Deep Blexas

America didn’t just get Blexas. America got Deep Blexas.

The Democrat James Talarico beat his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, by 12 points Tuesday night, a lead almost as large as Donald Trump’s margin over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. But Talarico wasn’t the only Democrat riding the wave: Governor Greg Abbott, who seemed to have an uncanny lock on the politics of the state, lost to Gina Hinojosa, who will become the first Hispanic governor of Texas. State Representative Vikki Goodwin ousted the powerful lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick. Nathan Johnson, a commercial litigator and state senator, will hold one of the most influential attorney general’s offices in the country after defeating his Republican opponent, Mayes Middleton.

The Republican Bo French, who drew national attention for complaining about the presence of South Asian students at the University of Texas at Austin, lost his race for the Texas Railroad Commission to the Democrat Jon Rosenthal, who mocked French for a poll he posted on X last year: “The dude that posted the online poll last summer asking who’s a bigger threat to America, and the only two choices were Muslims and Jews—tonight this Jewish engineer sends that motherfucker home,” Rosenthal said on Election Night.

Democrats appear to have narrowed Republican supermajorities on the Texas Supreme Court and State Board of Education, both bodies with national influence. Many Texas cases have ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court, and the educational standards set by the board can affect schools in other states because of Texas’s size and market power.

Texas Republicans haven’t been washed like this since the end of Reconstruction, when Black Texans were overwhelmingly Republican and the state Democratic Party was run by a secessionist. The last time a Democrat won a Senate election in Texas, the Soviet Union was still in Afghanistan, Big Daddy Kane and Salt-N-Pepa had just released new albums, and Americans poured into theaters to watch that classic of American cinema, Crocodile Dundee II.

[Idrees Kahloon: Why Republicans lost so big]

The old saying is that the states are the laboratories of democracy. But for the past decade, Texas has been more of a laboratory for autocracy, testing out new forms of right-wing state repression. Texas has been an innovator in using voting restrictions and gerrymandering to entrench the power of the governing party. Texas lawmakers have pioneered restrictions on speech by passing book bans, censoring higher education, and demanding the firing of public servants whose views offend their sensibilities (such as the CEO of the Alamo Trust, who was forced out after a social-media post recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day). The state has pioneered draconian anti-abortion measures—passing its own strict ban with nearly unusable exceptions and a bounty law encouraging Texans to snitch on their neighbors, and also trying  to bully other states into enforcing its anti-abortion laws. Texas lawmakers have engaged in the outright persecution of trans people and their families, including triggering investigations by the state’s Child Protective Services into parents if their child was suspected of transitioning.

These Democratic wins mean that, at least temporarily, Texas will no longer be a safe environment for these kinds of experiments.

The GOP plan to hold Texas hinged largely on heavy-handed gender politics; a flood of ads attacked Talarico and Hinojosa for being too supportive of trans rights or, in Talarico’s case, of actually being transgender. Both candidates have moved to the right on trans-rights issues, but the ads clearly failed to mobilize voters. “We’re still running transgender ads. It’s just not resonating,” Dade Phelan, a Republican and former speaker of the Texas House, told Texas Monthly in October. “The 8 to 10 percent of voters in the middle who are going to decide this election, when they hear stuff about boys in girls’ sports, they don’t even know what you’re talking about. This never happened in their communities.”

Texas is a very big place, and contrary to stereotype, liberal Texans have never been confined to Austin. For many years now, Republicans have consolidated their power by capitalizing on conservative fears that liberal infidels would “California my Texas.” In the end, it was  Republicans’ success that led to their defeat. Republicans have run Texas for more than 30 years: There was simply no one else to blame for the economic burdens that drove Texans to the polls yesterday. Having so long dominated state politics, Republicans were used to trying to outflank one another from the right in GOP primaries, but ill-prepared for a competitive general election. They didn’t just lose the big races; they got walloped like Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

As the more moderate, business-oriented party of the George W. Bush era gave way to Ken Paxtons and Bo Frenches, Texas Republicans seemed to become more focused on making the lives of millions of Texans miserable, rather than better. It was a strategy premised on the idea that disdain for out-groups and culture-war nonsense about vegan tacos and solar energy would be sufficient to distract Texans from corruption and misgovernance. It worked, until it didn’t.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Talarico addressed this strategy directly. “We are tired of being told to hate each other,” Talarico said. He might not have spoken for every Texan, but he was speaking for most of them.