Nearly six years ago, just after Georgia flipped control of the Senate to Democrats in January 2021, I wrote a column trying to show that “Texas is the next Georgia.” The Georgia model was succinctly summarized by Stacey Abrams in 2012 when she said to me and my late wife, Susan Sandler, “There are 1 million people of color in Georgia who are unregistered. I’m going to register them to vote.”

Eight years later, Jon Ossoff, who worked for civil rights movement icon John Lewis, and Raphael Warnock, who preaches from the literal church pulpit where Martin Luther King once stood, became United States senators.

There was no reason Texas couldn’t do something similar. The ingredients were all there—a state that was even more racially diverse than Georgia, a large nonvoting population of people of color, and talented and dedicated community-based leaders and organizations working to turn demographic majorities into voting majorities.