Yes, a purple Texas. Not a solidly blue one unless Democrats start getting 2/3 of the vote in places like Harris and DFW (which I don’t think is necessarily out of the question in the four core counties that make up the latter by the end of the decade). Democrats should have enough votes in the places they need to have at least one major statewide win by the end of this decade is my point. Probably beating Ted Cruz in 2024 or 2030 is my guess.
For my DFW point, I fear you underestimate the bloodbath that is coming this decade from places like Collin County and Denton County flipping. And we haven’t seen Democrats peak in Tarrant yet either.
I think Dems will start occasionally picking up a statewide win here or there by the end of the decade. Unlike GA though, I think the GOP has a very viable path to keeping Texas competitive and maybe even swing it back their way in the far distant future. I think one could make a case (assuming current trends continue) that the GOP has a higher ceiling with hispanics than Dems do with whites, mostly due to education divide. Non College hispanics are a much much higher percentage of the hispanic vote than college educated whites are of the white vote. White voters are also rapidly declining as a share of the population while latino voters of all types are the fastest growing demographic. There's also the factor that out of state whites moving in have also tended to lean R based on surveys I've seen. Collin and Denton are very likely gone long term for Rs because of the high income voters there, Tarrant I think will be moderately gone short term but Rs have future upside with hispanics and Tarrant overall is much more working class than Collin, Denton or Dallas. Harris and Bexar also have long term hispanic upside for Rs along with the RGV. If hispanic voters never eventually flip though, the TX GOP is pretty much done in a decade's time.
Another thing to consider and I have been beating this drum: If Hispanics no longer deliver for Democrats, they will simply look to peel more off of the WWC. This is what the Howard Dean 50 state strategy was about after it looked like after the 2004 election that relying on Hispanic voters wasn't delivering (they either stay home or vote Republican). It was eventually shelved when Hispanics "came home" in the Obama years.
If Hispanics become that problematic for Democrats, they will be given space to triangulate on some of the issues that have made less-educated but also less-religious suburban and rural white vote more Republican. Ala the Danish Soc Dems or better yet, when Bill Clinton did his Sista Soulja thing when he won back enough Reagan (but not Nixon) Democrats by emphasizing a shift in resources from combating extreme poverty to fighting violent crime. A cop on every corner. The era of Big Government is over. Et cetera. Et cetera.
Either Polis, Whitmer, Warnock, Fetterman, or Shapiro can say, in 2028 or 2032, "Not everyone who wants to come here should stay here", "were not a racist country", and "there is other ways we can help oppressed and endangered people other than moving them here".
