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When I was born in 1996, George W. Bush was already a year into his first term as governor of Texas. In my lifetime, Texas politics has been entirely dominated by conservative giants who governed with unchecked power, while progressives seemed to lose more and more ground. I have never known a Texas that sounded more like Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan than it did like Fox News and Karl Rove.
Few national campaigns, funders or candidates bothered to show up here, underscoring their preconceived notion that Texas was never in play to begin with. As a result, the infrastructure necessary to register and turn out voters has consistently lagged behind heavily courted states like Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia.
But for the first time in decades, Texas politics are changing.
The Democratic Party’s decision to host this week’s presidential debate in Houston is the latest indicator of what so many of us have been saying for years: Texas is the largest battleground state in the country. But the part too often glossed over is that the Lone Star State is only in play because of young voters.
In Texas, 43% of us are under the age of 30, and 63% are people of color. Our state is getting younger and more diverse every day and in 2018, those young folks showed up to flex their electoral power. Youth turnout tripled in Texas between 2014 and 2018, a surge that helped flip 12 seats in the Texas House of Representatives, two in the Senate, and brought Democrat Beto O’Rourke within striking distance of Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. When young people showed up to vote, the conversation about Texas started to change.
But showing up has never been inevitable. Texas has some of the strictest voting laws in the country, laws that disproportionately block access to the ballot box for young people and people of color. That’s why groups like MOVE Texas, Texas Rising, JOLT Action and Battleground Texas invest so heavily in civic education, voter registration and voter turnout programs that empower young Texans vote — many for the first time. But we are not just turning folks out to vote for one election; we are creating a habit of civic participation that will create life-long voters and fundamentally change who decides elections in this state.
