Houston election signals key trend
It also signals an unmistakable evolutionary step in national politics, one that provides further evidence of a trend that helped make Barack Obama president: growth-oriented communities like the Texas metropolis, rather than aging big cities or nostalgia-inducing small towns, are setting the course of the country’s political direction.
Houston is one of a set of fast-growing cities and expanding suburbs whose changing face and increasingly post-racial politics helped make Barack Obama president. Their politics are defined by some of the same trends—notably, growing Hispanic and Asian populations and the rise of the service sector—that are shaping the nation as a whole.
It’s not as if these places are suddenly embracing a new and thoroughly alien form. Majority-white Charlotte, for instance, first elected a black mayor in 1982 – the same year Houston first elected a woman—and chose another young black reformer this year to replace a white Republican.
But the election of Annise Parker in Houston makes clear that the Charlottes and Houstons are now at the forefront of American political change, while the shrinking and declining big cities of the Northeast and Rust Belt are bringing up the rear.
“Houston is your post-racial, post-ethnic future of America,” said demographer Joel Kotkin. “It’s a leading-edge place.”
While the political math of deep-red Texas denied Houston a presidential visit, Obama’s campaign focused on similarly situated cities—places like Las Vegas, a hub of his Western campaign, with late-in-campaign stops added for Orlando, Fla., the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and the Research Triangle of North Carolina.
Tags: Barack Obama, Houston, Houston Voters
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