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In 2018 a captivating congressman from El Paso nearly turned Texas blue. In a race against Sen. Ted Cruz that captivated Democrats nationwide, Beto O’Rourke lost by a modest 2.6 points, the closest a Democrat has come to winning a Senate or governor’s race in Texas in modern memory.

Although this performance was still a loss that earned Democrats exactly zero Senate seats, it augured a bright future for Democrats in the state. “Blue Texas,” foretold since the Obama era, seemed on track. That perception grew in 2020, when Joe Biden lost the state to Donald Trump by only 6 points in a presidential year, improving 3 points on Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. The state’s color was turning.

And then, in 2024, Texas Democrats, as O’Rourke told me, “got what they deserved.”

Kamala Harris lost the state by a whopping 14 points. While the country shifted rightward as a whole, the turn against Democrats among Latino voters turbocharged the collapse in Texas. Cruz easily won another term in the Senate. “Blue Texas” had never seemed further away.

Which makes it all the stranger that only two years later, we’re doing this again. Because Democrat James Talarico really could win a Texas Senate race.

The political-media industrial complex has been down this road before. No one—no reporter, operative, commentator, analyst, or person on the street—wants to look like an idiot by overhyping it again. I certainly don’t. But after weeks of speaking with politicians and experienced campaign hands in Texas, there’s no denying it: There’s more to this race than the usual hopium.

“You’d have to work pretty hard to not recognize that this is different,” University of Texas professor James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, told me. “That this Senate race is different than any Senate race we’ve seen for a couple of generations, let alone any statewide race.” He noted that in the run-up to the 2018 Texas Senate race, O’Rourke never led in any polls. Meanwhile, Talarico has led or tied in all but one recent poll.

“I think Talarico is just one of, if not the, best candidates we’ve ever seen,” O’Rourke himself told me.

Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. Especially given their setback in 2024, it was clear going into 2026 that Democrats would need a perfect storm to win. They just might get it.

The national environment is at Democrats’ backs. Talarico is a compelling and well-funded candidate—albeit one not without baggage—running against a scandal-plagued and poorly funded opponent in Attorney General Ken Paxton. The strong gains Trump made among Latinos in South Texas over the issues of cost of living and immigration are reversing over the issues of … cost of living and immigration. There’s a populist revolt over data centers and Flock cameras. Gas is expensive. Everyone is mad.

But it’s not just the conditions. There’s something more fundamentally different this time in Democrats’ approach. What struck me as I was talking to Democrats about this cycle is that, unlike in previous runs that had their hopes up, they’re not relying on vibes to do their work for them. The past failures and overhyping has chastened them and offered much to learn from, and they may well be learning it: They’re not promising a new era of Democratic Party rule in Texas. They’re just focused on winning this race, this time, and not squandering the opportunity that has fallen into their laps.

Democrats’ future—not just in terms of winning control of the Senate in 2026, but in terms of staying competitive with Republicans in the long run—depends on their learning to win in red states. Have they finally cracked the code?

Why does the idea of Texas turning blue hold such fascination in Democrats’ hearts? Why don’t charismatic Democratic candidates from Mississippi or Tennessee make the cover of Vanity Fair, rake in record amounts of money, and capture Democrats’ national attention?

It’s not just because Texas is the crown jewel of red America, the second-largest state in the country with the second-biggest allotment of electoral votes. It’s because, unlike many other comfortably red states, there was a period when its demographics were shifting in a way that aligned with those of the Democratic Party. During the Obama years, the state was becoming younger, more concentrated around metropolitan areas, more diverse, and more white-collar. This was the coalition that Democrats were betting on for transformative change across the country, the party’s then recipe for an enduring majority.

The idea, then, was not that Texas Republicans were going to convert en masse to voting for Democrats. It was that their majority would be diluted away as Democrats registered more and more Latino voters, assured to be on their side. College-educated transplants would flood to the orbits of Austin, Houston, and Dallas. Suburban voters would veer away from the GOP.

The appropriate way to interpret this information was, and is, that Democrats had the ability to make Texas a competitive state. The inappropriate way to handle it was, and is, to think that assumed demographic change guaranteed that Texas would inevitably turn blue and it was only a question of when. This latter stance can breed an idleness that, as we’ve now seen, ensures it may not happen at all.

One of the first tests of this era of demographic promise was the 2014 governor’s race, when Greg Abbott ran for election against Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.

Davis had gone viral in 2013 for a 13-hour filibuster against a state legislative bill restricting abortion. She had a compelling biography, as someone raised by a single mother who rose........

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