Okay, have at me.

A month or so ago, my friend Bret Begun, the national affairs editor of Newsweek, called to ask if I thought Texas Democrats could make the state competitive in the 2012 presidential election, as various prognosticators had suggested just after Election Day 2008. The theory went like this: Just as Colorado and Virginia had flipped from red to blue for the reasons we’ve talked endlessly about (emerging Hispanic majority, generational trade-out of young urban progressives for older rural conservatives, migration to the suburbs of base Democratic types), Texas was poised to flip next time. I told Bret I thought we were still a couple of cycles away from Texas voting Democratic at the presidential level — even if everything goes the party’s way, I said, the most optimistic view was that 2016 was the first election where we might see true competition. At which point the thing that always happens in these cases happened: Bret said, “Great. Why don’t you write 750 words for us?”

So I did. This piece runs in the Inauguration Week issue of Newsweek — on newsstands Monday but online now. Glenn Smith and Matt Angle and the Burnt Orange boychiks, among others, will sharply disagree, I suspect. They and anyone else who wants to offer a rebuttal should email one to me at esmith@texasmonthly.com; I’ll be happy to post it and get the dialogue going.