .................. Ken Paxton, the attorney general, may become the GOP nominee, and he has “been dogged by scandal after scandal for over a decade.” They also include the fact that Texas has a large Latino population — and Latinos have swung hard against Donald Trump and his party since 2024. .......... the claim that low taxes lead to rapid economic growth has been more thoroughly tested in practice than any other proposition in economics, and has failed every time. ............. What Texas does do right, however, is let businesses build stuff, especially housing, in stark contrast with the regulations and multiple veto points that strangle construction in many blue states. A new house in Greater New York costs about 85 percent more than a house in Dallas. A house in the San Francisco Bay area costs around 150 percent more. .............. by far the nation’s largest producer of wind energy .............. More people, more jobs, but not higher income or output per person. ......... (Texas treats the poor and vulnerable terribly, but that’s another story.) ................. per capita income probably isn’t the big driver of differences in political orientation across states. Education levels are almost surely far more important. In fact, there’s a startlingly strong relationship between the percentage of a state’s population over the age of 25 with a bachelor’s degree or more and the way it voted in 2024: ................. Texas does not have an especially highly educated population. Why not? Mainly because the state hasn’t been especially attractive to industries that employ large numbers of highly educated workers. A few years ago there was a lot of hype about Austin rivaling Silicon Valley as a technology hub, but that move has largely fizzled. ................... two world-class metropolitan hubs in Houston and Dallas. Indeed, the maturing of those metropolises is certainly the main reason that Texas has become more culturally and professionally sophisticated. .............. Georgia has Atlanta — and Georgia, which has a similar education level to Texas, has become a genuine swing state. The rise of Texas urbanism hasn’t yet altered the outcomes of state-level races, in which Republicans have had a lock on power. But, as in Georgia, that could change. ............ in Texas a significant share of eligible voters are Latino, and they are a real wild card. According to exit polls, in the 2024 election 55% of Latino Texas voters voted for Trump – a 13-percentage-point increase from 2020. Many (mostly Republican) pundits quickly proclaimed that there had been a fundamental realignment of Latinos toward the GOP. But that was simply wishful thinking. Recent elections and polling have shown a sharp swing in Latino voters back to the Democratic party. In fact, the Trump administration’s hostility and brutality toward anyone with brown skin are likely to undo many years of Republican cultivation of Latino voters in states like Texas. .............. Texas is not about to become New Jersey, or even Colorado. But with the right Democratic candidates, who can straddle the divide between urban Democrats and non-urban Republicans, it could become Georgia. And maybe, just maybe, Texas could blaze the trail for Democrats in other deep red states.