8 Miles High

Texas is the most intriguing political state in the country this fall https://t.co/L3pa56ONRJ

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 18, 2020

I’ll accept the accolade of “most intriguing political state, “ but otherwise this is the view from very high up and very far away. Even the summary of the article misleadingly implies Dallas and Ft. Worth are politically equivalent. They aren’t.

Outside of Fort Worth and the cities of west Texas, the cities of Texas are Democratic. And frankly, there are no major cities in west Texas.  And the shift is not just demographic. People don’t vote based on demography, they vote for persons. This is part of what Beto did in 2018: he gave us someone to vote for. The rest he has done in the last two years.  Balz doesn’t even mention it, but Beto has run a massive voter registration campaign that got 97% of eligible voters registered in Travis County (Austin) and several million voters across Texas. You can upset a lot of predictions, which are after all based on electoral history, by increasing the number of people who can vote.

1/6 As of Friday, 1,983,090 people voted in person or by mail in Texas’ 10 largest counties — 20% of registered voters in those counties.

57% of Texas’ registered voters live in these 10 counties, according to the secretary of state.https://t.co/LXQ0csKvCZ

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) October 17, 2020

As of Friday, 27% of registered voters had voted in Denton County (D/FW area), up from 19% for the same period in 2018. Harris County (Houston) jumped from 16% to 21%.  Almost 2 million voters had voted statewide by Friday in Texas’s 10 most populous counties where 57% of registered voters live. Over 20% of voters in those counties have voted. Did I mention Beto has a massive GOTV campaign running?

Can I tell you what this means for November 3rd? No; no one can. I can say Texas is not a red state, it’s a low turnout state. If Trump has changed that it will at least cost the GOP the Capitol in a redistricting year, which will cost them the House for at least a decade. M.J. Hegar is hammering Cornyn on COVID, the stimulus that isn’t, and ACB. That is so new (a Texas Democrat hammering a GOP incumbent, I mean) I’ve never seen it before, and it might work. Turnout is heavy, and the conventional wisdom is that high turnout favors the Democrats. Why else are Republicans so anxious to keep people from voting?

The view from the ground is really much more interesting than from 8 miles high.