Suburban War

The GOP's Problem, In Four Suburban Counties

If you’ve been a reader of my work for really any amount of time, you’ll know my fascination with the concept of Blue Texas. You’ll know I was one of the biggest proponents of it happening last time, and I was clearly very wrong. I disbelieved the Hispanic slippage (or, in some cases, tidal wave), and I believed polls that were hilariously out on the Democratic performance with educated whites. I got it wrong, but that doesn’t mean my fascination with the state is gone - but it does mean I have understood the limits of blue Texas, at least in the short term. Greg Abbott should win his job again, and him losing would be a serious shock to the system - a shock I do not find very plausible at this point. As much as I stand by the notion that Texas will flip relatively soon, I don’t think it’s 2022. Plainly, the state is still just a bit further away from Democrats than those bright eyed optimists wanted to believe it was in 2020.

The counterpoint to all of that is that Texas will flip, eventually, and we all need to get ready for what that will look like, and the reason is very simple - the suburbs. Take four main suburban counties - Denton and Collin, the two light red counties in the DFW quad, and Hays and Williamson, the counties directly south and north of Austin - and you can see the story of why Texas is running left - and why, barring the reversal of the Global Realignment, the GOP will eventually lose Texas.

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In 2010, those four counties made up 8.41% of the total votes cast in Texas, and Rick Perry, in his last term of office, won those four counties by 29.7%. Put another way, those four counties made up 20% of Perry's raw vote margin that year. Two years later, those four counties voted for Romney by 27.7%, and those counties made up 9.62% of the total votes cast in the state. Skip to 2020, and they made up 11.56% of the votes in the state, and Trump won it by 3%. Put another way, those four counties are sprinting to Democrats, and they're making up an increasing amount of the Texas electorate. And that's why the GOP are in huge trouble.

At every election since 2010, the share of the statewide votes cast in those four counties has risen steadily, due to a combination of intra-state migrants from the cities to the suburbs, and from the increasing numbers of Californian expats moving to the state. That said, it isn't just migration that's changing these voting patterns, because we know from similar areas (including Southlake, whose status as a city in Tarrent excludes it from this math) that there are a lot of Romney-Biden voters, Republicans who can’t vote for the party anymore, after in many cases supporting it all their lives. These four counties all share demographic similarities, and are the home of a lot of well-off white social liberals. All four, unsurprisingly, were areas where Lak’s model found Biden overperforming in 2020, and all four are areas where Trumpian, culturally conservative politics don’t particularly work, which is why the GOP are in trouble in Texas.

The GOP are bleeding votes in the places where there are an increasing number of voters every single electoral cycle, and they’re doing so in a way that is consistent with what the international data suggests should be happening. These four counties could be best compared to Kooyong, the rich suburb of Melbourne currently held by the Deputy Leader of the Australian right. When the Liberals ran Malcolm Turnbull as their leader nationally, the Liberals won this seat 63/37, a 13% margin in Australian terms and a 26% one in the American context. In 2019, despite a national swing to the right? Their margin was cut in half, to 56/44. You want to understand what these two seemingly random results have in common, it’s simple - Kooyong is just the Australian version of these suburban counties. I’ve said it before, but being gay is an act of always worrying about whether you can be yourself, be honest about who you in a place, and around people. In these areas of Texas, and in Kooyong, I would have no problem being the relaxed, calm version of myself with a partner that I always dreamed of. These places are full of social liberals who voted for the GOP or the Coalition out of deference to tax cuts, and when they are offered a candidate who does not offend their sensibilities (as Romney and Turnbull didn’t), they will vote for the right. The problem for the GOP and the Coalition is that they cannot run a moderate anymore.

There is no appetite for a Romney-esque moderate in today’s GOP, and anyone who thinks that there could be a lane is deluding themselves. The next GOP nominee for the Presidency will almost assuredly be either Donald Trump or someone doing their best Trump impression, and whether that is Cruz, Hawley, DeSantis, or someone else, that will not fly with the suburbs. The GOP have made a choice to prioritize cultural conservatives in the rust belt, and that choice bore electoral fruit in 2016 (and nearly did in 2020), but the counter to that is they’ve hurt their standing in white, socially liberal, wealthy areas. In the same way that Democrats are highly unlikely to be able to radically improve their fortunes amongst cultural conservatives because of the choices they have made (including Hispanic cultural conservatives in the Rio Grande Valley), the GOP have made their choice, and that choice doesn’t involve them reversing their bleeding in the Austin and Dallas suburbs.

The GOP’s main problem is there isn’t a political strategy that gets you Ohio and Texas safely anymore, and the GOP can’t win without both of those. Go for the strategy that gets you increasingly red Ohio, and you will end up with a Texas that is sprinting left. Go to plug your Texas hole, and Ohio - and Iowa, for what it’s worth - will start to revert to something closer to Obama-era relative partisanship, which means that the GOP would probably need to give up on parts of the midwest and reprioritize Virginia and Colorado. There will be no pivot to the centre, no recommitment to moderation, and so the GOP will continue to hope that either they gain the political advantage of a strategy they are explicitly not pursuing, or that somehow they continue to gain in the rurals without losing any more suburban ground, both of which are naive - in much the same that thinking Steve Bullock or Phil Bredesen could win was naive. Take it from someone with form on this - thinking you can wind back the clock with voters who don’t support you anymore is a losing proposition, and the GOP have to reckon with what a universe where they lose Collin and Denton looks like.

The GOP have many problems facing them, but the Suburban War is but the biggest - these areas are becoming bluer and bluer as they make up a bigger and bigger share of the electorate. That’s a recipe for disaster if the GOP can’t stop it - and right now, they’re acting like they have no problem at all, and if and when Texas flips, it should rightly be seen as the latest lost GOP battle in the suburban war.