I think even suburban California culture is much more similar to Texas culture than it is to SV culture.
It makes sense. There’s a lot of shared history: Central American cultural influence/heritage, long history of intense and local economic booms and busts (Oil in SoCal and Texas, gold in NorCal), fiercely independent political history. It’s produced an interesting mix of conservative and progressive ideas. The only thing that California has that’s unique on top of that base mindset is environmental conservatism; because California is jaw droppingly gorgeous and Texas isn’t.
Totally agree with the point others have made, that Texas is a lot more blue than its gerrymandered districts let on. Similarly, California is much more “red” outside of the urban bubbles. They’ve a lot more in common than cultural memes would lead you to believe.
I grew up and lived as an adult in central and rural California (and the Bay Area) before moving to Texas.
I thought I was pretty conservative, like many in rural California.
But coming to Texas it was shocking how liberal I was. Not in anything specific, but in the overall. Texans and California’s government and voter just don’t even think about the same kinds of things. What is perfectly reasonable in California is completely foreign in Texas and vice versa.
The big example: the taxpayer. In California I never thought about them. Who’s going to pay for this great new law or public policy? In California we never ask. In Texas, everyone knows: the taxpayer.
No conservative one in Texas is going to support a law, no matter how good, that the taxpayer isn’t going to want to pay for.
Somewhere issues of how government should be run, how taxes should work, were also tied to issues like abortion and gay marriage.
And will have all the problems of California, New York, etc. in another 10-20 years after that.
Everyone complaining about policies in California make it sound like Texas is perfect. I'm pretty sure it could use a lot of improvements on its policies. There are some large factors that have had a disproportionate effect on the housing problems California faces and one of those is Prop 13 so it is much better to focus on avoiding repeating those mistakes than making general blanket statements.
Prop 13 has effectively created a vicious cycle of escalating property values.
Sure, but without any numbers, this is simply a just-so story. House prices in Seattle metro have shot through the roof in past 5-6 years, despite Seattle not having Prop 13 law. If house prices can demonstrably go up a lot in a place with no Prop 13-like law, but otherwise rather similar to California when it comes to attitudes towards what kind of houses are allowed to be built, it stands to reason that Prop 13 is unlikely to be main factor in dire California's housing situation.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
Humans are really good at crafting narratives explaining complex and uncertain reality. However, just because something sounds superficialy plausible, doesn't mean it is true: it is usually easy to craft an alternative theory, just as plausible as the one at hand.
For example, the narrative of Prop 13 being the root of all California's housing problem very much depends on exactly how much it affects the decision making. It could be a lot, it could be a little, but without knowing exactly (or at least approximately), we're simply in the dark. Maybe it's not Prop 13, but environmental activists running amok? Maybe it's a cartel in the construction industry colluding to keep the construction prices up? Without putting numbers on these, you can't tell which of these has significant impact, and which is irrelevant.
I live in Seattle, where the attitudes of residents and attitude to building are similar, but we have no Prop 13. How is it possible?
Even if there is a bright future ahead, people will limit change. This is in large part because the benefits and costs of change are not uniformly distributed, and when people have a valuable status quo, change represents significant risk.
Sure, Texas could start imposing an income tax, and raise the sales tax rate, but that would be a huge political hurdle to jump in order to be able to enact CA's terrible housing policies.
Austin is as blue as they come (and way less of the neoliberalism you see in SV). Houston from what I can tell has become much more liberal too (partly because a large influx of Katrina refugees).
Hot take - with all of the migration to Texas, this state will be blue in the next 10 years.
The only "conservative" things you find in those areas is (1) big trucks (2) guns (3) tobacco (4) sports. Not much different than what you might see in rural CA.