Friday, October 14, 2016

Hillary Could Win Texas

Stunning Texas Poll Shows Hillary Clinton Is Close To Turning Lone Star State Blue, reads a headline at Pliticus USA, and the story proceeds: "The bedrock Republican state of Texas could go for Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump's Lone Star state lead has shrunk to within the margin of error [...]"

Back in 2013 in my blog post Texas Is Purple, I tried to spread the word that Texas is not as solidly Republican as many people outside of Texas believe it is. So although I'm very happy that Hillary is now making it close in Texas, I'm not nearly as stunned as some people are.

Besides the fact this story may help to correct the widespread erroneous assumption that Texas is a deep-red Republican stronghold, I'm very happy about it because Texas has 38 electoral votes, and because, of its 36 US Representatives up for re-election next month, 25 are Republicans, and it would be nice to flip a lot of those House seats.

I first became aware of this story today, not from news headlines, but because every day I take a look at a few websites with electoral-vote maps, and today, on one of those sites, , I saw that Texas had gone from pink, "Likely GOP," to white outlined in pink, "Barely GOP." Red means "Strongly GOP," and ElectoralVote has just 81 electoral votes marked red right now. Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Utah and Alaska are currently pink on their map, and besides Texas, the states in white outlined in pink, "Barely GOP," are Iowa, South Carolina and Mississippi.

I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, and put those 38 electoral votes from Texas, or the 6 each from Iowa or Mississippi or the 9 from South Carolina, into Hillary's column prematurely. The most I can say, objectively, is that, right now, Trump's support is plummeting all across the country.

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