The difficult electoral map is an inconvenient reality faced by the GOP presidential nominee of any election year since 1992. Increased government dependency, declining religiosity, and demographic changes have altered the political disposition of several former Republican strongholds like California, Colorado, and Florida, to name a few. Looking over this year’s map, not much has changed. The GOP will certainly focus heavily on the dozen or so swing states, but they are making a critical mistake. There exists an opportunity for the GOP to pick off what strategists have written off as three automatic electoral votes for Democrats – a little place called Vermont.

Vermont is ripe for a GOP takeover. The last census estimated that over 94 percent of the state’s population is non-Hispanic white. For nearly three decades now, those pesky Vermonters have not given their electoral votes to Republicans. If only someone would tell them that their demographics, if set equal to Mitt Romney’s 59 percent share of the white vote in 2012, afford the GOP an easy majority, then the state would flip overnight. In fact, it would turn so hard to the right that it would skip right past “Battleground Vermont” status.

Unfortunately for my fantasy scenario, Vermonters are increasingly leftist in political persuasion, and have been trending that way since the 1960s when New Yorkers and Bostonians started getting fed up with urban rat race. President Obama’s 67-31 re-election victory in the state puts to rest the notion that political ideology is always or should be determined by skin pigmentation or ethnic heritage. This begs the question -- why do we tolerate this sort of behavior from leftists? Every two years, I listen to the bleating of those who wish to “Turn Texas Blue”. In fact, so-called Democratic “operatives”, as if straight out of a spy movie, function under an organization called Battleground Texas. This group contends that, due to “changing demographics”, Texas is going to reverse course and stop supporting Republicans, leaving no hope at all for a future GOP White House victory.

Battleground Texas’s musings about changing demographics are nothing but politically correct references to how the state is becoming less and less non-Hispanic white, even though Texas has always been a state with vast ethnic diversity. Their efforts in driving Hispanic voter turnout in their favor were so successful in 2014’s gubernatorial election that Greg Abbott barely snuck by Wendy Davis by a margin of 20.3 points and nearly a million votes, making Texas redder than it has been at any point since 1998. Abbott received approximately 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, while other white conservatives on the ticket actually beat their Hispanic Democratic counterparts for it.

The rise of the Sanders ideology in the Democratic Party will push more Hispanics to the GOP on the national level. Many are weary of socialism and are repulsed by the cultural left that has turned societal order upside down. My state representative has told me personally that social conservatism resonates deeply with the Texas Hispanic population, and that Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has made significant inroads in the Rio Grande Valley by repudiating the aggressive push by the left on social issues. So why do Democrats feel that a growing Hispanic population guarantees them political victory in Texas as time goes by, regardless of the facts that Texas is filling up with conservative exiles and growing fastest in the deeply conservative suburbs? It is because they feel entitled to the vote, which should deeply anger any minority voter that is paying even the slightest level of attention to political affairs.

Hillary Clinton expects minority voters to vote for her because they are supposed to fall in line and vote against their “oppressors.” Once again, this sort of foolishness and hubris involves discarding the fact that most Hispanics, especially Texas Hispanics, are socially conservative, and Hispanics across America tend to vote for the GOP in greater numbers once they reach middle class status. Abortion, cultural upheaval, socialism, and illegal immigration are not appealing to those who would vote for Clinton. They are merely exhibiting the voting behavior of the poor.

Clinton is not alone in this type of behavior. The leftist punditry constantly echoes the statements that elections are forever bound to be simply a mathematical formula with race or ethnicity being the only variables that matter. If this is truly the case, and race or skin color is indicative of underlying ideology, then we can all save ourselves the trouble and give up now. Assigning attributes to human beings based solely on race or ethnicity is the very epitome of the racism conservatives are accused of harboring just because minorities have heavily favored Democrats nationwide for most of the recent past. As if playing a game of conquest, the leftist media snickers with delight in imagining that states that “go blue” will stay as such forever, as if minority voters have no thoughts of their own and would not eventually change political persuasions if left alone indefinitely. Ironically, a recent Rasmussen poll showed Donald Trump outperforming Clinton for the votes of non-black minority voters.

It is a fact that 12 red states from 1988 that turned blue in 1992 have not turned red since. In addition to those, there are several that have only resurfaced favorably for Republicans a time or two. Some of these trouble states, like Florida or those in the Rust Belt, regularly vote in GOP governors and legislatures and would be ripe for the GOP in presidential elections if conservatives would engage the minority populations in the same way the Texas GOP does.

I have personally had great success engaging minority voters on current issues and receiving positive feedback, especially when I inform them of the grave damage done to their economic prospects by unrelenting illegal immigration. We need to remember that we don’t have to take the entirety of the vote. A slight uptick in the GOP share of black voters would spell doom for Democrats in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Texas-style engagement of the Hispanic community would have the same result in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, and possibly New Mexico, while bolstering Arizona. The GOP loses the minority vote not because fiscal or social conservatism fails to appeal, but because the engagement of these groups is severely lacking. Far too often, we sit out in the suburbs and allow ourselves to be beaten by the racial outrage machine instead of facing the issue head on and pointing out the leftist hypocrisy present in every campaign.

Seth Keshel, former Army Captain and Afghanistan veteran, is a district captain for the Convention of States Project – Texas.