On Nov. 6, 1990, Democrat Ann Richards defeated Republican Clayton Williams to become the 45th governor of Texas. She won by a 50-47 margin, capitalizing on the arrogance and abhorrence of her GOP opponent, and widely held public perception that he had been disrespectful to her because she was a woman. She was chosen by 1.9 million voters in an election that saw roughly 51 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters show up to the Texas polls. It was the second time Texas elected a woman governor, and the last time it elected a Democrat to the state’s highest office. She was subsequently defeated by George W. Bush in 1994, and for the last 22 years, Texas Democrats have wandered an electoral wasteland with only rare glimpses of hope for resurgence in recent years.
Turnout for midterm gubernatorial elections has steadily dropped to the extent that Texas’ current Gov. Greg Abbott defeated Wendy Davis in a “contest” that only summoned a mere 33 percent of the state’s 14 million registered voters to the polls in 2014. Moreover, though Texas successfully went blue for Democratic presidents in native Texan Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976, both elections effectively gifted the state to generations of Texas Republicans, who reaped the whirlwind of backlash stoked by the compensatory Southern Strategy.
It is against this backdrop that Hillary Clinton seeks to become the 45th American president, and to pretty much everyone’s surprise, the Lone Star state is now a battleground. Well, maybe it's a surprise to everyone but Secretary Clinton, because she’s admittedly been eyeing an upset of Texas-sized proportions for a long while, in spite of the purportedly long odds. Chances are she’s had her eyes on a Texas poll conducted in 2013, long before Donald Trump became the GOP nominee, which found her beating failed 2016 candidates Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and even sitting Texas Gove. Rick Perry in head-to-head match ups. While very little attention has been paid to Clinton’s uphill quest to capture the state’s bountiful 38 electoral votes, she’s made it no secret that she knows her path to victory in Texas rests with a base of historically disenfranchised voters that her opponent has been alienating since he launched his campaign.
Demographically, Texas is now one of five minority majority states, in which 55.2 percent of the population identified their race as “other than non-Hispanic white” in 2011. This means that with each passing year, the Texas electorate becomes ever more inhospitable to the Republican Party. As such, they have indulged in a concerted and successful effort to disenfranchise the very voters who could unseat their majority. In fact, the multicultural Texas vote has now been suppressed to the extent that the state ranked 42nd in voter registration and 51st in voter turnout in 2010. With such abysmal civic engagement, it’s no wonder how the GOP gained and still maintains power to this day.
Enter Donald Trump.
Though Clinton may have done her demographic number-crunching two-step in preparation for this contest, what she likely didn’t anticipate was the GOP and its base nominating a candidate just arrogant and abhorrent enough to remind Texas voters of Clayton Williams. Oh but they did, and the ironic result has been a slew of Clinton endorsements from the unlikeliest corners of the Texas Republican establishment. While he isn’t typically considered establishment and didn’t explicitly endorse Secretary Clinton, Sen. Ted Cruz not only bested Trump with his home state’s GOP primary voters, but also closed out the RNC convention by essentially telling everyone not to vote for the party’s nominee. Despite his expedient reversal to endorse Trump, his early willingness to defy the pack likely gave way to a cascade of other defections—most notably that of the Bush family, whose patriarch has declared his intention to vote Clinton in 2016. Despite the fact that Bush 41 and 43 have ceased to be nationally relevant over the last eight years, they remain major players in Texas politics, and their refusal to endorse Trump has also had far-reaching implications. The Bushes’ cold shoulder was accompanied by the Houston Chronicle’s rare (and very early) endorsement, as well as the Dallas Morning News’ first endorsement of a Democrat since before World War II. These developments have since cued a Texas-sized GOP side-step, in which local Republican politicians are now doing anything and everything they can to distance themselves from the ‘Clayton Williams’ at the top of their ticket.
With just days to go before the final votes are cast in this election, how will we ultimately measure the impact of Trump’s simultaneous alienation of both his opposition’s marginalized but enthusiastic base, and his own party’s dominant but demoralized establishment? Will we be able to know once and for all if Trump’s arrogance and abhorrence were unappealing enough to unite enough women, blacks, Asians, Latinos, and college-educated whites to join hands in solidarity strong enough to turn a red state as big as Texas blue?
Perhaps it can already been seen in this Texas-sized toss up.
Against all the aforementioned odds, a record 15 million Texans are registered to vote on Nov. 8, and early indications suggest that new registrants are disproportionately Latino. Not only are 1 million more Texans registered to vote this year, but the first week of early voting has seen record turnout, in some counties double what was seen in 2012. Though Texans don’t register by party, these spikes in early voting have also been most pronounced in the state’s most populous, Democratic leaning metropolitan areas, whose papers now highly recommend a dance with Hillary in 2016. Taken together, these facts on the ground signal the increasing possibility that the Lone Star state might finally be poised to two-step to a different tune—and that the eyes of Tuesday should rightfully be upon Texas.