LogFAQs > #979245403

shadowsword87 posted...

Texas has been pulling more and more high tech production towards them, that's where most of the jobs are for my field.
There's a nonzero chance that it flips with all of the moving.

People have been saying this every election cycle since at least 2016, and not only has Texas never flipped, it's never even really come close.

In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by 9 points statewide, and in 2020 he beat Biden by 6 points (notably dramatically outperforming the polls, which expected him to win by 1-2 points). Calling elections this far out is a mug's game, but thus far there's nothing in the polls that suggest that Trump is in any real danger of losing Texas in 2024.

And that's backed up down-ballot. Abbott thumped O'Rourke in the 2022 gubernatorial election by 11 points and in so doing, marked 30 years of Republican rule over the state (the last time a Democrat won the Texas Governor's mansion was in 1990). Texas's senators are both Republican, and have been since the 90s; the House reps are also roughly two-thirds Republican (though that, at least, is a bit misleading due to Texas having some pretty wild gerrymandering that favours the Republicans), and both the state house and state senate are controlled by Republicans.

Texas is slowly, slowly going more blue, but the odds that it actually flips this election are pretty negligible.

Aculo posted...

I'm not as worried as I was the last couple of elections, tbh. Incumbent presidents tend to get re-elected when the economy is strong and they're not wrapped up in any (real) enormous scandals.

The only caveat here is the US seems to be moving into a new era of politics, and a lot of the old "conventional wisdom" no longer applies.

By conventional wisdom, Donald Trump never should have gotten anywhere close to the Republican nomination, nevermind the actual presidency. To cherry-pick one example, Howard Dean's presidential ambitions ended because he screamed wrong; yet Trump survived scandals that would have sunk any politician from 10+ years ago. By conventional wisdom, the 2022 midterms - where the Democrats had the presidency, but were presiding over a somewhat moribund economy - should have been a landslide for the Republicans, but instead the Republicans held the senate and only barely lost the House. A lot of the polling in the last two election cycles has completely whiffed on their predictions (both Biden and Hillary were expected to cruise to easy victories; the former only barely squeaked out a win, coming perilously close to losing critical swing states, while the latter ultimately lost by similar margins; similarly, Texas and Florida in 2020 and Ohio in 2016 were supposed to be toss-ups, but the Republicans dominated in all three states).

"Conventional wisdom" appears to be failing us, and I think we still haven't fully figured out what the new normal for this era is.