When will Texas become a swing state?

[Verily]

Once the children of illegal immigrant (who are themselves citizens) are old enough to vote. Texas went from 61% R in 2004 to 55% R in 2008, while the white vote remained at 75/25 R. As another poster would say, be patient.

This was because the "favorite son" vote actually helped Bush a lot in the Rio Grande valley (much less elsewhere); it is almost impossible to imagine Cameron County coming even close to voting for a Republican not from Texas, but it happily voted for Bush in 2004. In the long-term, yes, as the second and third generations grow up, the state will become more Democratic. However, this needs to be coupled with a weakening of the GOP in the suburbs to tip the state to the Democrats.

[Verily]

Once the children of illegal immigrant (who are themselves citizens) are old enough to vote. Texas went from 61% R in 2004 to 55% R in 2008, while the white vote remained at 75/25 R. As another poster would say, be patient.

This was because the "favorite son" vote actually helped Bush a lot in the Rio Grande valley (much less elsewhere); it is almost impossible to imagine Cameron County coming even close to voting for a Republican not from Texas, but it happily voted for Bush in 2004. In the long-term, yes, as the second and third generations grow up, the state will become more Democratic. However, this needs to be coupled with a weakening of the GOP in the suburbs to tip the state to the Democrats.

I find it hard to believe that Hispanics are uniquely inclined to vote for a "favorite son." Again, the white vote diden't change a bit. What has happenned is that the GOP has gone suicidal on the  immigration issue.

The 1996-2000 swings in the Rio Grande Valley say otherwise, particularly in machine counties like Webb and Cameron. South Texas Hispanics may not have loved Bush, but they liked him until at least 2004. (Also note that this isn't as obvious against a map of Texas as a whole because the Southern-charactered areas also swung hard to Bush in 2000, but unlike South Texas they did not swing back to Obama, indicative of a different and more paradigmatic shift there.)

Also (to Vepres), the multi-generation Hispanic statistics are heavily skewed by Puerto Ricans and Cubans, who make up the majority of multi-generation Hispanics in the country but are much less represented among immigrants, or in Texas. Such numbers are pretty much useless. Furthermore, turnout among immigrant Hispanics is so dreadful that, even if their Democratic tendencies decline with the generations, the Democrats benefit from more generations passing because the voting rate increases (not to mention children of illegal immigrants, the latter of which don't vote at all and make up a solid chunk of the population of Texas).

[Verily]

Also (to Vepres), the multi-generation Hispanic statistics are heavily skewed by Puerto Ricans and Cubans, who make up the majority of multi-generation Hispanics in the country but are much less represented among immigrants, or in Texas. Such numbers are pretty much useless. Furthermore, turnout among immigrant Hispanics is so dreadful that, even if their Democratic tendencies decline with the generations, the Democrats benefit from more generations passing because the voting rate increases (not to mention children of illegal immigrants, the latter of which don't vote at all and make up a solid chunk of the population of Texas).

Still, I do think Hispanics will become a swing group, as Dgov said well:

You seem to be forgetting a key point here--Hispanics are ceasing to be an immigrant community in the United States.  There are more Hispanics in Texas than there are in Mexico who want to move to the United States (according to Gallup), and the "Hispanic Baby Boom" is starting to take hold.  They are gradually moving into suburban communities and up the income ladder.

So basically the second and third generations are starting to dominate the Hispanic society, and those voters tend to be Socially and Fiscally more in line with Republicans than with Democrats.  Take a look at the voting patterns of the immigrants from the late 1800s--they started out overwhelmingly Democrat when they were immigrant and poor, and now Lean Republican once they've moved up the income ladder and out to the suburbs.  Remember when the Democrats used to get ~80% of the Catholic vote?

But this is all either false or conjecture.

Catholics never voted 80% Democrat, or even particularly more than 60-65% or so (this varied by region, of course; Catholics in Louisiana may have voted 80% Democrat, but they were not recent immigrants anyway). And it took Catholic populations over a century to move from maybe 65% D to the modern 55% D, during a time in which massive other political shifts (Women's suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, the break-up of the Solid South, Asian and Hispanic immigration) changed the voting public and voting patterns in far more extreme manners than a 5% swing in Catholic voting patterns ever could.

Socially, the second and third generation Hispanics are more in line with the Democrats than the Republicans, even compared to their parents--consider, for example, the vote on Prop 8 in California, where established Hispanic areas voted against banning gay marriage (while areas heavy with recent immigrants voted in favor).

Fiscally, perhaps he is right that they are "more in line", or at least less out of line. But how much does this mean? Nothing, really; what matters is how they vote. Places like Ladera Heights, California are not fond of Republicans despite their wealth; why would similar wealthy Hispanics (still very much a rarity and underrepresented) change?

And, as I pointed out, there are no meaningful statistics suggesting that second and third generation Hispanics are less Democratic than their parents when controlling for origin (e.g., excluding Tejanos and Cubans from your sample, at the least, as they are very overrepresented among multi-generation Hispanics). Moreover, even if they were, that decline--say a 5% swing over 100 years, as happened with Catholics!--would be more than made up by increased turnout among a still strongly Democratic constituency.

[Verily]

"When will Texas become a swing state?"

-When Hell freezes over?

Or When Texas Freezes over?

Seriously, Texas has been "About to go Democrat" since the 1980s.  Since then, Republicans have managed to hold on by significantly increasing their percentage of both the White vote and the Hispanic vote, mostly due to rapid suburbanization.  Rural East Texas has gone from a swing region (Clinton won or came close to winning it in 92) to about 70-30.  Orange county in particular has had a large shift, having Voted for Clinton by 17 points in '92 and voted for McCain by 47 points in '08.  Add on that Texas Hispanics have gone from about 80-20 Democrat to close to 60-40 Democratic over the last 30 years (Topped off by Bush winning them or almost winning them in 2004) and you have plenty of reasons to believe the Republican party can hold on to the state.

This is... weird and wrong. Texas was Democratic in the 1980s. Undoubtedly it was moving towards the Republicans throughout the 80s and 90s, and maybe into the early 00s. But no one was talking about it being "about to go Democratic" in 1980 because it was Democratic, and the question then was when it would become more Republican.

Political winds have changed in Texas only in the past five or ten years or so. The Republicans are no longer gaining ground among white voters there because there is no longer any more ground to be gained, while the Democrats are gaining ground among urban whites and with an increasing Hispanic population. This is a slow process, though, and it will be at least a decade before Democrats are particularly viable statewide again.

Of course, I don't think 2010 is a great indicator of this Republican strength. 2006 would have been a better example, had the Democrats had a decent candidate and there not been weird Independents.

[Verily]

Indeed, they haven't been for the past few years. The suburbs have become less strongly GOP. They're still Republican bastions, to be sure, and would be even if Texas were a swing state, but not to the extent they were half a decade ago. It's not only about more Hispanic votes; it's also about lowering GOP margins in the suburbans and white urban areas.