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It was not just a defeat, but rather an "extinction."
This is how the governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, defined what happened in the midterm elections on November 3 in Texas, the place that best exemplifies the US political turn in favor of the Democrats.
The second largest state in the United States, one of the quintessential Republican strongholds, was engulfed by the "blue wave" that led Democrats to take control of both houses of Congress and secure other key victories.
"For my entire life, Texas has been the crown jewel of Republican politics," said DeSantis, who wasn't just referring to the symbolic.
"If the Republican Party does not have Texas as an anchor, it will not be viable at the national level in the future," he warned with an eye already on the 2028 presidential elections.
Like him, experts in electoral mathematics already anticipate that, if the US voted in two years as it did in last week's elections, the Democrats would have a practically clear path to the White House.
Texas is the second state with the most electoral votes (40 of the 270 needed to be president), only behind California, an impregnable Democratic bastion as Texas is in favor of the Republicans: the last Democratic candidate to win in the border state in a presidential election was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Although many things can happen until 2028 that could modify voting intentions, and political scientists remember that predictions based on the midterms do not necessarily come true in the presidential elections, Democrats have more hope than ever that Texas will stop being red and become blue on the political map.
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And that optimism is based on the political earthquake of last week.
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The dimension of the "blue earthquake"
The epicenter of the so-called "blue earthquake" was actually registered in the Lone Star State, where no Democrat had managed to win state office in more than 30 years.
Gina Hinojosa, 52 years old and of Mexican descent, was elected governor of the state, the first Latina to do so. He gave the surprise by dethroning Republican Greg Abbott, three times elected to office and faithful ally of President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, 37-year-old state legislator James Talarico, a former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, prevailed over Ken Paxton, a state prosecutor protected by the current president and pursued by scandals, winning a seat for Texas in the US Senate.
Both were easily imposed in the urban centers considered the most progressive of this generally conservative state, such as Austin, Houston and Dallas.
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Its increasingly extensive metropolitan areas have become more politically diverse in recent years, attracting workers in the technology, research or finance sectors, new residents with university education, in many cases from "blue" states such as California, Illinois, New York or Washington.
Meanwhile, the rural, broader and traditionally Republican regions – they remained red, the color of the Republican Party, in the last elections – have been emptying out and thus contributing fewer votes.
But where Hinojosa and Talarico obtained the largest margins was in the counties bordering Mexico, where the percentage of the population that identifies as Latino exceeds 80% and had favored Trump in the 2024 elections.
Voters who in this southern territory were already dissatisfied with the rising cost of life and the aggressive immigration policies of the federal government and who, according to analysts agree, ended up punishing the Republican Party at the polls for this.
Thus, two electoral districts in the Rio Grande Valley, bordering Tamaulipas, elected Democrats to the House of Representatives, including the well-known Tejano singer Bobby Pulido, now a rising political star.
And the Texas Attorney General's Office also remained in Democratic hands.
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Aside from specific factors, such as the suitability or otherwise of the candidates, the victories "are testimony to the new demographic reality of this state," Álvaro J. Corral, political scientist and professor at the University of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, told BBC Mundo.
"The transformation of Texas into a politically competitive state, a theory long contemplated by Democratic analysts and strategists, seems to have materialized in the elections," says John Fortier, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) specializing in US elections, Congress and the Electoral College.
And more cautiously, he adds: "Although it remains to be seen if it remains this way, if it is a lasting trend."
The new great hinge state?
Before explaining the relevance of Texas in the face of the 2028 elections, we must first understand how the US chooses a president.
And the member of the White House is not chosen directly by the voters, but by an organization called the Electoral College.
Each of the 50 states has a number of electors in the Electoral College equivalent to the sum of its representation in Congress (two senators per state and a number of members of the House of Representatives based on population, between 1 and 52).
With the exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, the candidate who wins a state takes all of its electoral votes—all the votes he or she contributes in the Electoral College—regardless of whether he wins by one vote or by a million.
The Electoral College has a total of 538 votes. And to be declared the winner of the elections and therefore president, a candidate needs to achieve 270 or more.
Most states always vote for the same party in every election. This is the case of California, which contributes the most voters to the Electoral College (54), but since 1992 has voted for Democratic candidates in all presidential elections.
That's why White House hopefuls focus their campaign efforts on specific "swing states," also called swing states, that could swing one way or the other, rather than trying to win votes nationwide.
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Until last week's midterm elections, the Lone Star State didn't look like one of them. In the presidential elections he has voted for the Republican candidate uninterruptedly since 1980.
