Something Strange Is Going On With All Those Retiring Texans

[Zorro]

The Republican Party of Texas appears to be molting. Last week, Representative Bill Flores became the 10th Texas Republican in the House to announce his retirement since the 2016 election, and the fifth this year. Others are expected this year.

If Democrats can flip the congressional districts they lost by less than five points in 2018 — including one represented by Will Hurd, a retiring local maverick who was once considered a Republican rising star — they will make up the majority of the state’s congressional delegation for the first time since 2005.

This has been branded “Texodus,” proof the Republican Party is running scared. A good deal of the churn has a simpler explanation: By 2016 the state’s Republican delegation had gotten long in the tooth, with some of the older members serving since the 1980s. Now they’re in the minority, and that stinks.

But there is something strange going on here, and it’s been going on for a while. Arguably, Texodus really started in 2015, with the most consequential retirement in the state in many years, that of Gov. Rick Perry. The Texas Republican Party had rarely looked stronger than it did that year — and has rarely had a stranger and more off-putting run than the period that came after.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/texas-republicans-texodus.html

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Reality my friend,reality.

The Urban Centers are and have been moving in a Liberal direction for a decade. The Big one is,demographics. Any as Corporate America moved their Jobs to Texas from what is known as Rust Belt States,well they inadvertently transferred a more Liberal Ideal system with those jobs.

The Demographics of the whole Southwest is Browning and becoming more Educated which scares the bejeesus out to the all White Old Peoples Party.

[Quemado]

2. It's demographics and the people moving to Texas.

An influx of younger adults from more-liberal places (like Illinois, California, and New York) has analysts wondering whether the Lone Star State could take on a blue hue.

There is "a demographic shift in Texas as a whole, with increases in the young-adult populations, growth in the Hispanic and Asian populations and a drop in poverty."

Houston, Texas's largest city, is one of the most ethnically and racially diverse cities in the nation and like the next three biggest cities in the state – San Antonio, Dallas and Austin – it trends Democratic.

The new residents, especially those who move to Texas for tech work, are heavily favoring Democrats, Espinosa of Progress Texas says, pointing to a report by his organization based on voter turnout data. There were 1.5 million first-time voters in 2016, and the growth margin favored Democrats five-to-one, the report said, culling numbers from the Texas voter file. In Collin County, where Plano is located, the result was even more lopsided, with 39,209 more Democratic votes cast from 2012 to 2016, compared to just 4,126 more Republican votes. (President Donald Trump still beat Clinton by a 56-39 percent margin in Collin County.)

Millennials are far more likely to lean Democratic (59 percent do, compared to 32 percent who lean Republican, according to a Pew Research Center report earlier this year), so the movement of young people to the state is statistically likely to help Democrats. Texas is among just a few states that saw its 18- to 34-year-old population grow by more than 5 percent from 2010 to 2015, according to a report by the Brookings Institution earlier this year, with the Houston and Dallas among the top three metro areas in the country.

It's still a hard climb for Democrats in the Lone Star State, but demographic trends are slowly starting to change the landscape, Morales says. "I think at the end of the day, Texas is still the dam that holds up the Republican Party," he says. "But they're going to have to move heaven and earth to keep it red."

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-10-11/in-texas-changing-demographics-could-have-political-implications