[Warning: This post contains no bike content.]
In the spring of 2016, while everyone was exhausted by a presidential campaign that had already been running for a year, I was in a class on demography and social change. We had to choose a topic for our final project, and being, at the time, a junkie for Nate Silver’s work on elections(*), I decided to build a Monte Carlo simulation of my own to look at a question which was being explored; could Texas flip to become a blue state? The Texas Office of the State Demographer had recently published an article with projections for Latino population growth based on the rapid increase the state had experienced between 2000 and 2015; I used those numbers as the basis for a model.
I decided to build it in the R language, which is very popular in demography. I didn’t know R, and it turned out I don’t like it, but it was adequate for the task. In combination with the Shiny framework, it was easy to make the simulation available online to anyone who wanted to play around with the parameters. And remarkably, the app is still working. Check it out:
As I watched election results come in on November 3, 2026, which included a flip to blue of all three branches of the Texas government, I was of course reminded of that project. My model had been limited to presidential elections, but the underlying demographic shift affects any elected position. As long as Latino voters remain more likely to vote for Democrats, and as long as the Latino population continues to grow relative to the white population, if you draw a trend line through the data you’ll find that Blue Texas is eventually inevitable.
The conclusion of my project, though, is not that Texas will at some point be Democratic forever. It’s that the demographic forces shaping politics in Texas (and other states too, but Texas is the most important) are going to force a political realignment, a redefinition of what it means to belong to the Republican or Democratic Party.
The Republican Party responded to this pressure by confronting the demographic tide head-on, adopting reactionary white nationalist positions. When Trump originally came to power in 2016, the clown car of his first administration was largely ineffective at enacting white supremacist policies. But in the six years since his loss in 2020, the movement gained power. Assisted by the Project 2025 handbook, along with cruel handlers like Stephen Miller, Trump’s second term has been characterized by using largely unchecked executive power in order to attack Black and brown people (among others). Former ICE head Greg Bovino said he wanted to deport 100 million, which is more or less the entire population of Black and brown people in the U.S.
Trump learned today that people didn’t like that.
While the past two years have seen a lot of pain and suffering inflicted by Republican goons, they could not possibly remove enough people to counteract the larger demographic forces. In the Blue Texas simulation, tweaking the sliders to represent different conditions has a huge impact; move the turnout slider for U.S.-born Latino people to match the one for white people (66%), for example, and you’ll see Texas going blue by 2024. When the post-mortems for this mid-term election come out, we’ll probably find that Latino “Blueness” [likelihood to vote Democratic] and turnout increased, and also that turnout among white voters decreased. We might even find that Blueness increased among white voters, though I’m less confident of that.
But here’s what I hope can be understood by the Democratic Party: You are at this moment reaping the benefits of the rejection of deeply unpopular policies from a deeply unpopular party led by a deeply unpopular rapist asshole. That benefit is one-time only. Those Latino votes don’t belong to you, any more than they did to Trump in 2024. If you go back to business-as-usual, as if the rules of engagement haven’t changed, as if the policies of Clinton and Obama are the solution, you’ll find yourself once again being trounced by the fascist movement.
The political realignment is upon us. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity.
(*) Forgive me. I was young.
