It's Wednesday, May 27, 2006.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Major earthquake on the Republican landscape took place last night, and that's when the returns came in.

In terms of the Republican runoff

election for the Senate seat in Texas that will now be vacated by current incumbent Republican

Senator John Cornyn. And the reason that is such a seismic event is because it really demonstrates

a major redirection of the Republican Party in the United States. Now, Texas, of course, is one of the

most important states to politics in the United States, is one of the most important states to

American culture. Both of its current United States senators are Republicans, and it has been

a long time since Democrats have won a statewide election there in Texas. That, of course,

is itself a reversal,

because for a very long time in the 20th century, the state of Texas was a predictably and reliably

democratic state. But it also became a more conservative state. And then you had the changes that

came on the political landscape and the cultural landscape in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, and you

had a basic reshuffling of the party identities. The Republican Party became the party of social

conservatism, of free markets, what was called conservative fusionism, a very clear conservative

argument. The Democrats moved in a very different direction. That was not entirely

predictable as far back as, say, 1960, but by 1964, 1968, all of this was becoming glaringly clear.

Now you have the state of Texas, which is also being changed, in that the fact that it is overwhelmingly

red, that is deeply conservative, deeply Republican,

but there are big islands of blue, and those islands have a very large population.

The second complication when it comes to Texas is that here's the good news, so many people

...