I’ve lived here most of my life, and I’ve voted in enough Texas elections to know the script by heart. Republican runs. Democrat says Texas is changing. Republican wins by double digits. Repeat. No Democrat has won a statewide race here since 1994. That’s not an election. That’s a formality with a ballot attached.
This year is different, and I think I know why.
Abbott is still going to win, probably. Twelve years as governor, Trump’s endorsement, more money than Hinojosa can dream of. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because it makes a better headline. But recent polls have had him up five points, four points, and in one survey, one point. One point. In Texas. That’s not a fluke. That’s what happens when everything people are actually mad about — electricity, groceries, property taxes, data centers eating the power grid — shows up in the same election cycle instead of getting spread out over twelve years.
Hinojosa figured out the one thing Democrats here usually get wrong. She stopped talking like a professor and started talking about money. Your money. She’s pushing a $1,500 check to every household out of the rainy day fund. Roughly $17 billion. Is that good long-term policy? Probably not. One-time money doesn’t fix property taxes or the grid. I get the objections. But I also get $1,500. You can explain your seven-year economic plan for forty minutes, or you can say a number people can picture buying groceries with. People remember the second one. That doesn’t make it wise. It makes it effective. Those are different things, and I think Hinojosa knows the difference, which is more than I can say for most of the campaigns I’ve sat through.
Then there’s the data centers, and this is the part where I think Texas Republicans deserve to be laughed at a little, even the ones I agree with.
Texas spent years telling companies to build here — cheap land, friendly government, all the power you want. Then AI companies actually believed it. ERCOT ended up with over 474 gigawatts of connection requests, more than five times the state’s peak demand. Abbott ordered an audit in August. I think that was the right call. But I also think it’s funny, because the same politicians who stood next to Google celebrating a $40 billion investment are now the ones asking “wait, how much electricity does this actually need?” I don’t know if that’s hypocrisy or just what happens when a good idea gets bigger than anyone planned for. Probably both. Case to case.
Here’s where I think the responsibility question actually sits, though, and it’s the same one I’d ask about any of this: who’s the bill for? Not who benefits — who pays. My electric bill doesn’t care whose PowerPoint said “AI innovation ecosystem” on it. If a data center needs a new substation, that’s on the company building it, not on my neighborhood. Abbott seems to agree, at least on paper, since he’s already ordered regulators to stop passing that infrastructure cost onto residential customers. Fine. That’s a principle I can defend regardless of which party says it.
The Senate race is the one that actually surprised me. James Talarico against Ken Paxton, and Trump’s own super PAC just dropped $10 million into it — half attacking Talarico, half propping up Paxton. Nobody spends $10 million defending a seat they’re not worried about. Talarico’s outraised him by a wide margin too. I don’t think that means Democrats suddenly own Texas. They don’t. But I do think both parties just lost the right to assume anything, and honestly, good. A guy with a twenty-point lead can ignore your phone calls. A guy up by one point starts remembering your street name real fast. I’d rather have politicians a little scared of me than comfortable.
Then you’ve got Beto still floating around Texas doing Beto things, and McConaughey still sitting there as the candidate everyone imagines and nobody has to actually vote for. Beto lost to Abbott by eleven points in 2022 and I probably would’ve taken the hint by now. Then again, I’ve got boxes in my garage I said I’d unpack three moves ago, so I’m not exactly in a position to lecture anybody about knowing when to quit. Hahaha. McConaughey’s smarter, honestly — he gets to be everybody’s favorite candidate precisely because he’s never had to cast a vote anyone could hold against him. There’s an advantage to never actually being responsible for anything.
Even the border, which used to be the easiest Republican issue in the state, doesn’t hit the same way it did four years ago. Migration north has dropped enough that shelters on the Mexican side are reportedly sitting empty. Republicans can still run on it. But people don’t vote based on a crisis they’re not currently living through — they vote based on the one they are. Right now that’s the electric bill and the grocery total, which is probably why Abbott himself put out an affordability plan instead of leaning only on the border like he used to.
I don’t think Texas politics got dysfunctional. I think it finally got competitive enough that the people running it have to explain themselves instead of just showing up. I’d rather have that, even messy, than twelve more years of a script everyone already knows the ending to.
So here’s what I keep coming back to: if your state rep’s race had actually been close this year — not safe, not a formality, genuinely one point either way — do you think you’d have heard from them even once before now? And if the honest answer is no, what does that tell you about how much they needed your vote in the first place?