Today's Texas GOP

» DMN: Poll's shocking SOS for Texas GOP (Rod Dreher)

The full report, which will be released today, knocks the legs out from under two principles cherished by the party's grassroots: staunch social conservatism and hard-line immigration policies. At the state level, few voters care much about abortion, school prayer and other hot-button issues. Immigration is the only conservative stand-by that rates much mention - and by hitting it too hard, Republicans lose both the Hispanics and independents that make up what the pollster defines as the "Critical Middle."

Who's in the Critical Middle? Mostly young males who see themselves as moderates and who lean slightly GOP. Clustering around Austin, they're largely unchurched and care little about social issues or immigration. They're open to a GOP appeal to overall spending cuts and credible promises to be good economic stewards.

"Republicans are going to have to win 70 to 80 percent of these voters if they're going to win statewide," Mr. Hill tells me.

This is not going to go down well with the activist core of the Texas GOP, especially people like me: a social conservative with firm views on illegal immigration. But reality has a way of focusing the mind, forcing one to realize that political parties are not dogma-driven churches, but coalitions that unavoidably shift over time.

There's two ways of looking at this:

One way is that these people are still voting for Republicans in Texas in the two worst climates thus far in the "Age of Bush".

The second way is that there really hasn't been a suffiiciently-funded Democratic candidate to press the issue.

There's nothing to suggest the first point won't alleviate somewhat for the GOP. But there's also nothing to suggest that the second point won't be getting any easier in the future. The statewide judicials actually had a semi-respectable chunk of change to run with in 2008 and demonstrated that Texas was, intrinsically, a 51-45 GOP state. I don't know that there's anything terribly frightening about a 6-point hill to climb when you're used to having head handed over to you without benefit of a silver platter by 12-20 points previously.