"But if Texas consolidates itself as a competitive or favorable state for Democrats, Republicans would have a much more difficult time achieving the majority in the Electoral College" in 2028, Fortier points out.
"With its 40 electoral votes, it would also become one of the main battlefields of the presidential elections," he explains. "And given how much campaigns typically invest in swing states, it's hard to imagine the amount of money that would be poured there this time," he exclaims.
Analysts and strategists also point out that not only would Texas no longer be a safe haven for Republicans, and that the electoral map of red and blue states that we knew would actually be breaking up.
And other states were also the scene of more competitive elections than many had anticipated, such as the victory in South Carolina of Democrat Annie Andrews over Republican Senator Darline Graham.
Meanwhile, Democrat and megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton defeated Republican Senator Roger Marshall in Kansas. And, as in South Carolina, Democrats broke the Republican supermajority, which has dominated the state legislature for 16 years.
Likewise, Democrat Scott Colom won the US Senate race in Mississippi, achieving a surprising victory for the party in a deeply conservative state that has elected Republicans for decades.
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"What seemed written in stone is no longer. There are simply more swing states," summarized Brendan Boyle, Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and next chairman of the House Budget Committee.
"For a quarter of a century we had practically the same map, but that's history now."
Call for caution
But no matter how big the blue wave has been and it is tempting to start making calculations, analysts call for caution.
They emphasize what differs a presidential election from a legislative one, beyond what is chosen.
And they thus cite a greater participation in those that define the new tenant of the White House, despite the fact that the appointment at the polls last week broke records in that sense. According to data managed by initiatives such as The Midterm Project, they would have been the second midterm elections with the highest attendance at the polls since 1914.
They also mention demographic gaps and differences, as well as voting patterns.
"It is important to emphasize that midterm elections do not always predict what will happen in the following presidential elections, and there are examples in both senses," Fortier warns along these lines.
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What happens in 2028 will have a lot to do with what the Democrats do once they take office in January and take control of Congress.
If they can pass measures to ease the cost-of-living crisis, expand access to health care and address other issues of concern to voters, such as corruption, they may be able to maintain momentum, analysts say.
At the same time, if the federal government manages to change citizens' perception of the state of the economy or improve the image of President Trump - today at a low level, according to surveys - it is expected to play a fundamental role.
And a relevant factor will be who competes to sit in the Oval Office and the drag that their figure has.
"How Democrats and Republicans use the next two years to limit Trump's unpopular foreign policy and define a clear alternative will determine both their success in winning the White House and their ability to shape the global landscape that its next tenant will inherit," writes Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America Program at the Chatham House think tank.
Moving tiles
Be that as it may, midterm elections usually mark the starting signal for the next presidential race.
White House candidates usually create exploratory committees shortly after the elections, usually announce their candidacies at the beginning of the new year and begin raising funds in the middle.
"What we are going to see this year is that this process is going to accelerate," Fortier tells BBC Mundo.
First of all, several Republican heavyweights rushed to reaffirm their internal leadership with analyzes and recipes to respond to the harsh setback suffered.
Vice President JD Vance, long considered a possible political heir to Trump, was quick to attribute the sweeping defeats to the president's war in Iran.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas criticized his party for ignoring the economic difficulties faced by many voters.
And Governor Ron DeSantis, who has now turned Florida into the great Republican bastion, warned that the consequences of the midterms will extend beyond 2028 with the forceful description that what happened resembles an "extinction."
On the Democratic side, possible presidential candidates also began to move chips.
According to the American media Politico, despite the fact that there was no public announcement, two days after the elections, allies of Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna launched a fundraising committee for a possible candidacy.
For his part, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who would be considering running for president, commuted the sentences of all death row inmates in the state, something that was widely interpreted as an attempt to leave a kind of legacy before leaving office.
And Illinois Governor JB Pritzker published a roadmap with proposals for the new Congress.
At the same time, party leaders in Washington began to outline their plans for the majorities they obtained in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
"As we look to 2028 and beyond, we must now begin to consolidate our position in the states we have won and reinforce the party's infrastructure in those territories," said the leader of the current Democratic minority in the Senate, Chuck Schumer.
"And continue expanding the map to new states."
That's what Democratic officials and strategists will focus on at the two-day conference that began this Thursday in Denver, Colorado, called What's Next.
The program includes some of the winners of last week's elections, such as the senators-elect for Texas and Iowa, James Talarico and Josh Turek, respectively.
And potential presidential hopefuls are also participating, such as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
There is no doubt that all of them will already be immersed in electoral mathematics, discussing formulas to obtain victory: and in them, decades later, Texas is included.
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