Texas

Texas is a nation-sized state, one of four states that had been independent republics earlier in their histories. (The others are California, Vermont and Hawaii.) It may come as no surprise that Texas stuck with its independent status the longest. Today, it is a state with an international image and international impact. The nation has voted for president 12 times since 1960. It elected Californians four times, and it elected Texans four times. These two largest states have put their stamp on national politics in our time, just as New York did up from 1900 to 1960, when it was the residence of five of the winners and eight of the losers in 15 elections. Texas has been the second-largest state in area since Alaska was admitted to the Union in 1959. It became the second-largest in population in 1994, when it passed New York. (California is the largest.) A formative strain in the state’s history is that it is a society without an aristocratic past, a state not formed by plantation owners or plutocrats but by dirt farmers. Texas was founded by Southerners, particularly Tennesseans, who wanted to establish their own republic within the borders of Mexico, a republic with Anglo-Saxon freedoms and black slavery. They defended their dream to the death at the Alamo and to a bloody victory at San Jacinto. They entered the Union willingly in 1845 and left it enthusiastically in 1861. The Texas that emerged from the Civil War was still young and poor. Not until 1901 was oil discovered at Spindletop, setting Texas wildcatters on the road to riches.

Without the underpinnings and burdens of tradition, 20th century Texas produced fabulous wealth, generously rewarding success while being unforgiving of failure. It has respect for learning and style—think of its great universities and Neiman Marcus—and it revels in rough manners and western wear. Texans are prone to wild swings in fortune—think of Sam Houston and the wildcatters, or Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush. As the 21st century began, Texans, for their history of slavery and segregation, proved open to immigrants and friendly with their Mexican neighbors. The North American Free Trade Agreement, the opening up of the border and the coming together of these two countries that are at such different economic levels and have such different cultures, was a project mainly of Texans of both political parties, of Republican President George H. W. Bush and Democratic Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, of Democratic Gov. Ann Richards and Republican Gov. George W. Bush. At the same time, Texas has become a high-technology powerhouse with some of the nation’s most creative businesses. But its success is not just economic. There are elements of heroism—some mythical, some genuine—in Texas history that every elementary and high school student learns.

Texas started off as a marchland on the border of the Third World with an economy based on commodities, mainly cotton, and cotton’s prices were in long-term decline. Its farmers felt like they were part of a colonial economy controlled by bankers and Wall Street financiers. After Spindletop, Texas became the nation’s—and for a time the world’s—leading producer of oil. But oil prices, too, fell in free markets and were propped up by politicians—the 1936 “hot oil” act that Democrat Sam Rayburn, as chairman of the House Commerce Committee, pushed through and the oil depletion allowance maintained for years by Rayburn when he was speaker, by Johnson, when he was Senate majority leader, and by Bentsen, when he was Senate Finance Committee chairman. These politicians also secured subsidies for cotton growers and contracts for defense plants and space facilities in World War II and through the Cold War years. Most Texas voters stayed Democratic up to 1970 because of Confederate memories, New Deal affections and the clout and competence of Texas Democratic officeholders.

