He moved to Texas, outside of Dallas. Needless to say, he is not enjoying the weather there at the moment.
In case you’re not aware, much of Texas is experiencing an unusual cold snap. The immediate crises spurred by the weather are freezing temperatures and snow, the sort of things for which Texans are not overly prepared. But there’s a secondary, related crisis: power outages across much of the state, a function of limited supplies of the natural gas used to generate much of the state’s power and physical systems not prepared to handle the deep cold. (The attention focused on the struggles of wind turbines at the moment, for example, generally ignores that there are cold-weather upgrades available for purchase that Texas energy providers have often declined.)
Texas, always independent, mostly operates its own electrical grid, an anomaly born of the state’s hostility to federal regulation. The result at the moment is that loads can’t easily be rebalanced from other parts of the country.
University of Houston energy fellow Ed Hirs told the Houston Chronicle that the system’s collapse was a function of deregulation that echoed the collapse of the Soviet Union: “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”
As is always the case when complex systems break, the causes are themselves complex. As when California had rolling power outages last year. Those interruptions were a function of the opposite weather extreme — heat — combined with mismanagement and a lack of preparation similar to what is seen in Texas.
Those blackouts affected far fewer state residents than the current outages in Texas. But for many prominent Texas politicians, that the deep-blue state of California was seeing problems that could at least in part be linked back to its heavily Democratic leadership proved irresistible for social media mockery.
There was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) laughing at California being “unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) blamed the outages on “California’s politicians.” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) said the outages showed “what happens when you let Democrats control energy policy.” Perhaps most ironically, Sen. John Cornyn (R) shared a satirical article in which billboards advertising Texas touted the Lone Star State’s readily available electricity.
Politicians in Texas have a particularly strong rationale to argue against renewable energy sources such as wind: The state generates a lot of the country’s oil and natural gas. But Republican politicians also enjoy a secondary benefit from this kind of “dunking,” as social media mockery has been dubbed. The state of California enjoys a particular place in the conservative worldview, serving as an exemplar of left-wing politics, economics and ideology — a shorthand for everything they stand against.
It’s not often that pollsters ask people how they feel about states, but a 2004 Pew Research Center survey did exactly that. Democrats were 16 points more likely to hold a favorable opinion of California than were Republicans; Republicans, perhaps because then-President George W. Bush hailed from the state, were 27 points more likely to view Texas with approval.
The traditionally liberal state of Massachusetts was viewed 16 points more favorably by Democrats, again perhaps in part a function of the year’s presidential contest. New York, also a traditionally Democratic state, was viewed more positively overall than most states, probably in large part because of ongoing good will following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
This was 17 years ago, in an era when polarization was far less sharp than it is now. (The party gap on approval of President Biden is 87 points. In June 2004, the gap for Bush was 66 points.) It’s quite possible, then, that the divide in views of the states has only widened.
It’s also quite likely that the current culture of punching and counterpunching means far less risk for even ambitious politicians in attacking an entire state. When a series of wildfires ripped across California last year, President Donald Trump blamed Californians for the blazes and threatened to withhold disaster funding. Instead of voters being indignant about the president’s attacks, Trump got 1.5 million more votes in California in 2020 than he had in 2016. (Of course, Biden got 2.4 million more votes than Hillary Clinton had in 2016.)
In response to the current crisis, several of the Republicans who had used California’s plight to score political points, including Crenshaw, have shared information about handling the cold. Cornyn went a slightly different direction, sharing a Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing that the incident proved the need for oil and gas.
The state’s other senator, Cruz, fell into the former category, sharing information about the weather with his followers. It’s worth noting that this was not Cruz’s first experience with taking a political stand at the expense of a blue state that came back to bite him. In 2013, he opposed a funding bill aimed at repairing the damage done in the northeast by Hurricane Sandy, only to advocate for a relief package for Texas after Hurricane Harvey four years later.
It seems he didn’t learn his lesson.
