Texas was near the very bottom of U.S. states in voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election. Few were surprised by this, given the recent history of voting in the Lone Star State. What accounts for our dismal performance? Why did a state like Florida, with 5 million fewer people than Texas, cast 600,000 more votes in the 2016 general election?

And will things ever change?

In fact, there are signs of change afoot this year, but such a shift would require bucking a long history of low civic engagement, a situation that, in my view, results from several interrelated factors, some of which began even before Texas gained statehood.

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First, Texas was settled in the 1820s and 1830s by white farmers and the owners of enslaved people, who brought with them the ideals of the traditional political culture that dominated the southern states to the east.

As the 20th-century scholar of American federalism Daniel J. Elazar noted, this culture featured a paternalist and elitist conception of the commonwealth that "accepts government as an actor with a positive role in the community, but tries to limit that role to securing the continued maintenance of the existing social order."

Those who do not have a definite role to play in politics are not expected to be even minimally active as citizens, Elazar said. Accordingly, "in many cases, they are not even expected to vote."

Our longstanding system of one-party dominance in Texas elections reinforced this traditionalistic culture. From the 1870s to the 1960s, Texas was a one-party Democratic state. Since the early 1990s, it has been a one-party Republican state.

With the minority party having little chance of prevailing in general elections, voter turnout is generally low in presidential elections (about 60 percent of registered voters actually showed up at the polls in 2012 and 2016) and very low in the midterm elections, when most important state offices such as governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general are decided. About 34 percent of registered Texas voters turned out in 2014.

Obviously, the dominant party — long the Democrats, now replaced by the GOP — have had little reason to change a system that routinely elects their nominees to all statewide offices.

With Republican dominance threatened by the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the Texas population, recent Republican-controlled legislatures have used their power to slow any transition away from the status quo by enacting tough voter identification laws, resisting efforts to make voter registration and voting easier for Texans and gerrymandering congressional and state legislative maps to minimize political opportunities for Democratic candidates.

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These efforts have borne fruit, as the Democrats hold just 55 of 150 state house seats, 10 of 31 state senate seats, and 11 of 36 U.S. house seats.

Given the Republican control of all the levers of power in Austin, coupled with the federal courts' reluctance to intervene in partisan political matters, if change is going to come to Texas, it will have to be driven by the state's voters.

Plenty of people are now registered in Texas — a record 15.6 million, the Texas Secretary of State has announced — but turnout among those on the voter rolls is among the lowest in the nation. Will that change in 2018?

Possibly.

The rise of Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016, securing the Republican presidential nomination and defeating Hillary Clinton, has been a game-changer across the nation. President Trump has scrambled the electoral eggs. Many Democratic blue-collar and less-well-educated white voters have moved toward the Republican party, while college-educated professionals in the growing suburbs have shifted toward the Democrats. And Trump's reversal of longstanding GOP efforts to broaden the party base by reaching out to the growing Latino and Asian-American communities will matter in Texas.

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That national dynamic is moving Texas from a deep-red state to a slightly more purplish hue, with pockets of blue in suburban areas like Fort Bend County. Couple President Trump's mixed impact in Texas with the surprising emergence of Beto O'Rourke as the best-funded U.S. Senate candidate in the nation, and we may finally have an important competitive election that could draw as many as 6 million Texans to the polls this fall.

That will still be pretty lousy turnout by national standards, but it will be a lot better than the 4.5 million we usually expect to vote. We are not going to jump into the Top 10 in voter turnout in 2018, but we might move up to maybe 35th. Will that improvement signal a turn toward a more robust voter turnout in the future? We cannot answer that until we go through at least two more election cycles.

Richard Murray is a University of Houston political scientist and director of survey research at the Hobby School of Public Affairs.

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