Texas’ biggest metro areas may tip America’s balance of power in the years ahead

The fast-growing metropolitan areas of Texas are moving to the front line of the battle between the two major political parties for control of the nation’s direction.

Texas has been a linchpin of the Republican Party’s national strength for a generation. But in 2018, Democrats recorded their most significant gains in decades in the state’s largest urban centers.

Now Texas Republicans face indications that the same recoil from President Donald Trump that has hurt the party in other diverse and well-educated metropolitan areas — from suburban Philadelphia to Orange County, California — could combine with growing racial diversity to move Texas from reliably red into a genuinely competitive state much more quickly than almost any analyst envisioned even a few years ago. CONT.

Ronald Brownstein, CNN