But the state’s economy grew more complex. By the 1970s, it was no longer dependent on raw commodities. The “awl bidness” here became less a matter of extracting oil than it was playing host to the greatest concentration of highly skilled specialists in extracting oil and natural gas in any part of the world. Also, beginning in the 1960s, Texas became a center for technology with the critical mass of knowledge and finances needed to produce firms like Texas Instruments and Dell Computer and a university infrastructure in the University of Texas and Texas A&M to match the highway system that ties the state together. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is rich with defense contractors and with erstwhile small firms that grew large with exports to Mexico. Houston is home to firms like Schlumberger, the global oil services company, to many of the high-tech spinoffs from the space program, and to the enormous Texas Medical Center. San Antonio, with the Air Force’s prime hospital, has significant medical technology and biotech industries. Austin, as UT doubled its number of engineering professors, became a high-tech center vying for second place after California’s Silicon Valley. Texas state courts, once a happy hunting ground for trial lawyers, have been transformed by changes in tort law passed by the Legislature in 1995 and 2003. Meanwhile, the federal court in Marshall, thanks to a fast discovery process and the willingness of juries to bring in big verdicts against patent violators, has become one of the nation’s prime venues for patent cases. Texas’ low taxes, and lack of a state income tax, helped attract corporate headquarters like American Airlines, GTE, J.C. Penney and Exxon Mobil. Oil is just a small part of the Texas economy now. As a result, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are ahead of old industrial centers like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis on the Top 10 list of metropolitan areas, and they are in the process of overtaking Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Texas surged ahead despite the crash of oil prices in the early 1980s and the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s, the defense cuts of the early 1990s and the World Trade Organization ruling against cotton subsidies in 2005. Its economy quietly boomed during the first seven years of the new century and it was hit late and only lightly by the recession that started in late 2007. Low housing prices, tight lending practices and tough foreclosure laws meant that Texas did not have much of a housing bubble. Foreclosure rates in 2008 and early 2009 were well below the national average and far below those in California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. Texas has developed a civic culture of adaptability and resilience, as it demonstrated by taking in thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in 2005. Three years later, Houston weathered Hurricane Ike with orderly and timely evacuations and an absence of panic and looting. While other states pass laws requiring alternative energy sources in some distant year, Texas already produces more electricity from wind power than any other state, more than twice as much as California. In July 2008, regulators approved a $5 billion wind power transmission line project that will allow production to quadruple, enough for 3.7 million homes on a Texas-hot summer day.

Texas is proud of its history and requires a year of Texas history in its high schools. In 1845, when the Republic of Texas was annexed by the United States, New Englander Edward Everett Hale wrote a pamphlet entitled “How to Conquer Texas Before It Conquers Us,” calling for emigration from the North to dilute “an unprincipled population of adventurers.” But the newcomers joining ancestral Texans—think of the Bushes—have done much to put the stamp of Texas on the whole of the United States. Texas’ vast economy has outperformed the national average and most other large states. It has some of the lowest taxes in the country and some of the lowest welfare levels. Most spectacularly, Texas has an economy that has, seemingly effortlessly, generated a massive increase in jobs. Job growth has been about double the national average—Texas has 8% of the nation’s population and generated 14% of the nation’s job growth from 1999 to early 2008. Texas also exports more goods to other countries than any other state. Growth has been most rapid in the exurban counties at the edges of its big metropolitan areas; between 2000 and 2008, the population rose 55% in Collin County north of Dallas, 50% in Fort Bend County west of Houston, 58% in Williamson County north of Austin and 41% in Comal County northeast of San Antonio. Rural counties in West Texas, like so many in the Great Plains to the north, have been emptying out, but there has been steady growth in much of East Texas and rapid growth on the Lower Rio Grande, from Laredo to Brownsville. Growth has come almost equally from internal migration—a net 711,000 from 2000 to 2008—and immigration—851,000 during the same period.

Texas has surged in part because, in vivid contrast to that other onetime republic, California, it has nurtured and profited from its relationship with its southern neighbor, Mexico. California has been relatively indifferent to Mexico and even at times portrayed its southern neighbor as a burden, generating illegal aliens that California taxpayers must pay for. Texas has taken a different course. Its border with Mexico is longer, some 1,200 miles, and more often crossed. Southern Texas along the Rio Grande is a transition zone between two very different economies. Despite a history of racial segregation, Texas has shown a friendly face to Mexicans, while Mexican immigrants have been happy to become Texans. Fewer Latinos have crossed the border here to take advantage of welfare programs, which are much less generous in Texas than in California. Political leadership has made a difference. Gov. Bush, like Gov. Richards before him, journeyed often to Mexico and invited Mexican leaders to Texas, emphasizing the positive in public and leaving negative details to private negotiations. Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who prepared for his office by taking Spanish lessons, has followed the lead of Richards and Bush, and has opposed putting up a border fence on the Rio Grande. Nearly half of U.S. merchandise exports to Mexico are from Texas, significantly more than California. The NAFTA secretariat of labor is in Dallas, the North American Development Bank is headquartered in San Antonio, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission is in Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, and the busiest truck crossing between the countries is the new World Trade Bridge near Laredo and Nuevo Laredo.

