“Flyover country” is very sparsely populated in places, which is why those national maps showing “number of counties won” are so misleading. And the right’s willful ignorance/distortion that basically any politics to the left of center-right is “socialism” has reached snow-capped peaks of absurdity.

Typically two-faced rightists only started carping about California’s “liberalism” when the state began consistently voting Democratic in presidential elections—primarily thanks to the state GOP’s vociferous anti-immigrant overreach under Gov. Pete Wilson. California, lest the right conveniently develop amnesia, was once the largest Republican state in the nation.

One could equally argue that rightists are “dangerous”—given that the states they run typically gut environmental and consumer protections, shortchange public health and education, attempt to suppress voter turnout among non-conservative voters, treat adult women like chattel incapable of making their own reproductive decisions, and ram through hyper-partisan and discriminatory mid-decade state and federal redistributing.

Texas meets all the above dubious distinctions criteria, is the second-largest state in population ,and been solidly won by the GOP nominee in 10 of the last 10 presidential elections. California has been won by the Democratic nominee in 7 of the last 10 elections—but only after voting for Republicans in every presidential election from 1952-1988 except 1964.

Since 1952, Texas has voted Democratic presidentially just four times—1960, 1964, 1968 and 1976. And except for 1964, all the Texas Democratic popular vote wins (translating into winner-take-all Electoral College victories) were very narrow.

Democrats overall, however, have won solid popular vote margins in every presidential election since 1992 except 2004, with Bush II effectively installed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Trump two years ago winning several states by the narrowest of margins. Demographic trends are very much against Republicans, with younger voters especially rejecting GOP/rightist orthodoxy against marriage equality, legal immigration from non-Caucasian countries and reproductive freedom. Trump’s coddling of white supremacists, attempts to legalize theocratic discrimination against LGBT Americans, particularly transgender kids, and monstrous warehousing of the children of asylum-seeking parents have repulsed solid majorities of Americans of all ages.

See you at the voting booth November 6. :)