Beto O'Rourke gets the April cover of Vanity Fair.

[dalton99a]

61. +1. Very interesting, indeed

Mr. O’Rourke’s improvement came almost exclusively from white voters, and particularly college-educated white voters. Whites probably gave him around 33 percent of their votes, up from a mere 22 percent for Mr. Obama in 2012.

There’s clearly additional upside for Democrats if they could pair their recent gains among white voters with improvement among Hispanic voters (through some combination of persuasion, higher turnout among registrants and newly registered voters).

Can Democrats really turn out Hispanic voters in huge numbers in Texas? There are real barriers, and you wouldn’t expect Hispanic Democrats to turn out in particularly high numbers given their low turnout elsewhere in the country. It is far-fetched to suggest Hispanic mobilization will fundamentally transform the electorate and turn Texas into a blueish state anytime soon.

But a more modest increase in turnout or support among Hispanic voters is fairly likely if Texas sees the campaign dollars and attention that come with a contested state in a presidential year. When Mr. Obama contested Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado in 2008, the turnout there increased by an average of 13 percent to 23 percent over 2004 levels, which included a mix of higher turnout among registrants and thousands of newly registered voters. Given the extraordinary turnout in the 2018 midterm election nationwide, it is plausible that turnout will be up substantially in Texas regardless of whether the state is a battleground.