Texas is sharply divided between its cities and rural oilfields. And if you’ve ever actually lived in an oil town, you’d understand why (there’s an absolute saturation of fascist media and marketing, largely to discourage unionization).

Combine that with the systemic disenfranchisement and the gerrymandering and the police violence, and you can give guys like Beto a bit more credit for his “It’s not a Red State, it’s a Non-Voting State” (even if the only remedy he could come up with is “Vote Harder!”)