On July 17, 2013, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, having recently declared his candidacy for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, hosted a town hall on Twitter. The exercise was, perhaps, poorly timed.
For 20 years, the Texas Democratic party had been in the wilderness. In recent years, though, national Democrats, casting a covetous eye at Texas and its 38 electoral votes, had dabbled in the idea that “changing demographics” would eventually turn the state blue. The phrase was general enough to cover several concurrent trends, including increasing urbanization and migration from other states, but the key issue was the growth of Texas’s non-Anglo population, and specifically its population of Hispanics. January had brought the launch of a new initiative called Battleground Texas, an organization started by non-Texans that pledged to expand the electorate and mobilize Texas voters who have historically been disengaged. And in June, state senator Wendy Davis had vaulted to fame during the course of an eleven-hour filibuster against an omnibus bill restricting abortion that was making its way through the Texas legislature.
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