Take note, voters. AOC and her left-wing, defund-the-police, open-borders Squad have big plans for the country, and they run right through the heart of Texas. Here's the New York City lawmaker asserting that Democrats flipping Texas blue is an inevitability, vowing to fundamentally transform the Lone Star State when it happens.
She believes Texas needs to look a lot more like California , and that's what they're planning to accomplish:
Ocasio-Cortez: Texas turning blue. Inevitable. Inevitable! It will happen. The only question is when..We're going to make sure we unionize the hell out of this state.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) February 13, 2022
On the electoral trajectory point, is she right? On one hand, Donald Trump won Texas by single-digits in both 2016 and 2020, squeaking through by under six percentage points in the most recent election. And in 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly won re-election in a blue-tinted cycle. On the other hand, Trump and Cruz fare worse than more traditional Republicans in the state. Sen. John Cornyn outperformed Trump significantly in 2020, winning by ten points, and Gov. Greg Abbott easily overperfomed Cruz in the pro-Democrat 2018 cycle, winning by 14 points. In 2014, a much more red-hued year, Cornyn and Abbott won by 28 and 20 points, respectively. Then there's the emerging trends pointing to Democratic advantages eroding among Texas Hispanics. We've written about this phenomenon on several occasions, and Politico recently covered it too. Here's an excerpt from the story, headlined, "The GOP is gaining among Texas Hispanics. Women are leading the charge:"
Democrats were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s numbers in South Texas in 2020. The Hispanic Republican women who live there were not. Many of them have played a leading role in urging their neighbors in majority-Hispanic South Texas to question their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party...Hispanic women now serve as party chairs in the state’s four southernmost border counties, spanning a distance from Brownsville almost to Laredo — places where Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Latino voters. A half-dozen of them are running for Congress across the state’s four House districts that border Mexico, including Monica De La Cruz, the GOP front-runner in one of Texas’ most competitive seats in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s some of the clearest evidence that Trump’s 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics — perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters, but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country...Starr County saw the most dramatic shift of any county in the state when thousands more Republicans turned out to vote than in prior elections. While President Joe Biden ultimately won the county with 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent, that paled in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance, when she garnered 79 percent to Trump’s 19 percent.
Sometimes apparent demographic inevitabilities...aren't. AOC's talking point may need some updating, in light of new evidence. It would be highly entertaining to watch her try to explain the GOP's gains among Hispanic women in Texas. Someone should ask her. As for her comment on "unionizing the hell" out of Texas once Democrats take it over, how should the state's voters feel about that? Low-tax, low-regulation, broadly anti-union Texas is one of just four (all red) states to have replaced all of the jobs lost during the pandemic:
Texas and Arizona have joined two other states in recovering all the jobs they lost at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, leading a trend that is expected to include another dozen states by the middle of this year. The states, which also include Utah and Idaho, have benefited from demographic shifts before and during the pandemic—experiencing outsize payroll growth in retail, warehousing, technology and transportation industries. Companies have moved operations to the states, and workers have moved in as well, sometimes leaving more crowded and expensive urban areas. The states—all Republican controlled—also have had relatively relaxed Covid-19 restrictions during the pandemic, which economists say softened the blow on their economies...Mr. Kamins expects a third of the states to return to their pre-pandemic levels of employment by the middle of 2022, with California and states in the Northeast lagging behind.
AOC wants Texas to much more closely resemble one of the laggards -- her home state of New York:
New York, on other hand, is lagging far behind the Lone Star State. New York State Budget Director told reporters on Tuesday that the state has recovered less than two-thirds of the jobs lost due to the pandemic...In New York City, the unemployment rate remains well ahead the national average. The city’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate sat at 9% in November, more than double the national unemployment rate of 4.2%.
If Texans are excited about AOC's vision to reverse what has made their state one of the growth engines of America's economy, they can begin by electing Beto (aka Robert Francis) O'Rourke as their next governor. The failed Senate and presidential candidate is at it again -- explaining that he believes being 'pro business' means favoring abortion-on-demand (Texas' new law has heavily reduced abortions in the state), while evidently mistaking voters for fools with no memories. In case you missed it:
Beto says he isn't 'interested' in 'taking anything from anyone,' wants to defend Second Amendment https://t.co/LbWsgfkrOq
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 10, 2022
Hell yeah, we're going to take your AR-15. If it's a weapon that was designed to kill people on the battlefield, we're going to buy it back. pic.twitter.com/cCEWkG6y0X
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 13, 2019