Every four years, on election night, we see America’s political divide reduced to a binary map: an outer ring of Democratic states, as cerulean as the “I’m with her” arrow, encircling a sea of crimson. California, New York, Rhode Island, and Maryland are suffused with Solyndra-loving liberals who want nationalized health care for their government-subsidized Teslas. Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are painted red with gun-lovin’, anti-abortion, build-a-wall, red-blooded Americans.

The standard electoral map, of course, disguises vast differences of opinion. And in 2018, and even potentially 2020, there’s a good chance that the most unlikely of those nominally red states—Texas—could turn blue. The battleground in 2018 that could flip the state is in Texas’s 23rd congressional district, an immense plot of the country that stretches 800 miles along most of Texas‘s border with Mexico, as they say down South, “just north of the Rio Grande.” As you’d expect, the seat is currently occupied by a staunchly Trump-supporting Republican, Will Hurd. But that might not be for long. On this week’s Inside the Hive podcast, Jay Hulings, a former Texan federal prosecutor, who has worked public corruption, organized crime and immigration cases, and is now running as a Democrat for Hurd’s seat, explained why the 23rd District (and even Texas itself) is increasingly becoming more Democratic, and why Trump’s actions actually go against what a growing majority of people in Texas want for their state, and the country.

“There’s a lot more Democrats [in Texas] than people realize,” Hulings told me, and then pointed to the 2016 election results as a case-in-point. “Hillary lost Texas by 9 points without putting any effort or money in; she lost Ohio by 10; she lost Iowa by 11. Texas, with no effort was closer than those battleground states.” He noted that the cities in Texas—San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth—are all pretty Democratic, even if the typical Democrat in Texas is more culturally conservative, in some ways, than your traditional California resident. Many of them, in fact, are much like Hulings: protective of the Second Amendment, in support of health care, embarrassed by Donald Trump, and somewhere in the middle on immigration. What about that wall? “I think the wall is a terrible idea, and most people in Texas think it is a terrible idea,” Hulings said. “The border in Texas is a river. It’s the Rio Grande; so what, are you going to put the wall in the middle of the river? It’s the sort of thing that people who aren’t from the border, who haven’t spent time there, think is a good idea.”

So how does Hulings plan to win? He notes that when you look at the numbers from past elections, he has a pretty good chance of getting people to the polls in his favor. In 2016, for example, the 23rd district was considered a battleground quadrant of the country, and Republican Hurd only won by 1.3 percent. You would think that after winning by such a small margin, Hurd would try to be less partisan, but his voting record is anything but. Since Trump became president, Hurd has voted in line with him a staggering 96.1 percent of the time. That voting record, coupled with Trump’s embarrassing Twitter account, his approach to health care, and a state that is drifting away from an increasingly hard-line Republican Party, might be the perfect recipe to turn Texas from red to blue—or at the very least, a nice shade of purple.

iTunes user? Just tap here to listen to Inside the Hive at your convenience. And don’t forget to subscribe.