Politically, Texas is now a predominantly Republican state. George W. Bush carried it 59%-38% in 2000 and 61%-38% in 2004. In 2008, GOP nominee John McCain carried it by a lesser margin, 55%-44%, but still ran 9 points ahead of his national average in Texas. It was not always so. The Republican trend was a long time coming. One-party Democratic dominance ended in the 1960s, and for two decades Democrats had real competition, except in the cases of a few perennially popular figures like Bentsen, who was on the ballot in 1970, 1976, 1982 and 1988. Metro Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston were the first parts of Texas to go Republican, and Bentsen relied on Democratic strength in the Texas countryside to win. Now the pattern is the other way around. The counties containing Dallas and Houston, San Antonio and Austin are to varying degrees trending Democratic, mostly because of expanding Latino and African-American populations. Democratic nominee Barack Obama carried all four in 2008. Most of the fast-growing exurban counties around them are heavily Republican, but McCain carried metro Dallas with only 55% and Houston with only 54% of the vote, well below Bush’s 62% in Dallas and 58% in Houston in 2004. McCain also carried metro San Antonio with 52% and lost metro Austin 58%-42%. The heavily Hispanic border counties, which voted 52%-48% for Democrat John Kerry in 2004, voted 65%-35% for Obama in 2008. The rest of Texas, some 203 rural and small urban counties, is now the state’s Republican bastion, voting 68%-31% for McCain over Obama. But they are a declining demographic force, growing just 5% from 2000 to 2008, while metro Dallas grew 22%; metro Houston, 21%; metro San Antonio, 19%; metro Austin, 32%; and the border area, 13%.

Republicans now hold all 29 statewide elective offices, including the entire state Supreme Court. They have won every gubernatorial election but one since 1986 and every U.S. Senate election since 1990. But there are signs their dominance may be in peril. One is demographic: the seemingly inevitable increase in the percentage of Latino voters. From 1990 to 2008, more than half of Texas’ population increase was accounted for by the increase in the number of Hispanics, and the Census Bureau estimates that the state population was 36% Hispanic at the end of that period. A slowdown in immigration may mean that percentage won’t rise as rapidly as previously projected, but the number who are eligible to vote will grow nevertheless. The 2008 exit poll showed that just 20% of Texas voters were Hispanic (more than the 13% who were African-American but far less than the 63% who were white). But that percentage will undoubtedly increase, with considerable repercussions. If the electorate were 15% more Hispanic and 15% less white and each group split as they did in the 2008 presidential election, the result in Texas would have been a 50%-49% McCain victory. Bush and political strategist Karl Rove cultivated Hispanic voters with some success. Bush won 49% or 39% of their votes (depending on which exit poll you believe) in his 1998 re-election for governor and 42% and 49% in his presidential races in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison did about as well, 44%, in her 2006 race for re-election, but Perry got only 31% of Hispanics in the four-candidate 2006 race for governor. In 2008, McCain won 35% of Latino voters and GOP Sen. John Cornyn won 36%. In future elections, Republicans are going to have to do as well as Bush or Hutchison with Hispanic voters in order to carry Texas by anything more than narrow margins.

The other threat to Republican dominance is the fact that they have been visibly and sometimes controversially in control of the state for some time now, time enough to accumulate political baggage and to inspire creative campaigning by the opposition. The congressional redistricting plan that then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, state House Speaker Tom Craddick and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst slammed through in October 2003 made Texas’ House delegation more reflective of the party’s popular vote majorities but also set in motion a chain of events that resulted in DeLay’s resignation from the House under an ethics cloud. Craddick’s heavy-handed leadership sparked a move for his ouster in 2007 and fueled Democratic gains in legislative races in three successive elections that reduced the Republicans’ House majority to 76-74 and resulted in the election in 2009 of a new Republican speaker, Joe Straus, supported mostly by Democrats. Perry won re-election in 2006 against three opponents with only 39% of the vote and in early 2009, he and Hutchison were preparing to fight each other in the 2010 gubernatorial primary. Hutchison has said she will resign her Senate seat before that race, which would allow Perry to name a successor. But it would also trigger a special election, in which two Democrats with strong moderate records, Houston Mayor Bill White and former state Comptroller John Sharp, could be strong contenders. Texas politics, like the Texas economy, doesn’t stand still.