TX-24: The Texas electorate is changing - but could Biden really flip the state?
Now, in 2020, this race for the 24th district is a tossup, making it a perfect second stop in the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series, in which I am traveling the country with film-maker Tom Silverstone.
“As soon as Trump was elected folks needed to feel as though they were doing everything they could to make sure that they save their communities and this country,” says Candace Valenzuela, the Democrat running here. “We knew Donald Trump would be disastrous for the state of this country, and I think that movement here is gaining speed because Trump shows himself to be more and more derelict of his duties.”
The tight race here is an indication not only of some suburban voters’ distaste for some of the more extreme moments of the Trump presidency, but also of Texas’s evolving electorate. This district, like the state as a whole, is becoming increasingly diverse. By 2022 Hispanic Americans will become the majority in Texas, in the 24th district they now make up almost 25% of the population.
There are two opposing visions of the suburbs described in this election. For Donald Trump, a now archaic depiction of neighborhoods under threat from change: “If he [Joe Biden] ever got to run our country, our suburbs would be gone,” he said during the first presidential debate. For Biden, an increasingly realistic assertion that suburban life is no longer a relic of white communities in the 1950s but dynamic and multicultural: “He wouldn’t know a suburb unless he took a wrong turn,” Biden retorted in the same debate.
Valenzuela herself is emblematic of a wave of young, dynamic and diverse candidates running down the ballot for the Democrats this year. If she wins she will become the first Afro-Latina elected to Congress in an election year that has seen the highest number of black women running for office in US history. She battled homelessness as a child and first held political office on the local school board.
Her Republican opponent Beth Van Duyne, a former mayor of the city of Irving, is also an emblem of the current state of her party. In 2015 Van Duyne drew national controversy for falsely suggesting that a local Islamic tribunal could lead to sharia law, and for passing an entirely symbolic but deeply divisive city ordinance supporting “American Laws for American Courts”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/11/texas-electorate-changing-suburbs-biden-flip-state?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
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