Hold your water there Texas Democrats, because your Blue Wave is about to wind up a Blue Trickle if you don't fix a problem and fast.

It's not any specific candidate. It's not the big, bad Republicans. It's not even the primary turnout performance. It's this: Hispanics are not yet energized by Democratic candidates. And Democrats can't win Texas without winning Latinos, big.

First, let's dispense with one obvious bit of Republican hubris: You guys have little chance of winning the Hispanic vote in this state. George W. Bush did OK. Kay Bailey Hutchison outperformed every Republican in recent history.

But that was yesterday's Republican Party.

Today's Republican Party sounds anti-Hispanic, anti-Mexican (cultural and national) and anti-immigrant. And that's why the current Texas GOP hasn't cracked the 40 percent ceiling with Hispanics.

Exhibit A: Donald Trump, crushed by Hillary Clinton in Texas among Hispanic voters by a margin of 80 percent to 16 percent, according to the polling firm Latino Decisions. Crushed. Demolished. Pulverized.

It doesn't matter who married a Latina or who has a Cuban-sounding surname.

Exhibit B: Among Hispanic voters, Sen. Ted Cruz got his clock cleaned by Democrat Paul "Who?" Sadler in 2012. Since then, no Texas politician has hitched his star more firmly to Trump than Cruz, who's all border wall, all National Guard, all crackdowns and deportations, all the time. And I won't even get started on his Spanish.

No, Hispanics are not monolithically Democratic. But Republicans have exiled themselves to be a loser, minority party among Hispanics, who are also independents. The only question that really remains is how energetically they will turn out. Or, just how big a beating will Republicans take from them?

Armando Vergara walks his daughter Evylin, 3, past the Dallas County Government Center, Precinct 5 in Oak Cliff on Election Day. (David Woo / Staff Photographer)

Second, the Texas primary got interpreted all wrong. The hype about a Blue Wave was followed by more hype about Democrats outvoting Republicans in early voting. Both were -- to use my favorite term in political science -- dumb. And so, two dumb inputs quickly led to a dumb hypothesis: Texas is turning blue. No, it's not. It has to turn purple first. Then Republicans turned out a half million more voters and the story line was: Texas is still red. We went from dumb to dumbest.

Besides, primaries aren't predictive but illustrative, showing what's going on inside a party. By more than doubling turnout to 1 million voters, Democrats proved they've taken big steps in grass-roots organization and field operations since 2014. They took steps again in 2016, closing Trump's lead to just 9 points statewide -- the narrowest of any winning Republican presidential candidate in the history of the Lone Star State.

Doubling turnout was impressive, but that wasn't the most interesting part. Most importantly they goosed it in the state's most populous counties -- where the votes are, where elections are won and lost. Matt Barretto of Latino Decisions noted that in these 15 counties, Democratic ballots jumped 117 percent over 2014 while Republican votes increased only 16 percent.

So how did the Republicans get to 1.5 million votes? Smaller cities, less-populated suburbs and rural Texas, where regular, normal Republicans were having knockdown, drag-out brawls with the right wing, funded by the billionaire boys club. Exhibit C: Lubbock County, where 22,000 Republican voters turned out this year compared to 16,000 in 2014.

And herein lies the Democrats' big problem: They didn't energize Hispanic voters in the big numbers their party needs. The 2018 Democrats have exactly what might be called, if unfairly, the Wendy Davis Problem. They're appealing to Anglo urban and suburban liberals. But they're not turning on Hispanic voters.

Exhibit D: All of South Texas, which Lupe Valdez won and Andrew White lost, badly. That includes San Antonio, Laredo, Corpus Christi, the Rio Grande Valley (population 1.3 million). And all of West Texas including El Paso. These are not just dusty border villages. These are big, honkin' cities. And I won't even bother mentioning everything in and around Dallas-Fort Worth.

Unfortunately for him, Beto O'Rourke has the same problem, but on a smaller scale. He's plenty energizing to lots of Democratic voters: young voters who are, in fact, overwhelmingly Hispanic. But he lost in South Texas, too. Sure Hispanic turnout doubled in Harris County this spring but was still just 7.4 percent of over 500,000 Hispanic voters; that won't cut it in November.

To win, Democrats need to run Hispanic candidates and speak to Hispanic voters. That means, yes, being fluent in the language of immigration. Fairness and justice matter.

But so do good jobs, good pay, good education and decent health care. Yes, Latino voters want fairness in a country that has turned bitter and resentful. But they also want the same thing as everybody else: A decent shot at doing better than their parents. And the polling shows that.

That is the difference between a wave and a trickle.

Richard Parker is a writer in Austin 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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