Republicans In Trouble Even in Texas
Posted in H.L. News, Main Blog (All Posts) on July 18th, 2007 6:19 am by HL
In the upcoming Presidential election, Democrats will have to win states that they lost in the last couple of elections, by that I mean they have to win states that they won the last two election but were stolen from them, namely Florida, and Ohio. If the dems. can manage to win one of those states, they will need some others with high electoral vote counts such as Colorado, or Arizona.
Then their is another option: just win Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal the Republican party is even in trouble in that bastion of everything conservative, here’s the story.
Wall Street Journal: The Troubled Texas GOP
Excerpt
Don’t believe that voters would ever draw such a conclusion in Texas? In June several national polls found younger voters are turning away from the GOP. One of them, conducted by CBS News, the New York Times and MTV, found that 54% of 17- to 29-year-olds would vote for a Democratic candidate for president, while only 32% would vote Republican.
Many Republicans would like to believe that they are only experiencing a temporary downdraft caused by the unpopularity of the Iraq war and President Bush–conventional wisdom that seems to forget that Mr. Bush’s success in gubernatorial and presidential elections is a large reason why the GOP completed its domination of state politics. It was only in 2002 that the party won control of the Legislature.
Not everyone, however, is buying this assessment. Royal Masset, a political consultant and longtime political director for the Republican Party of Texas–who played a key role in organizing the grassroots support that took the GOP from marginality to an overwhelming majority–has been predicting a reversal for years.
“There’s a certain inevitability in demographics,” he told me. “We knew that if we could win 40% of the Hispanic vote,” as Mr. Bush did in 2004, “we’d control Texas until 2030.” But in 2006, the number of Texas Hispanics who voted Republican fell to between 30% and 35% (depending on the poll).
Is this the reason why Bush is so in favor of “guest worker programs” and giving illegal immigrants a chance to stay here legally. Sure he wants it so his buddies in big business have a source of cheap labor and to do away with the middle class. But maybe Bush knows something that his more strident anti-immigration republicans don’t want to think about. More from WSJ
And why not? A similar flip happened in California in the 1990s. What was once Reagan Country became a Democratic stronghold. GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s get-tough approach to immigration was an undeniable factor.
