Some might point to the ascendent Latino vote in Texas as a reason to hope to break the GOP lock on the state. (This is perhaps the most frustrating topic of discussion for anyone who lives in the real world of projecting electorate choices, instead of a fantasy “what it could be” land.) As Nate Cohn pointed out earlier this year, an up-to-date estimate of what Texas will look like in 11 years shows that Latinos will not be anywhere close to making up enough of the population to produce a Democratic victory in the presidential election. Unless there is a Democratic landslide nationwide, any Republican presidential candidate will probably win by double digits.
The math of Texas over the next dozen years is rather simple. Latinos might not even be 35% of the voting-eligible population by 2024, even as they are a larger share of the voting age population. Remember, you have to be a citizen to be able to vote, and a decent number of Latinos in Texas are not (yet). White non-Hispanics should maintain a majority of the vote.
That’s key because, while polling in Texas is limited, we can infer that whites in Texas vote a lot more like those from South Carolina than those in New York. Add on the fact that Texas Latinos are not as overwhelmingly Democratic as they are nationwide, thanks in part to good Republican outreach, and what you have in Texas is an absolute sinkhole for the Democratic party.
