After 12 years in the Governor’s Mansion, Greg Abbott apparently forgot one of the basic rules of politics. Even in fiercely independent Texas, voters expect you to occasionally do something for them.
Notice the use of the word “voters.”
Not major donors. Not lobbyists. Not billionaires who pour millions into political action committees. Not the 11.6% of registered Texans who showed up to vote in the Republican primary.
We’re talking about the general election voters who stand in line at H-E-B, pay property taxes and wonder how they’re going to afford to take their kids to the doctor.
On Tuesday, those voters — the ones who don’t have Abbott on speed dial — handed him his first general-election defeat in three decades. They elected Democrat Gina Hinojosa as Texas’ first Latina governor and shut down the Republican Party’s three-decade hold on the office.
As the dust settles, many on the receiving end of the shellacking — likely even Abbott himself — will describe his defeat as collateral damage. They’ll say he and other Republicans lost their statewide offices because angry voters showed up to repudiate Trump.
That’s partly true. But it’s far from the whole story.
Political experts say blaming Abbott’s defeat entirely on Trump lets the governor off the hook for an impressive collection of self-inflicted political wounds, from his unpopular voucher scheme and his clumsy about-face on data centers to the expensive and cruel performative politics underlying his $11 billion Operation Lone Star.
“I think definitely Trump played a big part in this, but it wasn’t just him,” University of Texas at San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor told the Current. “Years of Republican rule in Texas and exhaustion with Abbott after 12 years also factored into it. Along with anger about everything from Big Bend National Park to flock cameras to AI data centers to vouchers to harsh immigration [policies] and the Texas collaboration with ICE. They all played a role.”
And Abbott and his longtime chief political strategist, Dave Carney, deserve credit for those failures. They worked plenty hard on them.
Take vouchers, for example.
Abbott spent years ramming that scheme down Texans’ throats, even bankrolling the defeat of fellow Republicans who stood in his way. The result was a $1 billion program that threatens to siphon money and students away from public school districts as they struggle to stay solvent.
The issue alienated rural Republicans who fear the collapse of their public schools and don’t have any private campuses nearby to spend a voucher on.
Hinojosa, a former Austin ISD school board president, seized on the unpopularity of the program and made public education a centerpiece of her campaign. Meanwhile, Abbott spent the closing weeks accusing her of being too woke, invoking tired clichés about transgender kids and Sharia law.
“It was like he was running his campaign from the last playbook and not this one. Just tone deaf toward issues that really mattered to Texans,” Taylor said. “It’s stunning. I mean, this is a guy who was arguably the most powerful governor in the United States and he lost to somebody who he outspent almost eight to one. It just is astounding to think that this happened, but it happened.”
Then there was Abbott’s flip-flop on data centers.
Before public opposition to water- and electricity-hogging computing facilities reached a fever pitch, Abbott eagerly courted investment from the industry. Under his watch, the state showered data center developers with tax incentives and maintained a lax regulatory environment to cozy up to Big Tech.
Once again, Hinojosa recognized a political opening and called for a moratorium on new data center construction and tougher safeguards.
Abbott responded by touting new restrictions of his own and a pause on construction of the massive computing facilities. Only an investigation showed that state approvals continued for dozens of data center projects, exposing the governor’s election-year reversal as more political theater than substantive policy.
The biggest blue swings during Tuesday’s election came from majority-Latino counties in South Texas and along the border, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. Hidalgo, Maverick, Starr, Webb and Zapata counties each moved upwards of 38 points toward Democrats compared to the 2024 election, the data shows.
It’s hard to imagine that anger over Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown and demonization of Latinos didn’t play a big part in that border wave.
But the president didn’t act alone.
Abbott was with him all the way, busing migrants to Democrat-controlled cities, installing razor wire and floating barriers in the Rio Grande and attempting to give Texas police the power to pull people over for driving while brown.
As loud as Abbott was about vouchers and the border, he was strangely silent on affordability and corruption as those emerged as top voter concerns this election cycle. One of his few acknowledgments of voters’ pocketbook pain came in a laughable series of “affordability roundtable” photo ops his office arranged weeks out from the election.
On the other hand, Hinojosa made affordability central to her campaign and offered proposals to help Texas families weather the crisis. For one, she proposed making $1,500 payments directly to Texans from the state’s fat-to-bursting emergency savings account.
And when it comes to corruption, a Public Citizen investigation found that donors to the governor’s Texans for Greg Abbott PAC received nearly $1 billion in no-bid state contracts from 2020 to 2024. The pacts came as Abbott declared state emergencies over COVID-19, border security and natural disasters — declarations that allow the state to dispense with normal low-bidder contracting rules.
At the same time, Abbott and GOP cronies including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton benefited from millions in campaign contributions that tech mogul Elon Musk and far-right West Texas oilmen Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn poured into party and candidate coffers.
“The reason you saw the Trump agenda rejected so strongly in Texas is that there was an arrogance and entitlement on the part of Abbott and Patrick and Paxton — that they were the natural owners of these offices,” Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson said. “I think everybody knew that Talarico might win, but I don’t think that Abbott and Patrick and Republicans further down the ticket really believed that Hinojosa was going to win.”
By Nov. 3, Abbott and his GOP cronies had spent nearly 12 years in charge of a state where Republicans controlled virtually every lever of statewide government. At some point, it’s difficult to keep blaming the other guys for everything that’s wrong.
Turns out voters expect more from their elected officials than culture wars, political stunts and favors for billionaires. On Tuesday, they made that expectation painfully clear.
Texas politics is a mess. We make it a readable mess.
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