AHC/WI: Make Texas as Liberal as Possible

Pretty much as the tin says. In OTL Texas has a reputation for being rather right wing even though it has liberal areas in its major cities. Your challenge is to make Texas as liberal as possible with a POD of the Great Depression.
 
Great Depression leads to growth of Trade Unions and Socialism. America follows trends in Europe and Socialism/Social Democracy becomes the core part of the Democratic Party and so party fundamentally changes. The Great Depression leads to a more radical shift with FDR going further with the New Deal and we see developments Unions in Texas most notably in the Oil Industry and it becomes increasingly hard for business to undermines Unions. I think that Great Depression might be abit late for all this but I can see Texas having a more Liberal Outlook by having stronger trade unions which will be socially conservative but over time become more Liberal
 
Something similar to Silicon Valley, Hollywood etc springs up in Texas (maybe a larger Back to the Land movement similar to what turned Vermont blue? I like the sound of Bernie Sanders I-TX)
Someone like Trump comes along earlier, even locally, and gets Texas Hispanics angry enough to increase their turnout permanently, which turned Cali into safe blue from safeish red.
 
Something similar to Silicon Valley, Hollywood etc springs up in Texas (maybe a larger Back to the Land movement similar to what turned Vermont blue? I like the sound of Bernie Sanders I-TX)
Someone like Trump comes along earlier, even locally, and gets Texas Hispanics angry enough to increase their turnout permanently, which turned Cali into safe blue from safeish red.

Well if Univision and other Latin TV stations decided to set up their US headquarters in TX that might qualify for the Hollywood thing. How do we get a Texan Silicon Valley though
 
One quick thing might be to keep John Connally in the Democrats and prevent the rise of Reagan - probably not enough to make it liberal, per se, but it'd be both bluer and less conservative. Another quick thing might be to avert the death of Mickey Leland and the health problems of Barbara Jordan, and/or get Richards re-elected in 1994.
Maybe if you prevented the oil boom in Houston? Not sure how to do that, though.
 
Well if Univision and other Latin TV stations decided to set up their US headquarters in TX that might qualify for the Hollywood thing. How do we get a Texan Silicon Valley though

The Silicon Hills is on its way - if we could avert the rise of Silicon Valley and get more universities in that area (UT is one, but Silicon Valley has the more technically-focused Stanford plus UC Berkeley). Maybe a bigger Texas Instruments in the place of IBM, or a bigger Dell in the place of Microsoft?
 
Like Minnesota and Wisconsin?
Wisconsin? Wisconsin has always been far more conservative than a lot of people see to think. This crap with Walker just didn't appear out of thin air. As to Texas a liberal Texas wouldn't be Texas IMO. After all the three biggest exports are Oil, Beef and Bullshit
 
There seemed to be quite a few liberal Texans on the political stage in the late 50s and early 60s.
Perhaps helping their careers somewhat would help.
Yarborough for governor possibly.
 
In addition to unions,

get past the poisonous brew of racism. Southern elites really did try to focus the resentment of poor white onto black persons. A fair number of poor whites saw through this as bullshit, but a fair number also went along. When you're almost toward the bottom of the totem pole, yeah, sometimes a person will settle for having someone at the absolute bottom to look down on and feel superior to, and even you and I might not fully have the skills to do something more constructive instead.

Alright, with oil money, starting even in the 40s and increasing into the 50s, maybe Texas could be the one state to do separate but equal in which the separate schools really are substantially equal? ! ?

Now, one might think, then they'll just be more invested. Maybe. But the physical school facilities aren't going anywhere. And with better African-American schools, you take away a lot of the myths and urban legends such as "these kids" aren't prepared well enough or the hygiene isn't to the same level and all the other crude myths claimed by people who want to keep things the same.

I think it would make desegregation easier, and Texas could be a model for a post-Jim Crow future. Now, just to find a couple of PODs!
 
One can certainly imagine some liberal victories that came close to happening in OTL--for example Ralph Yarborough defeating Price Daniel in the 1956 gubernatorial primary or Dan Yarborough defeating John Connally in 1962. In 1956, winning the Democratic primary would mean winning the general election; by 1962, this was no longer automatic, but it is certainly possible that Don Yarborough would have defeated the Republican candidate Jack Cox in the general election.

The problem is that without more basic social change, such victories are likely to be ephemeral. They may accelerate the decline of the Tory Democrats and the liberalization of the Texas Democratic Party, but they will also probably accelerate the rise of Texas Republicanism.
 
If you look at the current numbers for the 2016 elections, Texas seems almost on the verge of becoming a swing-state. Although that may have something to do with a certain GOP candidate, aren't the changing demographics also leading in this direction?

Otherwise, how about Austin somehow becoming a megalopolis?
 
The extent to which partisan allegiances in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century US was determined by environmental and energy issues has been underrated.

Once the Democrats were perceived as more environmentalist and less friendly towards resource extraction than the Republicans, all the parts of the country where coal and oil extraction was a big part of the economy swung to the Republicans, with the eastern Kentucky -West Virginia- western Pennsylvania coal area being the last to switch, though switch it did. Of course this helped the Democrats in bi-coastal suburbs.

A simple change where its the Republicans and conservatives are the environmentalists, and liberals/ Democrats don't care about the environment and consistently oppose any environmentalist proposal, would help the Democrats in Texas.

To a great extent, once a state swings far enough in one direction in terms of partisan allegiance, the allegiance itself becomes part of the state's cultural identity. Texas has a particularly strong cultural identity. These days, being Republicans is part of what makes Texans Texan. But up until LBJ left the White House, being Democrats were part of what made Texans Texan. But in the 1970s and 1980s the state was very much up to grab, and just tilting things a little towards the Democrats would have a cascading effect. Either keeping the Bushes in Connecticut or just out of the White House would also help.
 
The extent to which partisan allegiances in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century US was determined by environmental and energy issues has been underrated.

Once the Democrats were perceived as more environmentalist and less friendly towards resource extraction than the Republicans, all the parts of the country where coal and oil extraction was a big part of the economy swung to the Republicans, with the eastern Kentucky -West Virginia- western Pennsylvania coal area being the last to switch, though switch it did. Of course this helped the Democrats in bi-coastal suburbs.

Very much this. It would have to be a different Democratic Party from today. And it isn't a situation, as others have suggested, where there's a divide between more liberal operators and more conservative corporate. Those whose livelihoods depend on the oil and gas and related industries in general are Republican and will remain so as long as they believe that the Democrats threaten said livelihood.
 
How about have a situation similar to how the NDP took power in Alberta? Have a conservative "dynasty" control the state for 45 years and the people get sick and tired of them and vote in liberal Democrats. That's my best guess.
 
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