Republicans face a Texan chill

It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good, unless you’re a Democrat looking to make inroads in Texas, perhaps…

For Republicans, the Lonestar State just got very cold very quickly as they are reminded of the harsh truth that an extreme climate event can make even the strongest ideological position seem brittle. The climate event in question is a polar vortex, unleashed by a weakened jet stream, that has drawn cold air into the southern states. It is thought that over 71 per cent of the US now sits under snow but the focus is on Texas which appeared uniquely unprepared for a prolonged dip below zero.

In this post-Trump world when politicians (well, some at least) attempt to reorientate themselves to facts and real-world priorities, a polar vortex offers the Democrats another chance to remind people that political decisions impact lives. Sub-zero temperatures are even harder than Covid-19 for Republicans to spin, though state leaders have certainly given it a good try. Governor Greg Abbott appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News on Tuesday, and tried to deflect. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” he said, exhibiting either cynical misdirection or risible logic around the fact that non-weatherproofed wind turbines predictably iced up (but so too did wellheads). The “Green New Deal” has nothing to do with the temperature in Texas. It remains a huge slice of sky-bound pie advocated by more progressive Democrats; a policy in name only and one for which the Biden government has shown little enthusiasm.

The optics for Republicans also are not helped by Senator Ted Cruz jetting off on holiday to Cancun, Mexico (and then scuttling back), but Rick Perry, former Secretary of Energy under Trump, made sure the sense of Republican disconnect was compounded by declaring that “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Again, it’s difficult to imagine many Texans, currently reducing their grandmother’s sideboards into tinder to feed a dying stove, will be muttering through their frosted lips “thank God for small government and a lack of regulation”. Yet, if that wasn’t outlandish enough, Perry then tried to talk about the pragmatics of the Texan system. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically,” he said. Yet that “resilient grid” is precisely why Texans are now swapping their cowboy heels for yeti boots.

Alongside Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, Texas is one of only a few states where electricity supply is deregulated. It is on its own power grid and does not connect to grids in adjacent states. Furthermore, the company that runs the grid, aptly titled the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), has been under no obligation to prepare their facilities for unusual weather. With neither state nor federal oversight, the company predictably chose the path of least expenditure.

That might sound reasonable for a state as famously hot as Texas. After all, it is sometimes said that Texas owns no snowploughs, though the Department of Transport claims they have 30. Northern Texas, in particular, suffers seasonal snow, which makes this current crisis feel less like an accident and more like years of bad decisions suddenly left to snowball. ERCOT, for example, does not operate a “capacity market”, such as we have in the UK, which rewards providers with money up-front to mitigate the fluctuations in energy provision given the variability inherent in green energy production. It might be pricier, but it is reliable.

Instead, ERCOT follows a “scarcity pricing” model by which costs are calculated based upon the current supply and demand. This results in huge variability in the price of power as companies reduce or increase production based on seasonal variability; offering cheap electricity in normal circumstances but a system that resembles the plot to a Cormack McCarthy novel during critical events. This appears to have contributed to this week’s power outages across Texas as ERCOT struggled to add extra capacity when the vortex hit. Without the contingency of being able to tap into a larger national grid, Texas went black.

It might yet go blue. Beyond the obvious peril to which ordinary Texans have been exposed, this story is certain to have a prolonged political impact. Back in November, cable news networks whipped themselves into a cultish frenzy anticipating Biden flipping Texas. In the end, it remained red as Trump carried it with 52.1per cent of the vote (Biden 46.5 per cent), which is almost the same as Trump’s 52.2 per cent in 2016. That does not mean that Texas is incapable of flipping in the future.

Democrats paid little attention to Texas in 2020, with the Biden team sensibly focusing their strategy around the midwestern “blue wall” states. Texas hasn’t gone blue since Carter in 1976 yet Democrats have been increasingly buoyant about their chances over the last few election cycles. Beto O’Rourke offered a strong challenge to Ted Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018 but the Democrats never capitalised on that momentum. Democrats still need to learn to win in Texas, especially in Latino communities, as a post-election piece by Jack Herrera, from Politico, made clear. In “Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote”, Herrera offered an ominous warning. “If the Democratic Party’s 2020 postmortem for Texas—indeed, for the whole nation—goes only as far as to try to increase their appeal to “Latinos” as an undifferentiated bloc, they’re going to experience even harsher losses in the next election.”

The lesson of that article is about Democrat complacency yet the same might be said of Republicans who can also treat their vote in equally naïve terms. House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, defended Rick Perry’s remarks linking freedom to the energy supply by claiming he was speaking “‘partly rhetorically”, but, as H.L. Mencken quipped, “One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.”

So too is a night spent in the cold or without running water. The experiences of this winter will be frozen in the psyches of many Texans exposed to the reality of what happens when ideology is left to drift towards ideological extremes. Republicans advocating (one might almost say fetishising) hugely unregulated markets and impractically small government face the prospect of speaking to an electorate who understand what life is like when risks are stacked against them in the name of reward and when government is diminished beyond reason in the name of freedom.

Texas is facing precisely the kind of challenge that Republicans under Trump proved so poor at resolving; the problem-solving practicality that was central to Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” campaign. If there was ever a case for investing in new infrastructure, retooling around greener energy, then this it. If the new President can be seen getting the pandemic under control, directing money into the pockets of average Americans, and establishing a tone of competence about the federal government, then Republicans should begin to fear the midterms as the next of many cold winters, where even the hot rhetoric of a resurgent Donald Trump will fail to keep them warm.