So I stayed up past midnight on election night. It wasn’t California returns that kept me up – California is always slow because so many vote by mail and anyway there wasn’t much on the ballot that I cared about except the billionaire tax (which unfortunately failed) and the measure to keep funding for Bay Area transit (which fortunately passed).
It was what was happening in the rest of the country. In particular, it was what was happening in Texas.
As regular readers know, I am a fifth generation Anglo Texan. And while over the course of my life I have actually lived a few more years elsewhere – first in D.C. and now in California – it is impossible for me to stop being Texan, despite knowing the history of the place far too well to not have very mixed emotions
So while I got excited about South Carolina sending a Democrat to the Senate – do you realize that this is the same seat that Strom Thurmond held for multiple years, initially as a Democrat – and the other indications that there was a blue wave (or tsunami) brewing, it was Texas I wanted to hear about.
I thought James Talerico had a shot at the Senate this time. I didn’t really expect any other Democrats to win statewide, except maybe Jon Rosenthal for railroad commissioner since the Republican had made such a bigoted ass of himself by attacking South Asian students at the University of Texas who were doing the most Texan thing possible: celebrating a football victory.
In the end, the Democrats swept every statewide race in Texas. The Senate. Governor. Lieutenant Governor. Attorney General. Comptroller. Railroad Commissioner. Land Commissioner. Agriculture Commission. All the open seats on the Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals. Open seats on the state school board.
The incoming Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court is not only a Democrat; she’s a lesbian.
Also, they flipped the Texas House of Representatives. The final results aren’t in for all the races, but the Democrats already have 77 of 150 seats.
And you know all those Congressional districts they gerrymandered to get rid of Democrats? Democrats won most of those, too. The whole Congressional delegation is still heavily Republican on account of the fact that the districts were already very gerrymandered, but they didn’t succeed in making it worse.
The state Senate is also still very Republican. But that’s it.
Texas is now pretty much a blue state, y’all. Texas and California are now going to be on the same side in a lot of political fights.
Now of course, all the pundits were busy bringing up the last time a Democrat won in Texas. In the case of the governor, that was Ann Richards, who was a liberal Democrat back in the day and worthy of comparison.
But before that, there was a time when Texas only elected Democrats as governors and senators and railroad commissioners and so forth, just as there was in, say, South Carolina.
There were some Republicans, but most of them were members of the John Birch Society. They elected the occasional crackpot like Ron Paul to Congress or the Legislature, but they otherwise had about as much clout as liberal Democrats. Which is to say, not very much.
For the most part, the Democrats who ran Texas back in those days were descendants of the Democratic Party from the days of the Civil War. Occasionally someone more progressive would slip through and they did support a lot of FDR’s New Deal, so long as they could do so and still be racist as hell.
The were “The South Will Rise Again” Democrats. They actively tried to keep Black people from voting (or from having any rights to speak of) and were only slightly better about Latinos. They cared about the oil bidness (as Molly Ivins used to say) and not paying any income taxes and weren’t very excited about funding schools or any other public services if they could avoid doing so.
And after Lyndon Johnson – who, you will recall, was from Texas – signed various civil rights laws and the Voting Rights Act, a lot of those Democrats started to drift to the Republican Party, led by former governor John Connolly. At first their political actions weren’t all that different, but over the years they got sucked into the right wing extremism that has engulfed all Republicans.
Meanwhile, the nationwide Democratic Party became the party of inclusion: Women of all races, Black people, Latinos, immigrants, not to mention gays and lesbians. Not just voters, but also politicians.
What I’m getting at here is that all those Democrats elected in Texas last Tuesday – they aren’t your grandpappy’s Democrats.
You can’t really compare the new crop of Democrats to the ones who used to rule the state. It’s not the same party at all.
Despite the occasional exception, like Ann Richards or Sen. Ralph Yarborough (and maybe even Lyndon Johnson), the people – the white people, most of them men – who ruled Texas from the end of Reconstruction through last Tuesday were all cut from the same cloth, regardless of whether they called themselves Democrats or Republicans.
Texas has never seen a state government like the one it’s about to have.
OK, so a lot of the races were pretty close and the state senate is going to be a pain in everyone’s butt, but just thinking about what a Democratic Texas Attorney General can do makes my heart go pitty-pat. Women in the two top jobs – Gina Hinojosa is the third woman governor of Texas, though the first Hispanic governor, while Vicki Goodwin is the first woman lieutenant governor.
And I note that the new land commissioner is not only Latino, but an immigrant.
In the end, though, it wasn’t the Texas results that kept me up. They were pretty much settled before midnight Pacific Time. I could have gone onto bed. But then I noticed that the Mississippi Senate race was in play.
When I first looked at it, the Democrat, Scott Colom, had taken a 20 vote lead with 95 percent of the ballots counted. It obviously didn’t get settled early Wednesday morning. As I write, Colom’s now up to 2,000 votes ahead. There are still some outstanding provisional votes and voters have until November 10 to correct problems with their ballots.
It’s just possible that Mississippi will not only send a Democrat to the Senate – something they haven’t done since the days of James Eastland and John C. Stennis, who were somewhat to the right of the conservative Democrats of Texas and definitely in the “South Will Rise Again” wing of the party – but they will send a Black man to the Senate, something that hasn’t happened since Reconstruction was sabotaged after the Civil War.
Mississippi.
If you don’t think things are shifting in this country, think again.