If Democrats have a political unicorn regarding the Electoral College, it’s Texas. How often have we heard that Texas is turning blue, and Republicans win every time on Election Day? Wendy Davis, who led the abortion filibuster that elevated her profile in 2013, was supposed to win the 2014 gubernatorial race, remember? Democrats thought there were shy Democrats that dotted the suburbs of the state, hiding like the Viet Cong until that cycle. That was brutally wrong, as Davis barely broke 40 percent of the vote. With Kamala Harris, we’re back to these same games.
Take this Newsweek piece with the headline, “Can Kamala Harris Turn Texas Blue?” It’s a piece that led Tom Bevan, co-founder of RealClearPolitics, to tweet “holy s**t” after reading the piece and zeroing in on the buried passages that wreck this piece of science fiction [emphasis mine]:
Holy shit. Newsweek took this quote ("I do not think that Texas will be in play. At all") and turned it into this:https://t.co/WIugbVHE93 pic.twitter.com/JAsghYyGXU
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) August 14, 2024
Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, a professor of American politics at the University of North Texas, suggested that even Harris' momentum and a close high-profile state level race doesn't necessarily mean the vice president will be competitive in Texas.
"I do not think that Texas will be in play. At all," Eshbaugh-Soha told Newsweek.
"This does not mean that Harris will avoid Texas. She will visit, to raise money and generate some exposure for herself and her campaign," he added. "There is nothing in the mix that indicates future performance will be any different from past performance; I don't see anything that may shake up the presidential vote in Texas."
Eshbaugh-Soha said that one issue which could harm Harris is that voters in Texas may still associate her with the record breaking levels of illegal migrant crossings seen at the border during the Biden administration.
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Kimi Lynn King, a University of North Texas political science professor, said that while Harris in enjoying a "bump" in her White House bid, it is unclear how that will help shift the narrative in Texas, a state where "pundits have been predicting since 2006 that there was going to be a purple wave."
"In 2022, up and down the statewide ballot, solid red candidates like Governor [Greg] Abbott and indicted and impeached, but not convicted, Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoyed double-digit victories over Democrats," King told Newsweek.
Mark Jones, professor of political science and fellow in political science at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas, added: "At the present time, while Harris is likely to make the race more competitive than it would have been had Biden been the Democratic nominee, I don't see Harris doing much better than Biden did in 2020, and thus a Trump victory in the mid-to-high single digits is the most likely scenario today."
In other words, like a longhorn, Harris is due to be politically slaughtered and devoured by Trump and the Republicans here. Yet, the GOP also has their issues on the map. Pennsylvania has long tortured the Republican Party, who have only won this state in the 1988 and 2016 elections. The Keystone State has an electorate where you’d think the GOP would perform better, but no dice. This year, it could flip. It was on its way to becoming solid Trump country until Joe Biden dropped out.
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