My title refers to Dave Wasserman, Nate Cohn, and Nate Silver, three liberal arts graduates with specialties, it seems, in probability & statistics, political science, and sociology. In the autumns of even-numbered years, I find myself compulsively checking the Twitter feeds of all three for election commentary, forecasts, links to the cross tabs of the latest polls, etc., etc. This morning, I believe with his tongue only partly in his cheek, Wasserman methodically lays out trends in Texas voting patterns associated with proximity to a Whole Foods Market. I'll summarize but here is the link to his Twitter.
Of the 254 counties in Texas, 11 have a Whole Foods Market. In the 1992 presidential election (Bill Clinton-Bush I-Ross Perot), 55% of the statewide vote came out of what I'll call Whole Foods Counties (WFCs). Clinton in 1992 won 48% of the two-party vote in WFCs. Since then, the percentage of the statewide vote coming out of the WFCs has ratcheted slowly upward. So has the percentage of the WFC vote won by the Democratic candidate. By 2016, 59% of presidential ballots cast in Texas came from the 11 WFCs, and Hillary did somewhat better than her husband had: she got 54% of them. Just two years later, in a US Senate race, 61% of the statewide vote came out of WFCs, and the Democratic candidate, Beto O'Rourke, won 58% of them.
Wasserman comments, jokingly, that the "Whole Foods-ification" of Texas is going to doom Republicans in the state. I guess that's the tongue-in-cheek part, inasmuch as the formulation suggests that building some more upscale groceries would turn Texas navy blue. Of course the presence of a Whole Foods Market is a proxy for something else, which, were we to try and name it, would be something like: a diverse metropolitan population wherein an unusually high percentage of the Caucasians are college-educated. The 11 WFCs, as you have probably guessed, are the home counties to Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso. The other five WFCs are suburban counties adjoining either Houston, Austin, or Dallas-Fort Worth.
Maybe "doom" is partly for humorous effect but it isn't hard to see where Texas is headed. In the 2018 midterms, the Democrats picked up two US House seats in the state, one in the suburbs of Houston, the other in the suburbs of Dallas. Both districts are entirely within WFCs. In a statewide race, such as for the state's 38 electoral votes in a presidential election, the task is to get to "50 percent plus 1." Thirty years ago, according to my rough-and-ready calculations, Democrats were getting only about half of what they needed out of the WFCs—just under half the vote in counties accounting for just over half of the total vote puts you to 25% and you need 50%. But 30 years later half of a half has become three-fifths of three-fifths, which is 36% of what's needed to win.
It's not as if 243 counties without a Whole Foods Market have no say, and Wasserman sets out the voting data for them as well. The problem seems to be that their share of the statewide vote is shrinking, and there isn't much upside for Republicans across much of rural and small-town Texas: everyone in town, except maybe the school nurse, already votes Republican. No room for growth unless you can get the nurse, a single Latina who on her occasional treks to El Paso loves to visit the Whole Foods Market.
What do the two Nates have to say today? Silver, of the FiveThirtyEight blog, currently pegs Biden's chances in Texas at 32 percent. That's a 1-in-3 that would spell D-O-O-M for Trump—it's like praying the league batting champ comes through with a hit! Cohn points out that the bad news for Biden is that, while polling evenly with Trump in Texas (and also in Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa), he's struggling to establish a clear advantage in Pennsylvania and Florida. The upshot, in his view, is that the Electoral College sits on a knife's edge: a small movement toward Biden between now and November would result in a route, but a small movement toward Trump would give him a chance to eke out another one in the Electoral College even while losing the popular vote by more than last time. Although it would have seemed farfetched half a year ago, Biden's most likely minimal victory right now might very well be the Clinton states plus Michigan plus Wisconsin plus Arizona plus the second congressional district in Nebraska. That would make exactly 270.
Nebraska, like Maine, awards two electoral votes to the statewide winner and one to the winner of each congressional district within the state. In 2016, Trump carried the second district, which centers on the city of Omaha, by 47 to 45 percent. I just checked and there is a Whole Foods Market in Omaha.
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