Increasingly Reasonable Magical Thinking

Ten million Texans didn't show up. That's a math problem.

On August 15, we discussed the Republican vote to bulldoze Big Bend, specifically the three Republicans from Texas who cast that vote. Last weekend, Progress Texas followed up on that article with an interview featuring all three Democrats running against those Republicans, along with a discussion of that vote.

As a reminder, those Democrats are:

• TX06: Danny Minton

• TX27: Tanya Lloyd

• TX31: Justin Early

Cook Political is rating each of these races around a 10 (R) or 11 (R), but last week Beto reminded me that a race in my backyard moved +30 points to the left.

But we’ve talked about this. Just because Taylor Rehmet’s State Senate seat flipped in one county, in one special election, doesn’t mean we’ll see a blanket +30 across Texas in November.

Realistically, we have to look at each district, each precinct, each candidate, the money, the organizing, and so on.

Yesterday, the Texas Observer published “The Year For The Magical Thinker,” where they defined the Lone Star Left as “deranged optimism,” which has become increasingly reasonable. You bet I’m making t-shirts. 😁

I must admit, in previous years you and I have spoken a lot about ideology, the Texas Democrat, and the paths to a better world. This year, though, I’ve shied away from general discussions of what the grassroots were feeling, acting on, and how that ideology was at play in Texas. I don’t know if you knew this, but there are a lot of ideological and identity fights happening within the Democratic Party, and they aren’t fights I’m interested in getting swept up in.

However, there’s really nothing magical about it at all.

The most important voting facts in Texas.

In 2018, when Beto lost to Ted Cruz by only 2 points, 57.9% of eligible voters did not vote. (Which was over 11 million people.) That’s both registered voters who did not vote and eligible voters who were not registered.

In 2020, Democrats may have been high on Beto’s close chances, and they still showed up in high numbers. But guess what? Because of COVID, the Texas Democratic Party was completely no-contact that year. 46.6% of eligible voters didn’t make it to the polls.

Fuck, 2022. Ugh. Yuck. I thought we would carry our momentum. A lot of shit went wrong. Texas Democrats, in general, were hyper-focused on what was happening in DC, rather than Texas. It’s the news’ fault, not theirs. Biden was in the White House. The left didn’t like Biden. Texas Democrats are further left than those in most other states. And our leadership then still sucked. 63% of eligible voters in Texas did not vote in 2022, or roughly 13.5 million people.

2024, if Texas Democrats weren’t depressed in 2022, they sure as hell were in 2024. Even Kendall Scudder says, “1.4 million Texas Democrats stayed home in 2024.” It was frustration with the choices. It was Gaza. It was a lack of civics education. It was whatever it was. But in 2024, 50.3% of eligible voters in Texas didn’t make it to the polls.

In Texas, there are two very consistent problems.

1. Millions and millions of people are eligible to vote, but never register.

2. Millions and millions of people are registered to vote, but never cast a ballot.

And in turn:

• In 2018, Republicans had 1 million more voters.

• In 2020, Republicans had 600,000 more voters.

• In 2022, Republicans had 800,000 more voters.

• In 2024, Republicans had 1.5 million more voters.

And the non-voters remain around 10 million or more.

Texas is the state with the lowest voter turnout in America and has been for many years, and Republicans, each legislative session, pass more bills to decrease turnout further.

And therefore, Texas isn’t a red state. Texas is a state where the Republicans ALWAYS vote, without faltering. And where Democrats mostly don’t vote, sometimes some of them do, but it’s really math more than magic.

The Republican advantage in a Trump-on-the-ballot year is 1.5 million voters. The people who didn’t show up at all are 10 million-plus, election after election, year after year, no matter who’s in the White House or what the vibes are. Republicans have never once needed to win an argument in this state. They just needed Democrats to stay home, and Democrats have obliged them for twenty years running.

If even a fraction of those 10 million non-voters show up, the 1.5 million-vote gap is just a rounding error.

So, could we have flipped 17 seats in 2024? Yeah, but Texas Democrats chose to stay home instead.

But why did they stay home?

A while back, Texas Monthly published an article basically saying that there was no proof that the non-voters in Texas were “secretly blue.” They could have been red, for all we know, since they were non-voters, after all.

L2, a big data company, has modeled Texas data and determined there are:

• Likely Democratic: 8,133,683 (46.5%)

• Likely Republican: 6,001,190 (37.7%)

The opps (Gen Z slang for “opposition”) have fought tooth and nail to debunk this claim by L2, mostly because they don’t understand big data and Texas doesn’t register by party. L2 did write an explainer of their modeling.

But if you work in an industry where you’re around a lot of people, or you talk to a lot of people in Texas, especially in urban areas. You probably don’t need big data to figure this out for you.

Did you know the maximum number of Facebook Groups you can join is 6,000? I found that out by reaching the cap. I used to join them all. All the Democratic clubs and groups across the state, but also the County Breaking News groups and gossip groups in every county in Texas. Hood County always had the best gossip. And Vidor was always my favorite place to troll. I probably pay less attention to them nowadays than I used to, but spending years and years with those groups on your feed will tell you a lot about the people of Texas.

There’s about a million reasons people don’t vote. I’ll give you a few.

A few years back, I met an elderly mechanic who didn’t vote. We got into a discussion about it. He told me about some of his personal financial struggles, his legal issues, and how, no matter who has been in office his entire life, nothing has ever gotten better for him.

I wish I could tell you I’ve only heard a story like that once in my life.

