Tipping Texas to Save America

By James Moore

Democrats in Texas tend to be afraid to express optimism over elections. For more than three decades, they have put more hope than logic and organization into their electoral politics. It has seemed that only the circles of the sun would, eventually, take them to a realistic place where circumstance suggested a different outcome than defeat. We may have, finally, arrived at such a time, and the evidence abounds.

First, there is a single number in the August University of Texas poll that ought to be keeping Republican consultants awake, and it is not about the horse race between the two U.S. Senate candidates. That number is 79 and it is the share of Texas Republicans who told pollsters they intend to vote for Ken Paxton. Greg Abbott is at 86 among the same voters. Donald Trump routinely runs above 90 with them. Paxton is seven points short of his own governor and a dozen short of his own president, in his own party, in a state his party has owned without interruption since Ann Richards packed up her boots.

That gap is writing a story Texas pundits and the public are beginning to believe, and without apologizing for overstatement here, might lay the predicate for changing the course of American history. The numbers are talking. James Talarico leads Paxton 42 to 39 in the UT/Texas Politics Project survey. Texas Southern had it 47 to 45. Texas Public Opinion Research put Talarico up six, 48 to 42, in late August, the worst showing of Paxton’s political life. Emerson had Paxton up a point. The Bush School at A&M had Talarico up four. Nobody has had Paxton over 50 since he won the runoff in May by wrapping himself in a Trump endorsement and calling it a mandate.

But skip the polls. Just consider what it means that we are having this conversation at all. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. No Democrat has won a Senate seat here since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, back when the Cowboys were worse than they are now and the internet was a rumor. Texas Democrats have spent thirty years being told they were three cycles away from relevance, and every cycle the finish line moved. Beto came within two and a half points, and the party treated it like a moon landing. Then Abbott beat him by eleven four years later and everyone went home and Beto stopped blogging.

I’ve been watching and writing about politics in this state for 50 years, and, yes, I think this feels different, and the reason is because the damage by the Republicans is self-inflicted.

To understand why, go back and look at the numbers underneath the numbers. Among independents, Talarico leads Paxton 37 to 11 in the UT poll. Texas Southern found independents breaking 63 to 23. Paxton’s job approval is 33 percent approve, 47 disapprove. His favorability is 34 to 47. This is a man who has been impeached by a Republican House, acquitted by a Republican Senate, indicted, pardoned, and divorced on grounds of adultery by a Republican state senator who happened to be his wife, became a multi-millionaire on his state salary, and he is asking Texas to promote him. Sixty percent of Texas Republicans still describe him as honest and trustworthy, which tells you something about Texas Republicans, but 29 percent do not, which is more useful information.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa was polling at 30 percent name recognition last October. She is now between 60 and 80 in every survey taken in the last month, and the closer voters look at her the better she does. Her favorability is 34 to 23. Abbott’s is 45 to 45.

The UT poll has Abbott ahead 45 to 40. Six other surveys in the same three-week window put the race between one and five. Remember what Abbott’s margins have looked like. He beat Wendy Davis by 20.4 in 2014. He beat Lupe Valdez by 12.3 in 2018. He beat Beto by 10.9 in 2022. He is now running five points ahead of a woman most Texans had never heard of a year ago, even after he flooded every television market in the state with money he raised from people who want something specific from him and always get it.

More telling is that Abbott’s job approval went underwater in August for the first time in this cycle, 43 approve to 46 disapprove. Among independents, 23 percent approve. That is near the floor of a time series that runs back to 2015. In the suburbs, Hinojosa leads him 44 to 40. In June he led the suburbs by five. The suburbs are where Texas elections are decided now, and they are moving away from him while he is spending money to hold them.

He has earned the disfavor.

Start with the data centers. Fifty-seven percent of Texans oppose building one in their community. Among rural voters, 60 percent oppose, and 44 percent oppose strongly. Texans expect data centers to hurt the water supply, the grid, their energy bills, the land around them, and the quality of life on it. On the state’s handling of the issue, voters disapprove 45 to 24. Sid Miller, the outgoing agriculture commissioner, a man who has never in his life been mistaken for a moderate, or an intellect, went on Texas Public Radio in August and laid bare the problem: “We’re on the wrong side of this data center issue.” He said he knows Republicans who will leave races blank rather than vote for the ticket and that Republicans could lose statewide races over it.

Abbott heard the same thing Miller heard. That is why he ordered a pause on data center grid connections and an audit of the queue, two months before an election, having spent four years recruiting the things. The problem with governing by weathervane is that everyone can see which way the wind blew.

