Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, the Valley....

Reliably Democratic, and has been for years now.

It was fun.

Thanks for playing an active part in the process.

I think just about anyone who can should volunteer on election night at least once, in part because it would blow some of our silly misconceptions about how things really operate into orbit.

I help trained over 200 poll watchers for Harris county. We had poll watchers at each of the early voting locations and then had poll watchers visit most of the GOP controlled election sites under the management of bad judges. There was a great deal of voter suppression by Stan and his goons.

One of the key victories was Kim Ogg as DA. It has been 36 years since Harris County had a democrat as District Attorney. Kim is already getting involved in the broken bail system in Harris County

The little weasel. Another small victory.

Of course it's still was nowhere near enough to win TX.

The big problem here is turnout. Latino turnout, in particular, lags the national average.

I think we have the numbers statewide. We certainly will in another few years, if not now. If we could increase turnout to around the national average, it would be highly competitive overall. Ironically, that's why Harris County was such a big win, as I noted.

Of course, the underlying problem is Tom Delay-era gerrymandering, which makes the local/state races exceedingly difficult. Austin is in 5 or 6 Congressional districts. I think San Antonio is in 7. Kind of hard to make gains when Dems in a wide area are crammed into 1 district out of 6 or 7.

Not that we won't try.

We really, really, really need to somehow gain control by 2020, the next redistricting year.

Given all the doom and gloom of the election results this is a nice bit of news. Democrats need to work to expand the map.

Clinton won the southland by nearly 400,000 votes with little coordination, it would have not been remotely close. Dallas County is the only blue county north of this line. In 2012 Obama would have eked out a win in this area by maybe a tenth of that amount. It would be even higher than 400k but a number of counties towards the northern edges had large +R totals.



You could move that line a couple of counties north to include the redder suburbs of Austin and Houston (including hyper-red Montgomery County) and she still would have won with 100k or so votes to spare.

The one county I'm disappointed in is Hays (San Marcos), there were an insane number of Bernie yard signs there around the university in the spring and it should flip by the next election. Also Nueces County (Corpus Christi) should turn soon. And it's nice to see the Dems pick up a true suburban county (Fort Bend).

While I would love to see the state split like this it's just a pipe dream. If anything it's yet another argument why the electoral college needs to go.

And there's too much blue in the southern part of the state. Unfortunately, about half the counties shown in blue (or neutral) are actually red, some of them quite so. Hudspeth County, for example, just to the east of El Paso, went 57/37 Trump. Aransas County, just NE of Corpus Christi, went 73/23 Trump. Definitely not blue.

Here's a better map:

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/texas

It lets you shift state lines around to determine who would win a theoretical state if you redrew the boundaries.

It's not terribly realistic since it includes some very red areas as part of its mythical blue TX. With the exception of the RGV, everything else is pretty much an island oasis. I suppose we could make Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, and Houston island nation-states or something.

If you take an extreme case like Illinois, Cook County is the only thing preventing it from being a red state (that's a big "but" though). Nevada is turning into something similar with Vegas.

Since it's just for fun and games, there is a way to split Texas in half that keeps Dallas and other urban counties in the +D part and most (but not all) of the +R suburbs and places like Waco in a separate state. It would look a bit awkward - like a turkey or some sort of bird - but would have been +D by a half-million votes

We Texans keep telling the rest of you how things are clearly trending in our state---to no avail whatsoever. Now that we're all residents of Trump Land, maybe you'll lay off the Texas-bashing and pay closer attention.

Obama barely won Harris County in 2012 (971 votes). Hillary won it easily.

Before you accuse "the rest of you" of Texas-bashing, perhaps you should read the post you're responding to. I quite clearly note that I'm posting this because the whole red state/blue state stuff is nonsense, and Texas is a perfect example of why. We're on the same side.

I pray to God the DNC would get their shit together here !!!

Texas can be flipped if the economic message is taken to the western part of the state if not just for the margins !!!

Hillary won Dallas and Houston big largely because they were outliers - the turnout there was much better than in most other blue areas in the state. If we could increase and maintain similar turnout in the other areas, we'd be much closer to swinging the state. We basically have to outvote the red areas and they are, unfortunately, only getting redder.

So, yeah, I agree - organization is going to be key.

Metropolitan areas that are larger than entire states should count as much as those states in our voting system.

we are living now.

I don't think I like this episode.