Texas Is Bracing for a Blue Wave in 2020. Yes, Texas.

But when Perry left office in 2015, as Jillson said, “traditional conservatism went with him.” Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, right-wing ideologues who both won reelection last year, have unchained the pent-up lawmakers and activists who’d long chafed at the relative moderation of party leaders—and they’re steering the Texas GOP straight toward self-destruction. “You’ve got a very conservative group of Republicans in the legislature passing their preferred legislation,” Jillson noted, “while the wave builds on the other side and Democrats are making gains.” Even though Republican leaders have grown increasingly alarmed about the Democratic renaissance, “there’s no move to moderate what the party is doing, or to speak to those growing constituencies in Texas. The Republicans are locked in,” Jillson said. “There’s a lot of money and a lot of institutional influence on the right that keeps the Republicans worried about primary challenges from the right more than winning general elections.”

While Republicans have been busy planting the seeds of their likely doom, the Texas Democratic Party has been rebuilding itself into a force capable of capitalizing on its opponents’ strategic insanity. A decade ago, when I was running a political magazine in Texas, the state’s Democrats were comically inept; while Texas grew browner and younger by the day, the party was led by a gang of aging, nostalgic white moderates who clung to the outdated strategies that had won them elections in the 1960s and ’70s. These dinosaurs couldn’t understand why Latinos weren’t registering and voting Democratic in far greater numbers, or why upward of 40 percent of those who did vote sometimes cast ballots for Republicans like Perry—what was wrong with these people?

What was wrong, of course, was that Texas Democrats were giving Latinos and young whites no reason to engage. That started to change in 2012, when Gilberto Hinojosa, a former judge, was elected party chair. “He wanted a progressive, aggressive institution,” said Manny Garcia, who became one of the new hires charged with “creating a Democratic brand” where there was none, and moving the party into the twenty-first century. Texas Democrats now have full-blown data and digital operations; they’re raising more money online than any state party in the country, Garcia said, while plotting “the largest coordinated campaign in the history of Texas” for 2020. The party’s efforts have been aided considerably by voter-engagement groups like Jolt and Texas Rising, which have focused on Latinos and young voters and helped to send voter registration and turnout soaring; from 2014 to 2018, Texas added some 1.8 million new voters, the majority of them women and people of color. The party estimates that “there’s 30,000 to 50,000 Democrats who arrive in the state every month,” according to Garcia, and now—at last—they’re being asked to register, vote, and run for office.

The spooked Republicans recently rolled out a voter-registration PAC of their own, called Engage Texas, which aims to sign up new Republicans. Garcia finds this both telling and amusing. “Those one million unregistered Republicans they’re talking about don’t exist,” he said, laughing. “They’re tapped out.”

It’s been a long time since Democrats in Texas could have a good chuckle at the other party’s expense. Republicans have been so omnipotent that, for years, they’ve been dispatching their own grassroots volunteers to other states at election time; they simply weren’t needed in Texas. Wealthy conservative donors have followed suit, funneling their millions into places where money was needed. That will likely change in 2020, after last year’s wake-up call—though conservative pundits like Sean Trende are worrying aloud about Republican complacency:

People grossly oversold GOP vulnerability in TX pre-Trump and are grossly underselling it now. Texas is an overwhelmingly urban/suburban state, so GOP weakening in the suburbs is felt disproportionately in TX. It could go blue, quickly, under this current configuration — Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) August 5, 2019

Trump and Cornyn will still be favored to win in 2020, partly because the chances of national Democrats fully investing in carrying Texas, at this point, remain slim. With its massive size and large number of media markets, it would cost gazillions to go all-in on winning the state—and national Democrats will probably choose to funnel their resources into the Rust Belt states Trump barely carried in 2016, along with Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.

But nobody in Texas, aside from a few blinkered Republicans, believes that Democrats won’t continue to loosen the Republican stranglehold in 2020. At least half a dozen Republican seats in Congress will be ripe for the taking, and Democrats have a realistic chance of capturing the nine Republican seats in the state House they need to gain a majority—just in time for the next round of redistricting in 2021. If they regain a toehold of power in Austin, and can prevent Republicans from having total control over gerrymandering, Democrats could turn Texas blue in a hurry; if not, it’ll probably be a more gradual process over the next decade, with strict voter ID and other forms of suppression still intact, and districts artificially tilted in Republicans’ favor.

Whether Democrats regain power in Texas quickly or gradually, it still adds up to a doomsday scenario for Republicans—and a precious ray of light, through the fog and gloom of Trumpism, for Democrats.