Texas Question

[pbrower2a]

It may be excessively simplistic, but I can look upon Texas politically as if it were Kansas or Oklahoma grafted onto Florida. The Hispanics in Texas are Mexican-Americans instead of Cuban-Americans. Such cities as El Paso, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Dallas are now comparatively liberal. So is the Lower Rio Grande Valley even if it contains no giant city but lots of small ones in a compact area. Wichita Falls, Abilene, Midland, Odessa, Amarillo, and Lubbock are still not large enough to have the well-developed (or anarchic, depending upon tastes!) suburban sprawl that itself creates a need for Big Government, and they might as well be in Oklahoma, Kansas, or even Nebraska. 

Texas seems to have or have had efficient government in which big property owners really run things and show some amazing (if ultimately selfish) foresight. The big landowners decided to become real estate developers and tried to attract  communities that would be conservative by nature. Thus they promoted the sorts of industries least likely to be unionized, and they promoted industries likely to need plenty of white-collar workers. They might allow colleges and universities to form, but these would lack any semblance of a college community.  Example: the University of Texas at Dallas has no dormitories (it is a commuter college) and there are no Berkeley-like businesses around. Any coffee shop nearby is a commercial Starbucks. The idea is to train people to be accountants, engineers, and perhaps school teachers. That kept much of Texas comparatively conservative for a long time.     

The economic realities of the giant cities are not that different from those in, for example, Ohio.  I can easily imagine such  counties as Collin (a fairly prosperous, rapidly-suburbanizing county north of Dallas) or Fort Bend going Democratic as urban sprawl renders them legitimately urban. Suburbia is urban due to its physical needs.