Democrats would have turned Texas blue in 2020 had Republicans not suppressed the vote to help Donald Trump win according to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Texas has not been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, but President Joe Biden had a real shot at doing so last year. In fact, he only lost the state by 600,000 votes, and that’s mostly because Texas Republicans used the courts to block efforts to expand voting by mail in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Several major Texas cities wanted to send absentee voter request forms to millions of registered voters just as many cities and states across the country did for their own voters. Absentee voting was a big reason why Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes in 2020, but the right-wing dominated Texas Supreme Court chose to suppress the vote instead.
Paxton, who frequently sucks up to Trump, admitted that Texas’ 38 electoral votes would have went to Biden had Republicans not suppressed the vote.
“Yeah, I think it’s certainly critical to my state and that’s why we fought off these twelve lawsuits,” Paxton bragged. “We had them in Houston, we had them in San Antonio, we had them in Austin — we had them in the counties where you have the most liberal judges. And it was a concerted effort, nationally, with lots of money going into it.”
“And just knowing that we had twelve lawsuits that we had to win,” he continued. “And if we had lost one of them, if we’d lost Harris County — Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them.”
“Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation — we would’ve been on election day,” Paxton concluded. “I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election.”
This is smoking-gun evidence that Republicans cheated to win in Texas by preventing people from voting by mail during a pandemic. Voting by mail is a secure way to cast ballots and fraud is very rare. Several states such a Utah and Oregon vote by mail. And every registered voter should have the right to cast their ballot by mail without an excuse. It certainly beats standing in a line all day long.
Clearly, this is why Texas Republicans are hell-bent on restricting vote by mail even further in the state. They are frightened because they know that Democrats can win the state if voting is more accessible. If Senate Democrats would just kill the filibuster, Republicans would no longer be able to suppress the vote, which they have admitted in court is the only way they can win elections.
Frankly, if Republicans want do-overs in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, Biden should get a do-over in Texas with vote by mail in full effect. Paxton’s admission proves that Texas is turning blue and can turn blue if enough Democratic voters will do their civic duty one way or another. Perhaps the state will turn blue by 2022. After all, it should have turned blue in 2020.
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