Whites Are Becoming A Minority In Many Texas Panhandle/South Plains Counties

The map above shows the counties in the Panhandle and South Plains regions of Texas. Traditionally this has been a very red portion of the state. That is because they are rural counties where the majority of registered voters are white -- and the base of the Republican Party in Texas is in the suburbs that ring the urban areas and in the rural counties. Those rural counties have been a reliable source of support for Republicans.

That is changing. It is already a fact that white students now are a minority in the statewide school system, and in another 10 to 20 years, whites will be a minority of the state's overall population. And this is not just happening in urban Texas. Many of the rural counties will also have white minorities. In fact, 17 of the counties shown above already have a minority white population and another four will be that way in the next 10 years.

Now some may think that this is just due to immigration, and the growing Hispanic populations of these counties are due to undocumented immigrants who cannot vote. But that is only a small part of the Hispanic growth in these counties -- and even then the children of those undocumented immigrants are born here and will be able to vote. There are two other factors helping to flip these counties to a minority white population.

The first is simply that the Hispanic residents of these counties generally have more children than the white residents do. While white families generally have one or two children, the Hispanic families will have three or four. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that eventually whites will be outnumbered in all of the Panhandle/South Plains counties. The other reason is white flight. Younger whites leave these rural areas in larger numbers for better-paying jobs in urban areas, while most Hispanics stay near their families in the area and take the available jobs. That means the white population is both aging and dwindling.

This is a good thing for Texas Democrats. It means the Republicans are slowly losing their rural base -- a base they have counted on to offset the Democratic advantage in the urban population. The question now is not whether the state of Texas is going to turn blue (it will), but only how long that process will take.

In the past, the Texas Democratic Party has focused it's efforts on the urban areas and in South Texas (where many counties have had whites minorities for quite a while now). They have ignored the red areas of rural counties in the Panhandle and South Plains -- leaving all organizing efforts to the underfunded and demoralized Democratic parties in that area. I think it's time the state party start thinking about some serious organization and registration efforts in these areas. The time is ripe to start flipping some of these counties blue -- and each one that is flipped subtracts from the rural base Republicans count on. All of these counties will eventually turn blue, but a little concentrated effort could make that happen much faster.

Here are the counties where whites are already a minority (with total population and percentage of whites):

Bailey
7,247
37.3%

Castro
8,116
36.1%

Cochran
3,109
40.3%

Crosby
6,092
42.7%

Dawson
13,751
38.0%

Deaf Smith
19,595
29.6%

Floyd
6,394
42.0%

Garza
6,562
45.4%

Hale
36,498
36.6%

Lamb
14,167
41.9%

Lynn
5,858
49.8%

Moore
21,954
37.3%

Ochiltree
10,530
48.2%

Parmer
10,332
37.4%

Potter
122,285
48.4%

Terry
12,675
44.3%

Yoakum
8,005
38.1%

Now these are usually not high population counties, and it's easy to write them off as not worth the effort. But that is a mistake (and it's a mistake the Republicans have NOT been making). Add a few of them together and you start getting a significant amount of votes -- enough to flip a state representative from Republican to Democrat. If the Democrats want to turn Texas blue in as short a time as possible, then every vote must count (even in the smallest counties) -- and that means a 254 county strategy must be employed.

Here are four more counties where whites will soon be a minority:

Hansford
5,557
53.7%

Hockley
22,892
50.2%

Lubbock
283,910
56.6%

Swisher
7,801
50.0%