Scrimshaw Spotlight: College Station, Texas
An Ode To A Place Of Meaning
(I haven’t done this bit in a while, so why not. Also, buy my book, so I can shut up about it.)
It’s a bit weird to write a book set in a place you’ve never set foot, and yet that’s what I did, setting Salvation In The Storm at Texas A&M - and therefore, sojourning, at least mentally, to the small city of College Station. College Station is, well, a college station in the literal sense - it’s home of a perpetually pesky, but serially underperforming, football program, and a school that has stood in that place for a long time. The residents of the place, and the alumni they produce, have a massive inferiority complex about “the school in Austin”, as they dismissively refer to the University of Texas, but it was the perfect school for the book. And, the lesson holds for my non-fiction writing - a trip to College Station might explain quite a bit.
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College Station, even more than anywhere else, might be the perfect encapsulation of the realignment, and yet it’s never discussed in those terms. Per J Miles Coleman, It’s a Romney +36, Trump +3 city at the centre of a Romney +35, Trump +14 county. Shockingly, it will surprise literally nobody that the vast majority of that swing came from College Station, but it also shows that it was the realignment - because the other parts of the county didn’t move. The city and county used to be basically synonymous, and now they’re going the opposite way. I won’t offer this prediction with much confidence, but I’d expect College Station to vote for the 2024 Democratic nominee, and the county to very much not. It is a compelling story.
College Station could be charitably described as the answer to the question “where the fuck do conservative parents send their kids in state”, especially those who don’t have an extra $44k to drop on SMU. The problem is, the parents sending their kids there now aren’t conservatives anymore, they’re Beto-Abbott-Biden voters in the DFW Quad and the Austin burbs. The city is changing not really because of the students - there were some left wing students in 2012 too, and while there might have been some liberalization in the median student who chose A&M in the last 5 years, it’s still not enough to create such a big swing. It’s clear what happened - it’s the professors, the graduates who stayed, and the effect of white social liberals being unable to explain away their guilty conscience anymore.
College Station is the microcosm of the realignment because it was always a socially liberal place, but it was never Democratic. A friend with deep ties to both school and place read the first chapter of my book, and his remark was that it’s odd to think that A&M would ever be a place where an ambitious Democrat went, and I laughed, before asking the rest of what he thought. It’s an odd remake of a city, and an institution, that usually reveres a certain kind of Republicanism - hell, they named one of their schools after the first President Bush. This is the exact kind of ancestrally Republican turf that has gone under discussed, and overlooked, for far too long.
For all the bon mots said about the need to do better in rural and regional America in 2022 and 2024, there seems to be a weird refusal to consider the other option - do a lot better in places like College Station. It’s a university city with Republican roots and an increasingly Democratic hue - and for some reason, nobody cares. There might not be a thousand of these areas, but there are enough ancestrally GOP areas full of white liberals with money who are moving to us to make it a worthwhile approach. The GOP are far more exposed than Democrats are, as cultural conservatives make up a minority of the population, and they already win them more easily. Democrats won pro-choice Texans by 33%, and lost pro-life ones by 50%. That’s a sign of GOP strength - for now. In another light, it’s a sign of imminent weakness.
None of this is to say that Beto is gonna win or some shit - he’s not. It’s Safe R, Abbott will win. But there are signs that places like this are the next ascendent coalition, and we need to be willing to at least consider the notion that these sorts of places will be crucial moving forward - at least, more crucial than they’ve been. College Station is a bit of a joke, casting a shade over 30k votes in a state that cast over 11M of them, but it’s not about the place, but what it represents.
There’s an instinct to try and reverse the trends in places that are sprinting away from the Democratic Party, because it feels instinctively wrong to be losing places with a rich history of supporting Democrats by the increasingly irreversible sums we do now, but it’s not the right strategy. Yes, Democrats should give up on rural white America, and spend their time and energy on places and people it can actually win, instead of wasting time on vanity projects and self-delusion.
You think I don’t get the irony of the leader of the Jaime Harrison brigade talking about self-delusion and vanity projects? Of course I do, and if I were still advocating for that kind of politics, I’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite. College Station, and these pockets of socially liberal Republicanism, are the future of the party, and it’s the only path that really stands before us. You want to try and turn back the clock in rural white America? Great, you’ll run College Station back to a place where we lose by 36%. It isn’t possible to pander to homophobes and hold the gains with the socially liberal centre. It just isn’t.
Ah, but Youngkin and John Bel Edwards and Laura Kelly and Charlie Baker, I already hear. Great, you can do it, once in a while, with specific candidates in specific circumstances, and they can hold on sometimes, even. But as a national strategy - as a strategy to win federal office - it doesn’t work, and won’t work. If there was a path which could hold the suburban strength and allow us to make the ground back in rural white areas, I’d be the first one advocating for it. The problem is, there’s a price we’d have to pay for doing that, and that’s the end of at least one of federal abortion protection, and federal gay marriage. Neither of those are a price worth paying to get back to 35% in some random ass county we now get 12% in.
Head out of Texas, and find these pockets of liberalism, and you’ll see the pattern. In Clarke County, Georgia, home of UGA, Obama won it by 29% his first time, and Biden won it by 42%. In Florida, Alachua - the home of the University of Florida - swung 10% left in those 8 years, even as the state swung 4% right. Despite underrunning Obama by nearly 7%, Biden did 11% better than his former boss in the county with Ann Arbor in it. Romney won Knox County by 29% on route to a smaller statewide win than Trump managed, but Trump could only win the home of the University of Tennessee by 15%. And it’s worth remembering that this is with a candidate who is widely considered to have been a drag on the youth vote, especially when the aging Biden is compared to the vibrant Obama.
These places, and the well-off white social liberals in them, are the future of the Democratic Party whether we like it or not, and not having an effective strategy for them is both infuriating and also unsurprising. Instead of meaningless tweets about the firehose of fatalism and fascism from the presumptive next Speaker of the House, a clear eyed autopsy of what happened earlier this month and where the Democratic Party goes next needs to take place. My view on the question is clear, but I don’t harbour any expectations that my view will be accepted wisdom any time soon. But this is the debate, and to whatever extent people listen to me, I am here to fight.
The future of the Democratic Party runs through College Station, and the dozens of other places like it scattered across America - and hopefully everyone can learn as much from it as I learned about myself by immersing myself there, if only in a fictional world.