“Do you really think Wendy Davis is going to win?” I asked Jenn Brown, the executive director of Battleground Texas. “I sure do,” she replied. Brown and her top staff may be the only people in Texas who think that Democrat Davis, who is running for governor, can defeat Republican Greg Abbott next week. But the larger question is whether Battleground Texas’s strategy of turning Texas Blue, which is currently married to Davis’s candidacy, can over the next two, four, or six years make Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, or voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, competitive again.

Battleground’s strategy, as it was presented to me during a recent visit to Texas, relies primarily on demographic trends within the state. Texas has already become a majority-minority state like California. According to 2013 census figures, only 44 percent of Texans are “Anglos,” or whites; 38.4 percent are Hispanic; 12.4 percent African-American; and the remainder Asian-American and native American. By 2020, Hispanics are projected by the Texas State Data Center to account for 40.5 percent of Texans and African-Americans for 11.3 percent compared to 41.1 percent of Anglos. Texas’s minorities generally favor Democrats over Republicans, but they don’t vote in as great a proportion as Anglos who have favored Republicans by similar percentages. Battleground’s strategy assumes that if it and other organizations like the Texas Organizing Project can get many more minorities, and particularly Hispanics, to the polls, then, as minorities increasingly come to outnumber Anglos, Democrats can take back the state.

Battleground’s strategy has met with skepticism in some quarters. My former colleague Nate Cohn has argued that the numbers don’t add up. Former Republican Party executive director Wayne Thorburn argues in Red State that the “Texas Democratic Party may have a more serious deficit with Anglo voters than Republicans do with Hispanics.” Indeed, there are grounds for skepticism. If you take the numbers, but keep the turnout and the degree of party support consistent with the most recent election in 2012, then it is unlikely the Democrats could achieve a majority by 2020, and perhaps not in the following decade. But if you take politics into account—if you assume that developments in both parties could alter baseline projections—then the Battleground strategy looks far more plausible.

Let’s first look at how the population figures translate into votes. While the overall number of minorities already surpass that of Anglos, the numbers of voters have not. Who votes depends on how many in each group are eligible to vote. In 2014, about 46 percent of Hispanics are eligible to vote. The rest are not citizens or are under 18. By contrast, voter eligibility among whites is in the high seventy percent and among African Americans is in the low seventy percent range. The other factor is turnout. In 2012, only about 39 percent of eligible Hispanics voted compared to a little over sixty percent of Anglos and African-Americans. So in the 2012 election, and most likely in the 2014 election, in spite of Battleground’s considerable efforts, Anglo voters, who are likely to favor Republican candidates, will outnumber minority voters.

In 2020, a presidential election year, the numbers should look different. Minorities’ population edge should have increased, and eligibility among Hispanic voters, which has been growing, should be around 50 percent. I have tallied four scenarios for 2020. They show the conditions that would finally lead to a Democratic victory in 2020. (In each of these, I am keeping black turnout and support constant, and assuming that Asian and Native American eligibility and turnout increase slightly, and support for Democrats remains at about 60 percent. To be safe, I am also using the conservative Texas State Data Center figures, which some political scientists believe understate Hispanic growth.)