NEW VOTERS, SWITCHERS, AND POLITICAL PARTY REALIGNMENT IN TEXAS

ECAUSE political parties play such an important stabilizing and directing role in American politics, scholars and practitioners pay close attention to the relative strengths of our two major parties. They look especially for signs which might indicate any change in party balance which could signal changes in America’s public policy agenda. Party realignments are complex phenomena. Ladd (1986) argues that the term realignment has three different meanings: &dquo;(1) major social groups changing their partisan loyalties and voting differently than they did in times past; (2) a significant net change in the partisan balance of power; and (3) the emergence of a new majority party.&dquo;1 While national and state partisan shifts may not yet be signaling the emergence of a new majority party, shifting social group-party alliances and net changes in partisan balance are definitely occurring. Most realignment investigations and emphases have focused on national-level political events and personages. Nationwide shifts of this type are clearly of great importance, but many of the forces encouraging realignments, and many of the effects realignments have, are really ap-propriate sub-national issues as well. Individual state or regional changes may not only presage larger national shifts, they are important indica-tors of change in their own right.2 And while national survey data for the past few years have shown little change in relative party balance, these national figures may mask important state trends and movements. Because of its state characteristics, Texas is an appropriate place to undertake a state-focused analysis of party realignment. Texas has ex-perienced rapid growth in the past twenty years, both from internal popu-lation forces and from in-migration. And, recent electoral events and public opinion sources indicate that Texas may be in the middle of a ma-jor partisan realignment. Public opinion data collected in the state over the past two decades show a marked growth in Republic party identi