Big Growth Could Shake Up Texas' Old Political Equation
It's no secret: Texas is big. And it's getting bigger.
The Lone Star State has added about 5 million people since the turn of the century, and its population is expected to swell by another 5 million by 2020.
This week, NPR examines the dramatic demographic shifts underway in the Lone Star State in our series Texas 2020. We'll look ahead to how the second-biggest state could change in the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of America.
In the first decade of this century, the population of Texas grew more than twice as fast as the rest of the country.
Former state demographer Steve Murdock says that's nothing new.
"Texas has always been a rapidly growing state," says Murdock, now a professor at Rice University in Houston. "In fact, in every decade since Texas became part of the U.S., it has grown more rapidly than the country."
What is new, Murdock says, is how Texas is growing: Two-thirds of the increase comes from Hispanics, while the population of non-Hispanic whites — the group Texans call "Anglos" — is barely growing at all. Anglos are no longer the majority in Texas, and Hispanics are expected to outnumber Anglos within about a decade.
"The face of Texas is changing from one where non-Hispanic whites were dominant in numbers to one where we're an increasingly diverse population, a multiracial and ethnic population, with lots of dimensions of that," Murdock says.
“ The face of Texas is changing from one where non-Hispanic whites were dominant in numbers to one where we're an increasingly diverse population, a multiracial and ethnic population, with lots of dimensions of that.