this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Texas is gerrymandered to shit, and employs pretty nasty voter suppression tactics in populous (see: blue) counties by having very few polling stations per capita in those areas and making it a crime to give water/food to people waiting in line to vote. Big Texas cities are blue for the most part (maybe a few exceptions in the DFW area)
If you look at pretty much any of the cities within Texas on the latest map, you can see that they consolidate the core of the city into one or two solid blobs, then split the rest out to be diluted by rural areas. See Dallas/Tarrant County, Travis County, Bexar County, and Harris County for the most obvious cases of these.
https://redistricting.capitol.texas.gov/docs/88th_Senate_Tabloid_2024_05_20.pdf
On a population level, Texas is basically a blue state held hostage by a red state administration.
Yeah. And the problem is that that won't change unless blue people move outside the cities and into the rural areas. And most have absolutely no desire to do so. Those that do, have no desire to be politically isolated.
You're telling me that the solution to systemic voter suppression is a massive urban exodus to spread out the voting population until it's homogenous?
That's the solution, instead of I dunno, forcing the Texas government to stop suppressing voters?
Well yeah, do that too. But as long as we're weighing votes based on land, Texas will remain a red state.
Fixing voter suppression tactics might help federal elections. Probably just Senate, actually. But state office elections...there are far more red counties and towns than there are blue cities and towns. And somehow that matters.
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.