A recent poll found that only 42 percent of registered voters in Texas say Republican Governor Gregg Abbott deserves to be reelected in 2022. Biden lost Texas by only 630,000 votes, and millions of young people and people of color didn’t vote. John Nichols reports on how the biggest Republican state could elect a Democratic governor next year.

Also: Richard Wright was America’s most famous Black writer in the 1940s and ’50s—with his novel Native Son and his character Bigger Thomas. But his place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. Adam Shatz talks Black American writing, and Black America, at midcentury.

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