Political Memes

On a population level, Texas is basically a blue state held hostage by a red state administration.

The State Senate is absolutely gerrymandered to shit, without a doubt. But from a gross popular perspective, Texas consistently turns out a healthy majority of conservative voters. We saw this play out after 2018, when Abbott's campaign staff took to their own aggressive GOTV operations (along with assorted nasty tricks in blue urban centers). The GOP was turning out north of 6M Republican voters in 2020 and north of 4.4M in 2022. This is substantially more than the 2.6M they were managing going back to 2014 and before.

Beto's thesis for winning in 2018 was interesting, and drastically increasing the Dem base in the years since has been great for municipal Dems. But the idea that Texas is a blue state given the 10-15 pt margins Republicans continue to win with in years with double the turnout of historical races really requires you to ignore all the Central and West Texas right-wingers who have been showing up in droves over the last ten years.