Not In My Wildest Dreams Did I See A Texas This Blue

I was raised under a big sky, on a long flat prairie. As a child, my parents taught me to stick out my tongue when anyone said the name “Bill Clinton.” Everyone I met, everyone I knew and loved for my whole entire childhood, was a Republican, except for the few libertarians. Sure, people may have grumbled about our invariably Republican elected officials—be it Bush or Perry or Abbott—but they still voted for them. Republicans ruled Texas in the same inexorable way the sun rises each morning. The alternative was basically unthinkable. Until last night, when all of a sudden it wasn’t.

I knew the place where I grew up was changing. But as the returns came in Tuesday night, I felt like I’d been hit by lightning. Steve Kornacki pointed at my home county, Denton, and declared that James Talarico was up by almost 13 points in the early returns. That margin wouldn’t stay, but the lead did. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Talarico won Denton County with a little over 53 percent of the vote. And it wasn’t just him. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, took Denton County by a narrow margin. Both took the state. 

They were not alone. In every statewide race in Texas, the Democratic candidate won. As Forrest Wilder wrote in Texas Monthly on Wednesday, “It seems like Texans went into the voting booth with a vengeance, voting against anyone with an R next to their names.” In addition to the national Senate seat and the governor’s mansion, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who has been an incredibly adept and evil politician my entire adult life, got destroyed by Vikki Goodwin. Democrats won the attorney general’s office, the comptroller, the railroad commissioner, and the fucking agriculture commissioner. They flipped suburban counties, including Paxton’s own home county of Collin.