Kamala Harris will drop down Friday in the supposedly confirmed modern red state of Texas.
It will be the first general campaign appearance--meaning something more than a private fundraiser--by a Democratic vice presidential candidate in that guns-and-cowboys state since the less-polarized, Southern-fried days of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
It means that enough positive signs are arising for Democrats in Texas that it's worth a stretch-run afternoon visit four days before the finish line if only for the strategic purpose of forcing the cash-strapped Trump campaign to spend money in Texas that it might otherwise spend in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
And there are several congressional and state legislative districts that Harris might infuse a bit of Democratic energy into.
It's more like chess than checkers at this point. Democracy is checkers. The electoral college is chess.
The average of recent polls shows Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by 47-43 in Texas. That suggests that current Democratic optimism is much like that of 2018 when Beto O'Rourke came close to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, losing 51-48, by 215,000 votes out of 8.2 million cast.
If you assume a greater turnout for this presidential election, particularly in the Democratic population centers of Texas, and believe that somehow Trump can offend even more than Cruz can offend, then you can begin to see that, whatever more nuanced reasons may exist for Harris' visit, the basic chance of taking those 38 electoral votes is, while outside, worth an afternoon's effort.
I remember being on a panel at Ole Miss in 2008 with veteran political journalist Tom Baxter of Atlanta, who told the audience that Texas would soon begin turning purple. He was referring to the ever-growing diversity--Hispanic and Latino voters mainly but not entirely--and the ever-emerging liberal-leaning concentrations of in-migrators in the suburbs of Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.
Part of Texas' solid reddening since the 1990s has been a matter of gerrymandered legislative districts and vote-suppression policies. What you always heard about Texas was that it was not so much a Republican state in terms of the entire population as a decidedly Republican one in terms of the segment of the population that voted, or got to vote.
All of that might be coming undone this time with the combined factors of uncommon voter fervor, spiked voter registration with more than 840,000 new registrants added since January, and record turnouts at early-voting stations.
That's except for the fact that, for some reason, polls show Biden doing less solidly among Hispanics than O'Rourke in 2018 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Biden leads Trump only 57-34 among Hispanic/Latino respondents in a Texas poll released Monday by The New York Times and Siena College. Something more in line with more robust pro-Democratic national Hispanic voting trends would put Biden for sure in the serious hunt for Texas' 38 electoral votes.
But there seems to be an uncommonly sized segment of Texas' long-standing legal immigrant population that finds something to like in Trump's hard line on those coming along now illegally.
So, I'd advise against premature celebrating among Democrats.
There is a growing conventional wisdom that Biden is on his way, holding a steady lead nationally and in battleground states and having survived all the potential game-changers, including that second debate.
"The cake seems baked," a learned politico told me Monday, causing the noted pessimist to whom he was speaking to wonder if the learned politico hadn't mistaken a collapsing souffle for a cake.
Among other factors in the baked-cake conventional wisdom is that Democrats are doing so well that they can afford to make a little side play in Texas and cite poll competitiveness in North Carolina and Georgia.
It would be wise for Democrats to separate confidence from hope. Being poll-competitive in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina is a reason for hope, not confidence.
Narrow losing margins don't produce electoral college tallies. Odds are that Democrats will still lose all three of those states, in which case local factors in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin will count for much more than emerging competitiveness in the South and Southwest.
That's why it matters more what rural Pennsylvanians think about phasing out fossil-fuel reliance for energy than what suburban women and Hispanics think about Trump in Texas, a state that is only electoral gravy for Democrats, not the electoral roux.
And beware of the idea that an uncommonly strong vote in Texas means that Democrats will win big in Pennsylvania.
There are common trends, such as the support of suburban women. But there is still uniqueness in states, as evidenced by the fact that it's Kamala who will be in Texas and that Joe had better be in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin, or, somehow, all three.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.