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. Continue reading “Not Your Grandpappy’s Texas”…