The GOP's Looming Electoral College Problem

How Can The GOP Hit 270 Without Texas?

When Texas goes blue, the GOP are massively, massively fucked in the Electoral College.

This is not a claim that this will happen in 2024 - I don't think it will, to be clear - but at some point, whether it is 2028 or 2032, the left trend of Texas will be enough that it eventually becomes a blue state, and when that happens, what is the GOP path to 270 Electoral College votes?

This isn't some theoretical question, because I've been trying to see what the map could be for a couple of weeks now, and I can't find it. I've been super generous to the GOP in the map above - giving them all three of the Wisconsin/Michigan/Pennsylvania trio, giving them back Arizona, flipping Nevada as well, and then giving them Maine At Large, New Hampshire, and Nebraska 2nd, almost none of which would be described as things they are favoured to do. You can argue about the rust belt trio, but everything else is a stretch, and even under those generous to the GOP assumptions, they're in real trouble.

What's left for them to go get? Minnesota, which sprinted left in 2020 and has a population increasingly centered in Minneapolis-St. Paul, with all that means for future trends given the (*all together now*) Global Fucking Realignment we are seeing? New Mexico, if the Hispanic problem gets really huge, and somehow the state, anchored by a fairly large and pro-Democratic city, suddenly just flips? Georgia, which is just New Illinois, at least insofar as the singular existence of the major city is enough to drag the rest of the state to a Democratic position? Virginia?

I'm genuinely confounded as to what people think is going to happen - is it that Texas won't ever flip, or that somehow the GOP has another path without Texas? I'm not trying to be blithe here, I'm genuinely curious as to why nobody seems to be interested in this topic. Remember, Mitt Romney lost the popular vote by basically the same amount as Trump did the second time around, and he won Texas by a shade under 16%. Trump won it, and by more than most expected, but it was a shade under 6% victory margin for him. The state is running left, and it will go eventually, whether 2028 or 2032 or maybe even 2036. But the fantasy that trending against you states will just stop is a good way to get caught by a Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania collapse on election night, as the Democrats were in 2016.

The obvious counterpoint to what I'm saying is that Texas isn't actually that competitive - that it's easier to go from ~R+10 to R+2.6, but to get from that close loss to an actual victory is a lot harder. They'd say that the Texas GOP haven't actually played defence in a while, and if/when it becomes a national battleground, they'll campaign there and keep it close, but keep it red. Maybe they're right, but remember, Georgia went from R+5 to a blue state in 4 years, the GOP did play defence in the runoffs, and Democrats now have a Senate majority because of it. Arizona shifted a similar, but not as big, amount, and nobody has been able to answer the question of why well-off white social liberals will vote for a political party whose signature accomplish in four years of power is putting three Supreme Court Justices on the bench, one of whom referred to homosexuality as a God damn "sexual preference" less than 6 months ago. Nobody has answered this for me, because the answer doesn't exist, and Texas has a lot of the white enclaves that feature a whole hell of a lot of these voters.

Collin and Denton will eventually flip, as I wrote about before, and the Quad is going to power Democratic strength in the state. Austin is sprinting left too, as this map of Lak's model shows, and even the white parts of Harris are becoming increasingly Democratic, a result masked by Biden's failures in the Hispanic areas in the south and downtown parts of the city. This state will flip - it is too urban, too educated, and too young not to do so in time. And when it does, what is the GOP's move?

The other part of this equation is why aren't the Democrats noticing this, of course, and prioritizing the state more. It's a fair question that I don't know, but can guess at, the answer to. Everyone in Democratic politics is scared, bowing to cowardice and bad headlines, and that's why bold, but correct strategic thinking - like abandoning Florida to invest in Texas - goes unlistened to. "Joe Biden in the White House because he ignored the idiots like me who wanted an expansive map" sounds like a correct take until you remember he spent part of his last day of the campaign in Ohio, a sign people took as campaign optimism they could win the state, and then Biden wouldn't even outperform Hillary the next day. The notion that the Biden campaign knew their map and knew that they needed an intense focus on a smaller number of states is belied by the way Biden went to Ohio so much and Obama kept getting sent to Florida. If they knew their map so well, they certainly didn't share it with the DSCC or the DCCC, whose spending decisions were at great variance to where their money could actually make a difference, to be very generous to them. (In their defense, GOP spending decisions were as shambolic.)

Flipping Texas isn't a fantasy any more, it's a state as red as Georgia was after 2016, and that flipped in one cycle. I'm not saying Texas will go that fast - I think the GOP will win it in 2024 - but Democrats should do everything in their power to speed the state along. Once it does go blue, the GOP runs out of credible paths to 270 electoral college votes, and every effort to deprive the GOP of such a path is a worthwhile investment.