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Democrats have long been dreaming about turning Texas purple. The state’s rising Latino population, plus an influx of liberals and moderates into Texas’ big cities, would allow Democrats to win statewide races for the first time in decades.

Or so goes the fantasy.

Despite years of predictions and hopes, Democratic victories in Texas haven’t looked any closer to reality. In 2014, Wendy Davis was supposed to have a shot at winning the governor’s race. She lost by more than 20 percentage points. Why? White voters’ shift to the right has easily kept pace with demographic change, as David Byler of The Weekly Standard has suggested.

This year has brought a new Democratic hope: Beto O’Rourke, a member of the House who’s trying to win Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. O’Rourke is, as my colleague Frank Bruni recently wrote, “a peppy, rangy, toothy progressive with ratios of folksiness to urbanity and irreverence to earnestness that might well have been cooked up in some political laboratory.” I keep hearing from people I know in Texas that O’Rourke is the real deal.