There's no shading it, Harris County (Texas) went undeniably blue
Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, has a population greater than 25 states. It also went solidly to Hillary Clinton. She won the county by more than 160,000 votes. Obama won the county in 2012 by 971. And it wasn't just Cliinton who won.
Red state, indeed. She won by similar margins in the other large cities in TX and in the Valley.
Ironically, perhaps, it was one of the few bright spots in this election. To put it in perspective, Hillary won Harris County by more votes than Trump won PA, WI, and MI *combined*.
I'm posting this in part because we as a group tend to talk about blue states and red states and often forget that every state is purple to one degree or another, leading to some rather dodgy assumptions. Turnout won Harris County and should be our primary focus moving forward.
From the Texas Tribune:
The blue wave was apparent up and down the ballot on a banner night for the county's Democrats.
They swept up every single countywide seat, including the district attorney and sheriff’s offices. They flipped a Texas House district in Pasadena. And with a presidential fight at the top of the ticket, Democrats shored up their lead in the fight for the typically purple county with Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by more than 160,000 votes — up from the 971 votes with which Obama took the county in 2012.
Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2016/11/11/harris-county-turned-blue/
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Thanks for playing an active part in the process. 
I think just about anyone who can should volunteer on election night at least once, in part because it would blow some of our silly misconceptions about how things really operate into orbit.
The big problem here is turnout. Latino turnout, in particular, lags the national average.
I think we have the numbers statewide. We certainly will in another few years, if not now. If we could increase turnout to around the national average, it would be highly competitive overall. Ironically, that's why Harris County was such a big win, as I noted.
Of course, the underlying problem is Tom Delay-era gerrymandering, which makes the local/state races exceedingly difficult. Austin is in 5 or 6 Congressional districts. I think San Antonio is in 7. Kind of hard to make gains when Dems in a wide area are crammed into 1 district out of 6 or 7.
Not that we won't try.
We really, really, really need to somehow gain control by 2020, the next redistricting year.
Clinton won the southland by nearly 400,000 votes with little coordination, it would have not been remotely close. Dallas County is the only blue county north of this line. In 2012 Obama would have eked out a win in this area by maybe a tenth of that amount. It would be even higher than 400k but a number of counties towards the northern edges had large +R totals.
You could move that line a couple of counties north to include the redder suburbs of Austin and Houston (including hyper-red Montgomery County) and she still would have won with 100k or so votes to spare.
The one county I'm disappointed in is Hays (San Marcos), there were an insane number of Bernie yard signs there around the university in the spring and it should flip by the next election. Also Nueces County (Corpus Christi) should turn soon. And it's nice to see the Dems pick up a true suburban county (Fort Bend).
While I would love to see the state split like this it's just a pipe dream. If anything it's yet another argument why the electoral college needs to go.
It's not terribly realistic since it includes some very red areas as part of its mythical blue TX. With the exception of the RGV, everything else is pretty much an island oasis. I suppose we could make Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, and Houston island nation-states or something.
If you take an extreme case like Illinois, Cook County is the only thing preventing it from being a red state (that's a big "but" though). Nevada is turning into something similar with Vegas.
Since it's just for fun and games, there is a way to split Texas in half that keeps Dallas and other urban counties in the +D part and most (but not all) of the +R suburbs and places like Waco in a separate state. It would look a bit awkward - like a turkey or some sort of bird - but would have been +D by a half-million votes
we are living now.
