Turning Texas Blue: What It Will Take to Break the GOP Grip on America’s Reddest State

This admirably slim, mildly polemical guide to electoral change in Texas will appeal to political junkies on both the left and right. Rogers (Cold Anger) a veteran political operative and confidante of the late Democratic governor Ann Richards, swiftly and entertainingly recounts Texas political history, starting with the post-Reconstruction Democratic stranglehold rife with the “ambition, cronyism, and barely hidden corruption” typical of states dominated by one party. She sketches out the post-WWII liberal faction of Democrats headed by Judge Ralph Yarborough and a more moderate faction exemplified by Lyndon Johnson, and she illustrates Dallas’s shift from far-right extremism to a corporate-friendly climate where the GOP emerged as a plausible alternative to the Democrats. She’s a clever, concise writer, unafraid to share her own experience of triumph and disappointment as Richards’s career waned, and brisk and scornful as she indicts “clowns, crackpots, and Christian crusaders” on the Texas right for choosing small-government ideology over effective governance. Democrats will value her analysis of how to reverse Democratic political fortunes, and Republicans who want to stave off a plausible, but by no means inevitable, swing to the Democrats by 2020 should also take a look. Agent: Jim Hornfischer, Hornfischer Literary Management. (Jan.)