View of San Antonio, Texas from the Tower of the Americas (Unsplash/Chandra Maharzan)
One of the most watched elections in the United States on Tuesday will be in Texas, where Democrat Beto O’Rourke is challenging the incumbent Republican senator, Ted Cruz.
The unexpectedly close contest — polls put Cruz 3 to 10 points ahead; he won by 16 points in 2012 — has revealed something many had forgotten: Texas is not, and never was, monolithic.
When people, especially non-Americans, think of Texas, they think of cowboys, oil and Republicans. For a quarter century, this narrative has held. Now it seems to be fracturing. A new, or perhaps the true, Texas is emerging. (more…)
Night falls on the Texas State Capitol in Austin (Shutterstock/Ryan Conine)
There are, in a certain sense, three big political regions in the United States: the Northeast, the Southeast and the Southwest.
The Northeast has a temperate climate, excellent natural harbors along the Atlantic Ocean and Great Lakes and a long border with Canada. The Southeast has a subtropical climate, less-than-excellent natural harbors (excepting New Orleans) and no international borders. The Southwest has a semi-desert climate, an abundance of energy and mineral resources and an extremely long border with Mexico.
For the purposes of this article, the Northeast has five “core” states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusettes. These are geographically contiguous and have voted for the same party as one another in all six of the presidential elections since 1988 and in 23 out of the thirty elections since 1892. At least four have voted in unison in 27 of the past thirty elections.
If you subtract the smallest of these states, Connecticut, then at least three of the remaining four of these states have voted in unison in 29 of the past thirty elections. The sole exception was 1988 when New Jersey and Pennsylvania voted for Bush senior while New York and Massachusetts were two of only ten states to vote for Michael Dukakis, who had been governor of Massachusetts. (more…)