Then there are the Flock cameras. Thousands of them across Texas, scanning every plate, every color, every bumper sticker, uploading it all to a searchable national database that police can query without a warrant. The Republican Party of Texas platform, Plank 55, calls for banning automated license plate readers outright and ripping out the ones already installed. Keith Self, a Republican congressman from McKinney, has filed a bill to require warrants to acquire the data. On August 26, with the Texas Tribunepreparing to publish an investigation showing that a state agency had funneled at least $30 million in grants into building the surveillance network, Abbott ordered state agencies to stop funding it. Then he went on Glenn Beck’s show and called the backlash a crackdown, as though he had been leading it. The man built the panopticon and is now running for reelection as the guy who finally noticed it.

Which brings us to schools, and to the most cynical thing on the Texas ballot.

Abbott will tell you he cut your property taxes. He knows better. Texas funds public education through a formula the Legislature controls and a local property tax the Legislature blames. When the state holds the basic allotment flat, districts do not stop needing money. They cut, they close, or they go to the voters and ask permission to raise the rate. Then the same legislators who starved them run ads about greedy school boards.

Look at what that produces. All ten of the state’s largest school districts have adopted or projected deficit budgets. Dallas is $104 million in the hole, Cy-Fair around $81 million, Houston about $25 million. A spring survey by the Texas Association of School Business Officials found more than 70 percent of responding districts would need to cut. Northside in San Antonio is in an “optimization” process, which is what districts call it now when they are deciding which neighborhood elementary to close. Right here in my part of Central Texas, Leander ISD has cut $26 million over two years and still faces a deficit and is asking voters in November for a tax rate increase to keep the lights on. Round Rock, Del Valle, and Georgetown are asking the same thing.

It has always been a cynical shell game. Austin cuts the rate. The district raises it back. Your bill does not fall. Your school closes anyway. Voters, who are not stupid, disapprove of state leadership on property taxes 47 to 27.

Meanwhile the National Education Association puts the average Texas teacher $10,428 below the national average in wages and per-pupil spending roughly $4,000 below it. Texas ranks somewhere in the high thirties to low forties in education funding depending on whose methodology you use, which is a remarkable achievement for a state that never stops telling the rest of the country how to run itself, and how much money it has in rainy day funds and surplus accounts.

And then there are the vouchers. The Legislature created a billion-dollar education savings account program, projected by the Legislative Budget Board to reach $7.9 billion by 2030-31, and awarded 118,441 students by August 10. Seventy percent of them were already in private school or homeschooled. Seventy percent. This was the entire objection, made by every superintendent and every Democrat and a fair number of rural Republicans, and it was correct. Forty-one percent of participants are white in a public school system that is 24 percent white. Abbott sold it by saying “school choice already exists for the wealthy.” He was right. He then wrote them a check to subsidize it. I don’t consider that school reform. It is more like a rebate program with a mission statement.

Here is the part that ought to be printed on a card and handed to every Texas Republican who goes on television to complain about the state of Texas. They have held every single statewide office since 1994. Every. One. The governorship, the lieutenant governorship, the attorney general, the comptroller, the land office, the agriculture commission, both Senate seats, the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, the Railroad Commission, and, since 2003, both chambers of the Legislature. There is no one else in the room. There has not been anyone else in the room since the Clinton administration.

Which means when they tell you the grid is fragile, they built it. When they tell you the schools are struggling, they wrote the formula. When they tell you property taxes are too high, they designed the mechanism. When they tell you rural Texas is being paved over by server farms, they signed the incentives. When they tell you a surveillance company has cameras on every farm-to-market road in the state, they wrote the grants.

Or, in the preferred formulation of the current vice president and president, it is all Joe Biden’s fault. Somewhere in Delaware, a man is probably being blamed for the Comal County power lines failing.

Trump, meanwhile, has been net negative in Texas in eight consecutive UT/TxPP polls. In August, majorities of Texans disapproved of his handling of government ethics, Iran, health care, government spending, the economy at 54 percent, and inflation and prices at 57 percent. Twenty-eight percent of Texas Republicans disapprove of his handling of prices. Favorability toward the MAGA movement in Texas sits at 38 favorable, 50 unfavorable, and that unfavorable number has climbed in four straight surveys. Building a border wall through a beloved national park is not helping, either, and ICE raids along the border have shut down businesses and forced bankruptcies.

