To be candid, I didn’t think this day would arrive so soon.

But it has. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Joe Biden with a statistically insignificant 1 point lead over Donald Trump … in Texas!

It’s a dead heat, according to Quinnipiac. An earlier poll from the Dallas Morning News/University of Texas has Biden with a 5 percentage point lead. Other surveys all suggest the same thing, that it’s anyone’s game here.

Jimmy Carter was the latest Democrat to carry Texas, winning the state’s electoral votes in 1976 while defeating President Gerald Ford’s bid for election. I’ve long thought that Carter’s victory wasn’t the “last” time a Democrat would carry this state.

Now, though, it appears that Joe Biden has a puncher’s chance of making a serious contest for Texas’s 38 electoral votes.

We moved to Texas in 1984, settling in Beaumont, one of the state’s last Democratic Party bastions. Much of the rest of the state had turned Republican by that time, but the Golden Triangle remained heavily Democratic. That has changed in the years since then.

The new Democratic bastion now appears to be Dallas County, which borders Collin County, where my wife and I now reside.

My own Democratic leanings are well-known to readers of High Plains Blogger. No need to belabor that point.

However, I am heartened by former Vice President Biden’s strong showing in this state, given its heavy GOP leaning over many years.

The coronavirus pandemic is going to preclude any big campaign rallies between now and Election Day. That’s a bit of a bummer. I would love to attend a Biden rally, just as I attended a Trump rally in the summer of 2019 in downtown Dallas.

Whatever. We can now expect to buried/swamped/inundated with a flood of campaign ads on our TV screens. I’m guessing they’ll begin in September.

I used to complain that Democrats had given up on this state and that Republicans had taken us granted.

It looks as though that has changed … bigly!