Firstly, I have a website now! How cool is that? I am not thrilled about how Substack has been handling Nazis on their site so with my dad’s help I got this set up! I’m a bit disappointed that I’m losing all the comments people have made, but it is worth the switch. Hopefully y’all will still read this!
For my first post exclusively on ethanlipka.com, I want to share a trend line that inspires a bit of optimism in me! Below you can see a trend line of the two way Democratic margin in Texas presidential races (I also included Beto’s 2018 performance for fun).
Obviously, this graph is not airtight or anything. Trend lines are not the height of data science and it doesn’t even show us winning until 2028. Moreover, the general safest guess about the future in my opinion is regression to the mean, rather than trends continuing. It is hard to deny that this graph is the start of a neat story though! Texas has been trending in the right direction for about as long as I have been alive. That’s a pretty happy thought.
I want to share a few more neat related bits and bobs that you can’t quite get from this graph alone. Texas…
- swung further left in the last 20 years than nearly any other state.
- is one the only states in the union where Hillary outperformed Obama’s ’08 landslide.
- in 2020 was about as far from Democratic victory in 2024 as Georgia was in 2016.
This trend line doesn’t make winning inevitable, and is not a particularly robust model of anything. However, as I have emphasized, it is quite neat! And I am optimistic about what it could signal for the political future of Texas.
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