Then there is the enthusiasm gap, which is the number that decides midterms. In August 2022, 52 percent of Texas Republicans called themselves extremely enthusiastic about voting. In August 2026, it is 39. Democratic enthusiasm has not moved. That is a thirteen-point hole in the Republican turnout model, dug by a president his party cannot criticize and cannot carry. Paxton, too, is running as a Trump appendage in a state where Trump is a net negative and where his own base is bored. Senator John Thune’s people told Axios that if MAGA wanted Paxton, MAGA could pay for him. You broke it, you buy it. MAGA has yet to begin spending money on his campaign.

Now the part nobody in the national party wants to think about but is the premise for my thinking here.

Texas has 40 electoral votes. California has 54. New York has 28. That is 122, and Republicans need every one of the Texas 40 in a way Democrats have never needed California or New York, because Democrats have never had to worry about California or New York.

Run the math off the 2024 map. Trump won 312 electoral votes. Harris won 226. Move nothing else, flip Texas, and the Democrat is at 266. Four short. Frustratingly, gloriously close.

Now add one thing. Any one thing.

| Add to Texas | Democratic total |

| Nevada (6) | 272 |

| Wisconsin (10) | 276 |

| Arizona (11) | 277 |

| Michigan (15) | 281 |

| Georgia (16) | 282 |

| North Carolina (16) | 282 |

| Pennsylvania (19) | 285 |

Read that table from the other direction and it is a death sentence. Without Texas, the Republican nominee must run the table. Not most of the battlegrounds. All of them. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Nevada, every, single, one, and the reward for that perfect night is 272 electoral votes and a two-vote cushion. Lose Nevada, the smallest of them, and it is over before the Nevada returns finish coming in.

Trump swept all seven in 2024 (if you believe the results) and that was called a realignment. I view it as the ceiling. Ask a Republican strategist to build you a path that survives losing Texas and watch him reach for a drink. The last Republican to win the White House without Texas was Richard Nixon in 1968, and he did it against a Democratic Party that had just torn itself apart in Chicago and a third-party segregationist who took five Southern states. That is the precedent, and it should not be a comforting one for Republicans.

And a Talarico win in 2026 would not be a fluke to be corrected in 2028. It would be a proof of concept and would give Texas Democrats a statewide operation, a donor base, a bench, and something they have not had since Ann Richards, which is the memory of winning. Thirty million dollars in a quarter for a state representative from Round Rock is not a fluke either and ought to be viewed by the GOP as a market signal.

And that brings me to the argument I have been making for years, to the visible discomfort of people I like.

The Republican Party does not exist. There is no platform in any meaningful sense, no governing philosophy that survives contact with a Truth Social post, no succession plan, no bench, and no mechanism for resolving disagreement other than a primary threat. In 2020 the party did not bother writing a platform and only resolved to support the president. That is a fan club with a legal department than it is a political party.

What happens when he is gone is not a smooth handoff and is likely to look like a probate fight.

The heirs cannot inherit the thing that makes it work, because the thing that makes it work is him. Vance has the ideology but less charisma than a used car salesman named Slim. The governors have the resumes and not the permission. The media wing has the audience and no interest in governing, because governing is less profitable than grievance. The donor class wants tax policy and stability and has spent a decade discovering it can have one or the other. And the voters, the actual coalition, were not recruited on a program. They were recruited on a personality, and personalities do not transfer. Let us all be thankful for that much.

My guess, and it is a guess, is that three or four cycles of factional bloodletting. A nationalist faction that keeps the base and cannot win a general. A donor-funded restorationist faction that can win a general and cannot survive a primary. A regional collapse in the suburbs that nobody addresses because addressing it requires telling the base something it does not want to hear. And a long argument about whether the last election was stolen, which is not a policy dispute but a loyalty test, and loyalty tests do not build coalitions. They shrink them.

I have said before that the party needs to burn itself to the ground and start over, and I want to be precise about why. It is not spite. It is that there is no version of American governance that works well with one functional party. A country needs a conservatism that can lose an election, absorb the loss, argue about why, and come back with a better idea. What we have instead is an organization that has replaced ideas with a man, and men are mortal, and mortality is a hell of a governing strategy.

Texas is where you will see whether the reckoning has started. Texas might be bluer than it looks, but the Republicans who run it have finally, after thirty-four unbroken years, produced enough failure to be noticed by people who were not looking. And if Texas does turn blue this cycle, there is a very real chance it will, eventually, make it impossible for a Republican to become president for more than a generation, and maybe longer.

The grid shakes. The schools close. The cameras watch the county roads. The server farms drink the water. And the men who built all of it are on television, right now, asking who let this happen.

Early voting starts October 19.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”