It’s a bit like Lucy with the football. Every few years, Democrats convince themselves that a Texas Senate seat might finally switch from red to blue. On paper, it makes sense. Texas is a large and urbanizing state with an increasingly educated – and increasingly non-white – population.

Other one-time Republican strongholds that have undergone similar demographic shifts have turned purple or even blueish – think Georgia, for example. The border counties along the Rio Grande valley, with their deep poverty and big Latino populations, were long thought to be fertile ground to nurture a kind of anti-Trump populism that could be converted into pro-Democratic sentiment. The state Democratic party is anemic there, but a few talented candidates have emerged.

Who else remembers Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas Democratic congressman and onetime presidential hopeful, who appeared on a 2019 cover of Vanity Fair, photographed in muted Annie Leibovitz tones along a desert dirt road, promising to deliver his home state, and a crucial Senate vote, from the clutches of Republican control?

Does that hope seem naive now? Even almost childish? Given what we know of O’Rourke’s subsequent success – or of the voting trends in the Rio Grande valley – does the past hope of a blue Texas begin to seem at all arrogant?

Forgive me, then, for harboring doubts about whether Texas will vote, as some pollsters and many hopeful Democrats now say it will, for James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee, over his Republican opponent, the odious state attorney general, Ken Paxton.

The excitement of Democrats in the Texas US Senate race this year carries with it the aftertaste of past disappointments. Lucy swears that........

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