East Texas House member Chuck Hopson switching from D to R...

Rumors are swirling and I have confirmed with several sources in the press and with John Cornyn's camp that there is another party switching happening today. Following on the heels of basically all of Hardin County's elected officials going from blue to red (link) State Representative Hopson is going to become a Republican....

Speaker Joe Straus will be on hand to welcome Hopson to the Republican side, but Straus ironically may face a challenge from within his party if Republicans manage to pick up enough seats... if the GOP can get back up to 85 seats they may want a more conservative Speaker or promises from Straus that he will be more conservative...

With so many Democrats in East Texas running fast and furiously away from Obama I think we may be witnessing the last throes of the the Democrats in rural Texas. It used to be that all of Texas was all Democrats, but in the middle of the 1990s a lot of them switched over. Of course some switched over before that but the mass exodus really happened in the middle of the 1990s...

There were some hold outs though especially in East Texas... now it looks like many of those hold outs are coming over to the Republican side. This is all speculation, but I think the elections on Tuesday were a wake up call, but I also feel like these decisions were in the works far before Tuesday. I wonder if we are witnessing the last of the yellow dogs and blue dogs in Texas... maybe Obama was what it took to push them over the edge.

One of Kay's big campaign themes is that the Republican Party of Texas is suffering and it is all due to Rick... she will come in and make the party a big tent and everything will be good again. Never mind that Kay has seen her Washington GOP colleagues drop like flies to near endangered status while the GOP in Texas still has majorities, all of this party switching undermines her big campaign theme.

I have no idea how much Cathie Adams had to do with this, if at all, but this is another big scalp for her in her early tenure as party chairman. Growing the party with party switchers, purging and purifying the party by supporting conservatives over moderates when possible... they don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive strategies apparently. Either that or maybe Adams was never planning on purging anyone in the first place.

It will be fascinating to watch all of this play out, but I think Democrats face a major major up hill battle in their goal of having a Democrat speaker.