Yes, Texas Could Go Blue This Year | Time - 0 views
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The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is more uncertain than any in modern history—and nowhere is that uncertainty on better display than in Texas, a state that could very well go Democratic for the first time since 1976.
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“If I were to guess, I would say 10-15% who vote in a Republican primary aren’t true Republicans,” Ryan says, adding that the percentage might be a notch higher for Democratic primaries, particularly in more partisan areas where the primary is functionally the general election.
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(to quote Frank Drake, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that’s “a wonderful way to organize our ignorance).
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The polls in Texas are all over the place, ranging from a 7-point margin for U.S. President Donald Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016, to a four-point Biden victory.
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Turnout in Texas this year will greatly surpass any previous cycle. In 2016, just shy of 9 million Texans cast a vote for president, amounting to 51.4% of the voting-eligible population, according to the United States Election Project.
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Many more voters are expected to turn out on Nov. 3. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 75% of respondents consider it safe to vote in person on Election Day, though there’s a rift along party lines: 57% of Democrats said they felt safe compared to 91% of Republicans, suggesting Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to vote in person.
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“significantly different electorate than in 2016,” says Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Nationwide, the conventional wisdom that higher turnout benefits Democrats does not hold up when one considers President Trump’s core base
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As of Wednesday, early voters with a history of voting in a Republican primary outpaced those who voted in Democratic primaries by 6 points, though the largest percentage voted in neither.
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both shifted Texas from leaning or tilting Republican to a genuine toss up, while the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato places it in “Leans Republican,” just one category to the right.
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“They’re only afraid of extremely high turnout.” Meanwhile, he says that Democrats have long held that Texas “is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state.”
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This is a particularly common misconception regarding eligible Hispanic voters, plenty of whom, polling by Blank’s organization and others suggests, are generally supportive of the Republican Party.
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There is a strong possibility that Democrats will retake the Texas House of Representatives this year, which Republicans have controlled—along with the Texas Senate and governorship—since 2003.
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the Texas Democratic Party has widened the front in terms of slating better candidates. For more than a decade, Blank says, the Party was “catch as catch can” in terms of finding viable candidates for district races, a process that restarted every cycle, with many seats going uncontested
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“If you’re a candidate who loses narrowly but runs again, it gives you a lot more parity with the Republican incumbent,” Blank says.
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Arguably the more relevant question is: how many Texans who otherwise would not have voted are excited about local candidates, and are thus more likely to vote and perhaps boost Biden?
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More to the point, those on the ballot for state races, Blank says, form an organic field operation across the state, armed with their own volunteers and knowledge of their districts that a statewide or national campaign could never generate from scratch.
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Whether that’s enough to make a difference is, of course, ultimately unknowable before the election. When I asked Sabato why he was keeping Texas in the “Leans Republican” category, he said that “I’ve been hearing every four years that Texas is going Democratic, and it never happens.”
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Dear Claire, While I appreciate the optimism, I think the Democratic Party has cried victory too early this year, and claiming that Texas could go blue simply reinforces this. The Democratic Party seems to have gone a little too far on the offensive, much in the same way as they did in 2016, and this could have disastrous results for the cause of Joe Biden. As for your evidence, I do not trust Larry Sabato, since his prediction given right before election night in 2016 was WILDLY wrong (Clinton 322 - Trump 216). In that prediction, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/our-final-2016-picks/), he predicted that Wisconsin was a "Likely D" and said "Lean D" for the myriad swing states that we all know went for Trump that year. When it comes to Sabato's 2020 predictions, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2020-president/), a great many of the states he marks as toss-up or lean Democrat went Republican in 2016. We also all remember the "Blue Wave" disappointment of 2018 that took the House but failed to take the Senate. Considering all this, I have reason to be quite skeptical of what pollsters say. And my opinion? I cannot have one yet. As of today, and probably even at the end of election day on November 3, the final winner of the election is unknowable.