Will Texas Become a Safe Haven for Progressive Tech?

As we discussed in our last article, the question about Texas’s political future hangs on a knife’s edge. In 2018, Texas experienced a tech-driven push to turn the solidly red state into a blue one. Jeremey Smith, a Silicon Valley transplant, is hard at work developing technology to help progressives grow in cities like Austin and Dallas. His nonprofit Register2Vote strives to help more progressives in Texas get out and vote. Over the last two years, Jeremy and his team have developed a multitude of apps and other services designed to find progressive voters and urge them to vote. 

Stories like Jeremey Smith are not unique. While many move to Texas for the rapidly growing tech market and friendly atmosphere, many transplants don’t mesh with the political environment. Mimi O’Brien Meese recently moved to Texas from her home state in New York. In a statement to PEW research, Mimi states, “Politics is something I’ve learned not to discuss with the locals.” While Mimi may have trouble discussing politics with the locals, she was relieved to find that many others had moved to her area from New York, Connecticut, and California. These transplants are choosing to stick with their political idealogy instead of adopting the beliefs of the locals.

This unwillingness to adopt the political beliefs of your community has conservatives in the state of Texas scared. We see that in cities like Dallas and Austin, where the tech industry is the strongest, counties are continuously flipping blue. In the past three elections, all the major cities in the state of Texas voted Democrat. 

This is why, for many conservatives, the growing tech industry is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the ever-increasing tech market is causing the Texas economy to explode with growth. However, this comes at the price of conservatives losing their political foothold in the state.