For many observers of Texas politics, the most striking developments have come in the Dallas area. “If you think about the history, Texas went from being a Democratic state to a Republican state first and foremost in the Dallas suburbs,” says Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “That was an era in which white middle- and upper-middle-class voters were choosing to leave the cities and move to these places that were very homogenous and like-minded, and that’s where Republicans started to build power.”

Now, though, the suburban growth “is not people trying to get away from the cities,” Blank says. “It’s younger Texans trying to be close to the cities. Fundamentally, that’s a different kind of mind-set, and that’s a mind-set that tends to align more with Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party.” O’Rourke still lost the two giant suburban counties north of Dallas—Collin and Denton—but by less than 50,000 votes (compared with over 170,000 votes for Obama).

James Dickey, the chair of the state Republican Party, is also intently watching the Dallas area. He notes that Republicans won nine state House seats—the exact number Democrats need to capture the chamber—by five percentage points or less, and that seven of them are in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. “The question is whether that is a trend, or a [temporary] dip,” he told me. “The answer is: That depends on us. Will we do the work necessary to make sure to win back the geographic areas that we had as recently as 2014?”

Democrats’ gains in metro Texas have been helped by two currents. The first is growing diversity. Since 2010, census figures show, the state has added 1.9 million new Latino residents, 541,000 African Americans, and 473,000 Asians, along with just 484,000 whites. That translates to nonwhites accounting for six of every seven residents the state has added over nearly the past decade. The demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution shared figures with me that show whites accounting for only about one-third of the state population younger than 30. Many of the suburban counties that once delivered reliable Republican majorities have changed substantially. “These are not the suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s,” Blank says. “These suburbs are significantly more diverse; they are significantly younger.” Since 2010, the number of eligible Latino voters has increased by at least 10 percent in five of the six suburban U.S. House districts Democrats are targeting next year, while the African and Asian American populations have grown even faster in most of them.

Both in 2016 and 2018, exit polls show that nonwhites cast 43 percent of the statewide vote. But the march toward a majority nonwhite electorate has been significantly slowed by lackluster turnout, particularly among Latinos. The Democratic firm Latino Decisions recently reported that while turnout from eligible Latinos in Texas soared from 1.1 million in 2014 to 1.9 million in 2018, the number of nonvoters dwarfed those who participated: 1.7 million Latinos who were registered to vote did not turn out, and 2 million more who are eligible have not yet registered. That huge gap threatens to again dilute the community’s impact in 2020, and despite all of Trump’s provocations, many Democrats are skeptical that the party knows how to significantly increase Latino engagement in Texas—a state with few unions that can organize these voters (as they do in Nevada) and with restrictive laws that hobble voter-registration drives.