When I’ve spoken to Black activists in East Texas, they’ve told me stories like that are common, but generational. Black civil rights activists were still being murdered in East Texas in the 1970s. We’re now looking at a youth who, in many cases, had parents and grandparents who didn’t vote because of generational disenfranchisement.

Then they aren’t teaching these kids anything in school.

A few years ago, my stepson brought a girl home, and like all of my interactions in life (it’s a running theme), the topic of voting came up. And the girl looked me square in the eye and said, “There’s no point, since they already pick who they want to win, anyway.”

I responded, “Who is they?”

She meant the wealthy elite. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that one, either. That the oligarch has already picked out who they want to win, and no matter who you vote for, they will stick their little tentacles in and declare the winner.

But that’s not true at all. And maybe it seems that way to people who “don’t pay attention to politics,” when they see our elected officials doing favors for the rich and nothing for the people.

And because I did my life backward and had a baby when I was a teenager, then went to college when I was 40, I actually had a chance to talk to college kids when I had a lot more sense. Largely, they believe everything that happens in DC is happening with every Democrat everywhere. Texas Democrats are like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and they are indistinguishable. Because Democrats are centerists and centrists are bad.

And then there was Gaza. A YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll, released in January 2025, found that roughly 19 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 but sat out 2024, nearly a third named Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza as a top reason for staying home.

The math said we could have flipped those seats in 2024. We could have flipped Texas in 2022, 2020, and even 2018. It was my magical thinking that believed Texans would have had enough of Republicans’ shit to kick them out of office. But they just didn’t bother to show up.

We’ve always had the numbers to flip this state.

We just never had enough people willing to do the boring, unglamorous, grunt work.

None of the people I just told you about are wrong. The mechanic isn’t wrong that nothing’s changed for him no matter who’s in Austin or DC. Those East Texas activists aren’t wrong about what their grandparents survived. The girl at my dinner table isn’t wrong that rich people get favors from elected officials.

Every single reason somebody’s given me for not voting is rooted in something true. That’s what makes it so hard to argue with. And it’s exactly why both parties find it easier to ignore than to fix.

But “they already picked the winner” and “my vote doesn’t matter” are two different sentences that end with nobody showing up, and the 1.5 million vote gap holds for another cycle. Cynicism is a strategy.

So here’s how twenty years of this state beating the hope out of people and me refusing to learn my lesson gives me magical thinking. The math was never the problem. The problem was 10 million individual Texans, for a hundred different individual reasons, deciding one at a time that Tuesday wasn’t worth it.

Convincing ten million people sounds impossible. Turning out a few hundred thousand of them, district by district, precinct by precinct, does not.

And why convince them?

Because in Texas, we have a ton of progressives on the ticket!

Part of being a magical thinker is thinking there are more progressives among blue voters in Texas than among their non-Texas counterparts. I’ve actually been saying this for about a decade; I’ve run many polls about it over the years. It’s one of the things I learned best from being in all those Facebook groups. But let’s get to 2026.

Start with the fact that the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus is a Texan. Greg Casar is the first CPC chair in the caucus’s history to come from a Republican-controlled state. Lloyd Doggett sits on the CPC’s executive board as a vice chair. That’s what happens when a state party gets so locked out of statewide power that its members stop performing moderation for an electorate that was never going to reward them for it anyway.

In a swing state, a Democrat has to worry about the general election, so the incentive is to hedge right and chase the mythical persuadable moderate. In Texas, until very recently, there was no persuadable moderate to chase. Statewide Democrats haven’t won an election since 1994. So the only place the incentive structure actually operates is the primary, and Texas Democratic primary voters, concentrated in Austin, Houston, Dallas, and the border, skew well to the left of the state as a whole. You don’t win a Texas Democratic primary by sounding like Joe Manchin. You win it by sounding like Casar.

That’s the same dynamic behind the 2024 platform fight I’ve written about. Texas Democrats became the first state party in the country to pass a Gaza ceasefire resolution, months before it was safe to say that in national Democratic circles. Nobody in Texas Democratic leadership was going to lose a general election over it, because there was no general election to lose.

Texas Democrats have spent thirty years with nothing to protect and no swing vote to court, and that turns out to be exactly the condition under which a party stops triangulating and starts saying what it actually believes.

• There are currently NINETEEN Texas Democrats on the Congressional ballot who have publicly supported universal healthcare (maybe more; haven’t updated since June).

• Five Texas Democrats received Track AIPAC endorsements; a dozen others have put out statements on US military aid to Israel and human rights abuses.

• There’s an entire new slate of progressives in the Texas House, even before the election. I thought I wrote about it, but now I can’t find it. Julio Salinas, Pooja Sethi, and Adrian Reyna, to name a few.

But maybe, if you don’t really pay attention to Texas politics, it may seem bizarre that there’s an insurgent, progressive-populist, anti-DC political party on the verge of being unleashed right here in the Lone Star State. But maybe, if you’ve been paying close attention and listening all along, it looks less like magic and more like the math working itself out.

County parties from Tarrant to Bexar are running actual canvassing operations instead of waiting for someone to show up and save them. That’s people doing the work, on purpose, for two years, before anybody outside Texas was paying attention.

No PAC is bankrolling this newsletter. I don’t have a campaign paying me to say nice things about their candidate, so I don’t have to be nice if they don’t deserve it. I have you. And nobody’s buying my optimism, deranged or otherwise. That means I only owe you the truth, math included.

We don’t wait for miracles. We make them, one subscriber, one precinct chair, one non-voter turned voter at a time. Consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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