2020 is shaping up to be as bad for Republicans as 2018, and likely worse.
First article, and I will guess that most conservatives won't bother reading the whole thing. Just a hint: it doesn't quite say what you think it does. If you don't look beyond the headline, you are doing yourself a disservice.
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Texas Is Bracing for a Blue Wave in 2020. Yes, Texas.
Why Republicans are getting very nervous about maintaining their stranglehold on the Lone Star State.
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“The tectonic plates shifted in Texas in 2018,” Senator John Cornyn, the powerful Republican who’s facing reelection in 2020 (with just a 37 percent approval rating) said earlier this year. Cornyn has been sounding the alarms ever since November, warning national Republicans against complacency and spelling out the dire consequences for his party if they can’t stave off the Democratic surge: “If Texas turns back to a Democratic state, which it used to be, then we’ll never elect another Republican [president] in my lifetime,” said Cornyn.
A confluence of events over the past couple of weeks has reinforced Cornyn’s message. In what giddy Democrats are calling “the Texodus,” four Republican members of Congress announced, in short order, that they won’t be running for reelection in 2020; three of their seats, all in the suburbs, will likely go Democratic, adding to the two they took from Republicans in 2018. “We could see other representatives step away too,” said Manny Garcia, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “Why would you go into a knockdown, drag-out fight when you’re either going to lose next time, or soon afterward?”
While the Texodus was underway, Republican infighting—the latest episode in a long-running battle between conservatives and the hard right—hit the headlines in the most embarrassing of ways. Republican House Speaker Dennis Bonnen was caught on tape by prominent right-wing activist Michael Quinn Sullivan crudely insulting several lawmakers, while rattling off a “hit list” of insufficiently conservative Republicans he wanted to be taken out in primaries next year. (Democrats filed suit earlier this week, alleging that Bonnen broke state law and violated campaign-finance regulations in the process.)
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Cal Jillson, a venerable political scientist at Southern Methodist University, is among those who think this president has accelerated the Democratic comeback in Texas. “My sense pre-Trump was that there were demographic dynamics that were going to bring two-party compe ion at some point,” he said. “I thought it would take another 15 to 20 years. But Trump has brought all that forward. It’s happening much more quickly.”
...Texas Democrats were giving Latinos and young whites no reason to engage. That started to change in 2012, when Gilberto Hinojosa, a former judge, was elected party chair. “He wanted a progressive, aggressive ins ution,” said Manny Garcia, who became one of the new hires charged with “creating a Democratic brand” where there was none, and moving the party into the twenty-first century. Texas Democrats now have full-blown data and digital operations; they’re raising more money online than any state party in the country, Garcia said, while plotting “the largest coordinated campaign in the history of Texas” for 2020. The party’s efforts have been aided considerably by voter-engagement groups like Jolt and Texas Rising, which have focused on Latinos and young voters and helped to send voter registration and turnout soaring; from 2014 to 2018, Texas added some 1.8 million new voters, the majority of them women and people of color.
The party estimates that “there’s 30,000 to 50,000 Democrats who arrive in the state every month,” according to Garcia, and now—at last—they’re being asked to register, vote, and run for office.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1547...2020-yes-texas
Mostly jibes with what I see happening on the ground.
I'll post a bit more here as data comes in. I will emphasize, once again, that Trump's win in 2016 was a narrow one, and he is less popular now than he was then, with the added headwind of an energized Democratic party.
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no, I think he’s a s bag.
the “if Bernie endorsed him he must be a loser” psuedo conventional wisdom. What is enlooper running on? More campaign finance violations? The only way Gardner wins is if he’s running against a scandal ridden candidate like enlooper.
