I voted Republican in Texas for 20 years. Believe the hype – a blue wave is coming

The election of Trump shook many Texan Republicans to the core. His horrific actions and the senate’s blind allegiance to him have led many of us to swear off the GOP for good

In recent weeks, there have been many reports that Texas might turn blue at the 2020 election. In 2018’s midterm elections, now presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke came close to ousting incumbent republican Senator Ted Cruz in what was a historic election day with record voter turnout. What many don’t realize is that, while Beto was responsible for record new and Latinx voter turnout, the seismic shift to the left was aided by a movement has been years in the making.

The Texas capital, Austin, has always been a bastion of blue in the red sea of Texas politics. However, Austin’s suburbs, where I lived for 20 years, are more conservative. Like many of my neighbours, I never voted for Democrats at the national level, and certainly not for president. Williamson County – a suburb near my north Austin home – along with Tarrant County near Dallas, were two of the most conservative counties in Texas.

The 2000s brought an influx of new residents from the west coast to major Texan cities. Their arrival caused a shift in the political landscape. Yet still, other than Austin, the metropolitan areas remained moderately conservative.

In the suburbs, people became quiet about politics. In the 2016 presidential race, many voters, out of loyalty to the GOP, didn’t want to admit that they opposed Trump. Most, including myself, presumed our votes wouldn’t matter. Trump had little to no chance of winning, we thought. We all assumed the state would stay red, but thought the nation would vote overwhelmingly blue. And frankly, we were secretly just fine with that.

While our assumptions about Trump’s odds of winning proved to be cataclysmically wrong, Texas did see some surprising changes. Houston elected democrats to every local position. Clinton bested Trump there by more than 160,000 votes, despite her unpopularity with independents and Republicans. Other major cities saw similar results, with Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas all voting blue. Trump’s single digit margin of victory was much smaller than predicted, especially compared to Mitt Romney’s 15.8 per cent margin in 2012.

Still, the election of Trump shook many of us to the core. Along with many of my friends, I wept in the days following the election. As the months went on, Trump’s horrific actions and the senate’s blind allegiance to him led many of us to swear off the GOP for good.

In 2018, Republican senator Ted Cruz was up for re-election. While Cruz is widely disliked by his peers in Washington and most Americans outside of Texas, he is inexplicably popular in the Lone Star State. In 2012, he won his seat by a wide margin. In the presidential primaries, Cruz bested Trump in Texas by 17 per cent. So when Representative Beto O’Rourke, an unknown Democrat from El Paso (a city so far away from the rest of Texas that it’s literally in a different time zone) threw his name in the hat, nobody expected much. The state was still presumed to be a Republican stronghold, and we all believed Cruz would win by a landslide.

Yet the suburban areas in Texas continued to shift. There was something bubbling under the surface of the perfectly manicured lawns of our suburban homes and churches. We saw a GOP that talked the talk, but most certainly didn’t walk the walk, and we were ready for a change.

I left Texas just before the 2018 election. But on election night I ignored my new state’s races to follow Texas. As results came in, I experienced a roller coaster of hope and despair. Early counties were predictably red. But as the evening wore on, Travis, Harris and Dallas counties all went for Beto. In a dramatic surprise, both Williamson and Tarrant Counties – the red bastions in a blue sea of central Texas – went to Beto too. Unfortunately Beto lost the race by mere 2.6 per cent. While it was a stinging defeat, it was still a tremendous victory for the Democratic Party in Texas.

Since the 2018 election, signs of a conservative pushback have surfaced. Ft. Worth’s Republican Mayor Betsy Price won re-election by double digits. Yet despite Price’s win, Tarrant County is showing signs of turning blue again in 2020. Early canvassing reveals farmers who can’t sell their crops due to Trump’s trade wars, and a conservative frustration with the GOP’s unchecked spending and poor fiscal policies. The murder of 22 El Pasoans by a white nationalist espousing Trump’s racist rhetoric has added to Texans’ dissatisfaction with Trump and the GOP-dominated Senate.

Next year, Texas’ senior senator John Cornyn will face a strong democratic challenger for the first time in over a decade. The GOP has already begun dumping money into advertisements targeting the state. What the GOP fears is what many Texans predict: with the right candidate at the top of the ballot, what shook the state in 2018 will be back again in 2020 bigger than ever. Texans, whether they will admit it or not, are ready for a blue wave.