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How Dems Can Turn Texas Blue

John Nichols on politics, plus Adam Shatz on Richard Wright.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

October 21, 2021

The US and Texas flags wave outside the Texas Capitol on July 13, 2021, in Austin.(Montinique Monroe / Getty Images)

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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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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