The Blue Wave—III

Christopher Hooks • Francisco Cantú • Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz RanaLone Star PastoralChristopher HooksIn January the state of Texas will experience a changeover in political power practically on the scale of a color revolution. Before the November election the question had been whether the Democrat James Talarico might win the Senate seat vacated by Lyndon Baines Johnson and lost to his party in a famous 1961 special election. This would have been painful enough, to Republicans. I was listening to an audio hangout on the site formally known as Twitter two weeks before the election when a conservative activist, not even one from Texas, was asked what it would feel like to watch Texas flip blue in this one narrow sense. “Bro, it would be like watching a woman make beautiful love to my wife.”The night of November 3, then, must have been exquisitely painful; I hope he survived. All seven statewide political offices on the ballot went to Democrats, from the Senate and the governor’s office—until now held by the imperial and cruel Greg Abbott—to lesser roles whose Democratic nominees were underfunded, little-known, and hardly able to contest their races. Every statewide judicial race was wo...