Hurd is one of six Texas Republican congressmen who have decided not to seek reelection next year. Until this year, none of them had, since 2011, experienced the purgatory of being in the House minority. In the 2018 “Texodus,” five Texas Republican representatives retired (a sixth resigned) and two were defeated. Of the 241 Republicans in the House when President Trump was inaugurated, almost 40 percent are gone or going. See a trend?

Hurd, who is not forswearing public life, insists, “I’m just getting started.” Might he come back to electoral politics? “For sure.” His “passion” is “the nexus between technology and national security.” He is, however, saying goodbye to the rigors of the “DC to DQ” tours that have regularly taken him to the far reaches of his district. For you effete coastal residents who are unfamiliar with the delights of flyover country, “DQ” means Dairy Queen. Hurd meets gatherings of constituents at DQs because “every town has one, and everyone knows where they are.”

AD

AD

Hurd, an articulate, assertive 6-foot-4 former CIA operative and the only African American Republican in the House, thinks voting trends “are moving so fast” that 2020 “has nothing to do with 2016.” Just as “U.S. economic and military dominance are no longer guaranteed,” neither is Republican dominance in Texas, a state that is hardly immune to national trends.

AD

AD

Nationally, Republicans are decreasingly strong where two generations ago they were especially robust — in suburbs. Texas ranks high among the states in terms of the percentage of the population that is suburban. And statewide, whites are a minority.

In 2008, with the Great Recession underway, John McCain carried Texas by 12 points. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried it by 16. In 2016, Trump (whom Hurd did not endorse) won by nine points. In Texas’s most important 2018 contest for a federal office, incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz won by just three. See a trend?

If the Democratic Party can collect Texas’s electoral votes — 38 today, perhaps 41 after the 2020 Census — as well as California’s 55, it will reap 35.5 percent of a winning 270 from just two states. Then the GOP will have almost no plausible path to 270, and Democrats who are currently hot to abolish the electoral college will suddenly say: Oh, never mind.

AD

AD

And Hurd will repeat what he says today: Texas is “already purple.” Republicans “have to get out of our own way” because “if the Republican Party in Texas does not start looking like Texas, there will not be a Republican Party in Texas.”