Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, All Blues
The heart wants what the heart wants. And it wanted something very different deep in the heart of Texas. The adage that everything is bigger in Texas definitely held up during Tuesday’s election, when an epic blue wave swept across the state and proved (in a shocking manner) that those who assumed that Texas would be forever red were all hat and no cattle. Consider that James Talarico “got 4,397,474 votes in early voting—more than the 4,249,373 votes that his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General James Paxton, received overall.” From Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker: The Night That Texas’s Seemingly Unchangeable Republican Identity Vanished. “Last night, I drank tequila and exchanged stunned, giddy texts with friends back home, as it became increasingly clear that something extraordinary was happening. Paxton and Abbott were losing, but so was Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, who fought to install the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom in the state; and Don Huffines, the comptroller, who has equated abortion with murder; and Bo French, the candidate for railroad commissioner, who once asked on X whether Muslims or Jews were a bigger threat to the country. The whole statewide G.O.P. apparatus—men who felt so secure in their power that they had nearly persuaded me to accept their inevitability—was teetering. Before yesterday, Texas had not elected a Democrat to statewide office in thirty-two years; now, nearly every key position will be held by a Democrat.” (I can’t wait to see how the characters on Landman react to all of this.)
+ “Elon Musk warned that Talarico would usher in the end of the American experiment. Ted Cruz said that “if Texas falls, everything changes.” Texas has fallen now, in almost every conceivable way. Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Gov. Greg Abbott. Democrats are poised to flip all 17 statewide offices that were on the ballot and take control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since 2002. They could net one seat in Congress from a map Republicans just redrew to flip five. Democrats went into Election Day cautiously optimistic. They ended it with the single most shocking set of results, at scale, that I have seen in my lifetime.” Tim Murphy in MoJo: The Texas Miracle.
+ Some of the changes will be immediate and local: “Less than 24 hours after a historic sweep of Texas’ statewide elected offices by Democrats, the state’s attorney general-elect Nathan Johnson said Tuesday he will not continue Ken Paxton’s practice of suing doctors in other states for sending abortion medication to patients here.” Some of them will be enduring and widespread. Vox (Gift Article): Democrats just seized one of the Republican Party’s most powerful weapons. “For years, Texas was the locus of the Republican Party’s quest to shape policy through litigation, especially during Democratic presidencies when Republicans could not use the US Department of Justice to bring cases.” That just changed, bigly.
