Will Texas Go From Red to Blue?

Prior to the recent US presidential election I had read Gail Collins' book "As Texas Goes..." which includes an interview with demographer Steven Murdock discussing the future importance of the Latino vote in that state. As expected, at least this time around, the state did vote for Romney, but it is clear in the aftermath of President Obama's re-election that Latinos in Texas are in the spotlight as people contemplate the state's future, which includes lots of immigrants and children of immigrants. The immediate thought among most people is that Texas will become a "blue" state because the Democrats did so much better this year among Latinos than did the Republicans. Ryan Lizza, writing for The New Yorker, notes that even the state's newly elected Republican US Senator Ted Cruz, is worried about this.

“If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community,” he said, “in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.” He ticked off some statistics: in 2004, George W. Bush won forty-four per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally; in 2008, John McCain won just thirty-one per cent. On Tuesday, Romney fared even worse. 

“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”

However, Cruz (who is of Cuban-origin) also notes that many Hispanics share the traditional values of hard work and strong family ties that are regularly seen as being central to the Republican Party. If non-Hispanic Republicans come to understand this, the story may change. Indeed, even Sean Hannity of Fox News has flipped on immigration. If Fox News gets behind this, will that matter? The first task would have to be to convince people in Texas cities, which are already more blue than the more rural parts of the state, as you might anticipate, and as you can see in a very interesting map put together by Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University