I said in an early blog entry that the Republican stranglehold on the state didn't get much weaker. I was judging mostly by the inability of the Dems to take a single US House seat or break the 9-0 GOP monopoly on the Supreme Court.
But we did make gains in the State House and there are some important statistics in the Presidential race that mean that change could be coming here, if you just wait a few years.
Obama lost Texas by 11-12 points. But he won with two groups that have helped him win in other states: Hispanics and young voters. The Democrats as a whole are still struggling with white and older voters, and there is always that powerful Evangelical bloc to contend with here.
We may have to wait a while to get Texas close enough to the center (much less actually turn it into a blue state), but we've just started to get somewhere.
So I take back my pessimism, and replace it with guarded optimist, tempered by realism of course.
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