After a quarter century of being painted a big, bold Republican red on the American electoral map, Texas is nudging toward a different hue this spring: purple.

Politics is often measured in the short-term: this election cycle, dollars raised and spent, the margin of victory. And there is no doubt that Republicans still enjoy a tactical edge. They control every statewide office. But the long view shows a whole different picture. And it's not just the increasing Hispanic nature of the population, which tends to vote Democratic. A new generation has arrived.

Meet the Next Texans. They have come from every point on the map, but many came from far more liberal states. They are overwhelmingly young, they seem to populate the densely packed urban centers and near suburbs, and they are already friendlier to Democrats than Republicans. The Next Texans are a new political wind blowing across Texas — and against the conservative Republican monopoly on power.

Their story begins around the turn of this century, when the first of them arrived in time for the first big boom in technology. The Lone Star State had just been through a terrible shaking out: a collapse in oil prices in the late 1980s, followed by a collapse of the savings and loan system in the 1990s and a collapse in real estate, as a result.

Michael Hogue/DMN Staff

The price of an average home in Texas was just 40 percent of the national average. Texas was a cheap place to live and not too shabbily. I returned home to Texas about then and bought a big house with a pool and a garage, which was completely unknown to me while living on the East Coast. "I may not live well," remarked a character in Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater's classic of the time, Slackers. "But I don't have to work hard to do it."

But this trickle became a torrent. Gov. Rick Perry claimed credit — low taxes and less regulation — for attracting business to Texas. Author and Houston Chronicle columnist Erica Grieder credited Perry for at least having an industrial policy, even if it involved spending $439 million to attract 47,000 jobs, or about 0.0047 percent of the workforce. But regardless of cause, the effect was the same: People kept coming.

About 5 million people relocated to Texas between 2000 to 2016, according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and the state demographer. They came from every part of America, even from as far away as Alaska. A good many, though, came from big population states: California, Florida and New York. Jobs were plentiful in Texas as the Great Recession unfolded, and it was still cheap to live here. Even counting the outflow of people to other states, at least 1.5 million people were added to the Texas population; half of the fastest growing cities in the country by 2015 were in Texas.

And all of them were in the Texas Triangle: Dallas and Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. By 2016, these cities had been Democratic for the entire 21st century, if not longer. Their metropolitan areas and suburbs are liberalizing. Hays County, next door to Democratic Travis County, is no longer staunchly conservative. Fort Bend County, next door to Democratic Harris County and for long a Republican stronghold, flipped Democratic in 2016, the same year that Donald Trump won Texas by single digits — the smallest Republican margin in modern history. Now, the story of the New Texan is beginning to come into sharp focus.

First, he or she is young; more than half of the people who have recently moved to Texas from other states are under 40, according to a 2016 report by the state demographer. Where did they come from? Dallas has attracted people from Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami. Austin? Orange County and Providence. Houston? Chicago, L.A. and St. Louis. (Houston is also the biggest magnet for international migration.) San Antonio? Arizona, New Mexico and the Chicagoland suburbs.

Born after 1990, millennials make up half the Next Texans. So now, Texas ranks seventh in the country for its share of these young people who are — right about now — in their mid-20s, according to the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (Some millennials, of course, are native born.) Two Texas cities, Austin and El Paso, have among the highest share of these young people in the entire country.

And these people are not the non-Hispanic whites that make up today's Republican Party: Only about a third of Houston millennials, for example, are non-Hispanic whites. Forty percent are Hispanic and the rest are African-American and Asian-American.

Katelynn Blasavage (center) poses for a selfie with fellow UNT graduates before they process into the coliseum for graduation on May 14, 2016, in Denton. (Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer)

These are not your father's Republicans. Nor, frankly, are they Greg Abbott's. It's true that in 2014, Abbott garnered 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, six points more than even Rick Perry before him. But Abbott did so amid record-low turnout; only 20 percent or a little more of Hispanics have voted Republican in recent cycles.

It is by no means guaranteed that all these Next Texans will vote. Nor is it pre-ordained that they will vote Democratic, nor that they are all liberals. Nor does youth equal monolithically liberal.

"Attitudes are not a fixed quality," says Josh Blank, a pollster with the University of Texas Polling Project. "But yes, when you inject a new population into the state, it's going to have an impact."

At the same time, even the most basic of long-time trends are turning, like a stiff wind, against the Republican Party in this state.

"I'll go out on a limb that no one else has gone out on," says Blank's colleague, James Henson. "This is likely to be a fair year for Democrats."

This year, the Gallup Organization has reclassified Texas from Republican to competitive. Texas residents over 18 — not registered voters, mind you — are far less likely to identify themselves as conservatives than just about a decade ago. Many label themselves independents when it comes to party preference, and that leaves Republicans, according to Gallup, with just a three-point edge over Democrats, 41 to 38 percent.

Third-grader Jaime Tobon looks at the power of a magnet as her dual language science teacher Carmen Arellano questions her about what makes it happen at Arthur Kramer Elementary in North Dallas last fall. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

The influential Cook Political Report in Washington has downgraded the 21st Congressional District, held by Republican Lamar Smith, one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress, from solidly Republican to leaning Republican. In Harris County three times as many Democrats turned out on the first day of early voting this week than in 2014 — and more than Republicans.

One million new voters registered between 2012 and 2016 when the Republican presidential margin dramatically slipped; 1 million more have registered this year. Perhaps most alarmingly for Republicans: Their turnout in absolute terms actually peaked a decade ago and has at best flattened out.

In the latest presidential contests, about 4.5 million Republicans voted, but hardly any more. In absolute terms, the Republican vote has only grown by fewer than 200,000 as the state's population has simply exploded. In gubernatorial races, the Republican turnout seems stuck, too, at about 2.7 million, according to the secretary of state. Given the population growth, in fact, the Republicans are arguably losing ground.

1 / 2Marina Dikosso (left), who is originally from Cameron, Africa, poses for a photograph with her friend Emily Estes after she puts a red dot sticker on the "Where are you from?" board at the State Fair of Texas in Fair Park in Dallas in 2017. (Jae S. Lee / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2Alta Shafaian-Fard, left, originally from South Africa, and Ruby Vargas, from the Philippines, take the oath of citizenship to become U.S. Citizens at the Plano International Festival Saturday October 14, 2017. The event was held at Haggard Park in downtown Plano, Texas. (Ron Baselice/The Dallas Morning News) (Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer)

I'm not rooting for Texas to turn blue; I'm rooting for a competitive two-party system. Monopolies are as unhealthy in politics as they are in economics. So when, exactly, will Democrats start winning major offices in Texas? Henson, the pollster, thinks that even a few small wins this year will spell a good year for Democrats, who have little recent experience in winning. And winning in politics, like anything, takes practice.

History shows that mass migrations to Texas have big, even lasting effects. The last migration? The Rust Belt refugees in the 1980s helped culminate a decades-long process of realignment and flipped the state Republican with the election of George W. Bush to the Governor's Mansion in 1994. The Next Texans are just the next chapter in a very long story.

But the even longer view is particularly discouraging for Republicans: the spigot of migration from other states has been tightened down; last year showed a big downturn in people moving from other states. That's probably not a huge surprise: Texas has become more expensive and housing inventories have become pricey and tight. The population boom is being fueled by a native, near Hispanic majority.

And the next great migration to Texas: It's already coming ashore, from all over the world, many from Asia and Africa, as well as Latin America. These global Texans will take their turn in the story of the Lone Star State. If the last 25 years were interesting, the next 25 should be, well, fascinating.

Richard Parker is a writer in the Texas Hill Country and the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America. He is a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @richardparkertx

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