For most people the mental image of a Texas county judge is almost certainly a middle-age white man, perhaps in a 10-gallon hat for effect. But when I shake the hand of the judge for Harris County, Texas, which encompasses Houston and neighboring areas, it’s attached to Lina Hidalgo, a 29-year-old Democrat born in Colombia. Until Hidalgo came along in 2018, her seat was the exclusive domain of white men, even as Harris rapidly became one of the most diverse counties in the country. Hidalgo’s victory was a bit of a political stunner, as in one fell swoop she became the first woman, the first Latina, and the first person born after 1990 to hold the office.

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to walk straight out of a Harvard graduate program and into a race to run the largest county in Texas, but Hidalgo identified a classic political arbitrage: a rapidly changing area won handily by Hillary Clinton in 2016 but still controlled by an overconfident Republican establishment. She also sensed the rising tide of anger at Donald Trump among a newly active coalition of Latinos and other people of color, younger voters, and white suburbanites. That coalition propelled Democrats to their most significant gains in Texas in at least a generation: two new U.S. House seats and 12 Texas House seats in 2018. It wasn’t quite enough to carry Beto O’Rourke, but his less-than-three-point margin against Ted Cruz suggested something was afoot in a state where Democrats had not won a statewide office in nearly a quarter of a century.

For the last two years, the burning question has been whether 2018 was unique, born of a nasty stew of Republican overconfidence and the personal unpopularity of Cruz and Trump, or a harbinger of things to come. People in Texas disagree on the answer, but they acknowledge that Texas is changing rapidly, epochally, and in the big way Texas likes to do things. Between 2012 and the end of 2019, voter registration in Texas surged by 3 million—roughly the entire voting population of Oregon. These new voters are typically young, Latino, internal migrants from traditionally liberal enclaves like California, or some combination of the three. Texas today is increasingly young, urban, and brown: By 2022, it’s estimated that one in three voters in the state will be under 30. That’s also the year that Latinos in Texas are projected to outnumber whites. In 2018, Latino population growth in Texas outnumbered white population growth by a margin of nine to one, and there’s no evidence the trend will change anytime soon.

And then there’s the president. After Democrats have been left in the wilderness for at least a generation, Trump has come riding, like a black-hatted antihero in a Clint Eastwood Western, to their rescue. When you talk to Republican leaders in Texas, they’re careful to tick off the president’s accomplishments—strong economic growth, new trade deal with Mexico, reduction in regulation, and gobs of “family values” judges. But for many Latinos, these accomplishments, real or imagined, don’t make up for the demonization of migrants and the racial animosity cultivated by the Trump administration. Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, told me that “Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to Texas Democrats in the modern era,” and it’s easy to see why: John Cornyn’s 48% support from Latinos collapsed to 18% for Trump in 2016, including only 32% of Latino Republicans. Ted Cruz did better in 2018, drawing about 35% of the Latino vote, but with Latinos swarming the polls in record numbers—nearly twice the turnout of 2014—the newly energized Latino vote almost carried Beto O’Rourke to victory. Their views haven’t mellowed since 2018: In a Texas Lyceum poll from January, Trump’s approval rating among Latinos sat at 36%, and many potential Democratic nominees held large head-to-head advantages over Trump among Latinos—Bernie Sanders by 31, Joe Biden by 26, and Elizabeth Warren by 23. Trump has awakened the slumbering giant of Texas politics, and it’s a long-term threat to the Republican stranglehold on the state.