And in Texas, political strategists are focusing on an interesting political shift.
Particularly since women's-rights filibuster champion, State Senator Wendy Davis, became a local and national hero.
Demographics are shifting in Texas as elsewhere around the country. Middle-class, suburban women are moving left.
While the Hispanic vote has been the focus of much of the analysis of Democrats’ prospects for turning the Republican tide that has swamped them since 1994, in the short term, they will almost certainly need to look to suburban women in the 2014 election — especially if Wendy Davis is at the top of the ticket.
However the Democratic Party, Battleground Texas and (especially) a likely Davis campaign for governor divide the labor of both increasing turnout and increasing the Democratic share of the vote, they will have to do more than wait for a big rise in Hispanic turnout if they hope to have any shot in the near term. If there exists a combination of luck and strategy that can give Davis a realistic chance of victory, suburban women will likely be a necessary part of the equation.
This is because some of these women appear to be turning away from the Republican Party. ...Texas Tribune
Notably, the Texas Tribune reports,"They haven’t been swept up in the conservative ideological surge personified by the Tea Party." And they had become a little disillusioned by George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism."
Between October 2010 and June 2013, conservative identification decreased from 49 percent to 38 percent among these women. And in June, while 20 percent of voters identified themselves as Tea Party Republicans, that number was 5 points lower for suburban women. ...Texas Tribune
