2026 Might be the Year of Blexas

In the words of a longtime Blexas denier, here's why it might seriously, actually, honest-to-God be the time.

Before I say anything else, I want to make one thing clear: I have credibility on this.

I believe that this is important to establish because, you, the reader, have no reason to even humor the title above otherwise. In every election cycle for the past decade, you have been told some version of how the map-changing, country-defining, culture-reordering result of wet liberal dreams was just around the corner. To just say that this has failed to be true would be a massive understatement. After stubbornly remaining in the Republican corner even during the strong Democratic years of 2018 and 2020, the state of Texas made a complete mockery out of decades of hopeful liberal forecasts in 2024. Hardly a single trend in the state went the Democratic Party’s way. The results were so bad that Trump successfully flipped several Hispanic counties on the southern border that hadn’t voted Republican since the days of Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft. When all was said and done, his 6,393,597 total votes in Texas amounted to the most raw votes any Republican had ever received in any election, in any state, in all of American history.

I take a measure of pride in the fact that I, unlike many left-of-center electoral commentators, saw this coming early on. After the results in 2022 excited liberals into truly believing in the possibility of a landslide Biden victory in 2024, they spent much of early 2023 fixating on the Lone Star State, which they saw as something like a crown jewel for the upcoming Wine Mom Empire. Alarming trends with Hispanic voters from 2020 were hurriedly written off as flukes, while promising shifts in the suburbs were glorified as unstoppable forces of history. When polling found that Democratic support among Hispanics was nowhere near what would have been needed for the state to even be competitive, the numbers were simply dismissed out of hand, oftentimes just for the reason that they seemed too bad to be believable.

It was maddeningly unconvincing. To that end, I regularly mocked the claims of Blexas believers back when the hype was at its peak and eventually made the idea of major Republican gains in the state and others like it core to my argument that Democrats could still win the electoral college while performing poorly in the popular vote. Yet things have changed. Over the past year, we have seen the GOP adopt the same kind of triumphalist attitude towards their success with rising demographics that Democrats once held. This summer, they even took the exceptional step of drawing an entirely new Congressional map for the state that was built entirely around the presumption that Trump’s 2024 nonwhite support is both fully transferable and here to stay. Now, only a few months later, everything we are seeing from voters is telling us that the party may have spiked the ball far too early.

For the first time since Biden dropped the ball with Hispanic voters in 2020, it is possible to make a case for Blexas that is theoretically sound—one that doesn’t rely on denying polling, selectively pointing at certain trends, or both.

Death, Taxes, and Circumstances

As one might expect, the core of the new case for Blexas in particular and a 2026 blue wave in general revolves around the results we saw in this month’s set of elections. Democrats running in those races won big, and they saw massive rebounds among the exact kinds of young nonwhite voters who swung hard towards Trump in 2024—voters who make up a particularly large part of Texas’s population. It was a revival that went largely unnoticed in statewide polls, and it allowed the party’s candidates to both rebuild and expand upon the winning Biden coalition across the country.

This was undeniably good news for the Democratic Party. But unfortunately for them and the all-important question of Texas, just what we saw two weeks ago in Virginia and New Jersey still wouldn’t have been enough to turn the Lone Star State blue by itself. Last year, Texas voted for Trump by roughly 14 points, the largest margin it had given to any Republican presidential candidate since Mitt Romney in 2012. Since Trump won nationally by 1.5 points that year, he left the state just over 12 points to the right of the nation—i.e., red enough to still sit snugly in the Republican column even if the D+8ish shifts we saw two weeks ago are replicated nationwide next year.

Yet results on paper aren’t necessarily everything. For as much as liberals have reveled in the results this month, I have found it remarkable how practically none of them have brought up the crucial pieces of context that makes the shifts we saw even more encouraging than they appear at first glance. When considering the larger context, what we saw in Virginia and New Jersey looks like it might have only been the tip of the iceberg for what Democrats may be able to achieve in the current political environment. In states with different local political environments—states like Texas—all bets may be well and truly off next year.

Now, without further ado, here are the most encouraging arguments for Democrats in 2026 that you haven’t heard yet.