Gov. Abbott's political machine faces a major test as Democrats gain ground in Texas
Yahoo! News
HOUSTON, Texas — On the first day of early voting in Texas, two weeks before the most consequential election Texas Republicans have faced in a generation, Greg Abbott addressed a sweaty crowd of hundreds of supporters packed inside an imitation saloon. The Texas governor pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket. “Steve Radack Community Center, 18650 Clay Road, Houston, 1.2 miles away,” he read, identifying the precinct’s nearest polling location. “Listen, I can roll over there in five minutes,” said Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as the fawning audience laughed. Abbott was making a closing pitch to the Republican Party’s most fanatic supporters, many donning “Make America Texas” hats, who clapped loudly as he bragged about bringing 2.6 million jobs to Texas and booed at the mention of his “crazy" opponent, Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa. And they perked up when Abbott asked if they wanted to “be your own political power broker and make sure that you’re the one responsible for us winning.” That’s when the governor issued another set of directions: Download the Abbott Impact App, the engine of the massive turnout operation that has enabled the GOP to build tremendous power over Abbott’s nearly 12 years in Austin. Many in the audience dutifully complied. The app is the key to Abbott’s ability to maintain his grip on the most influential red state in the nation through his extensive data, polling and “get out the vote” operation — powerful tools that have not only allowed him to sail to reelection repeatedly but has cemented GOP control of every single statewide office. That could all change in a matter of days. Abbott expected to spend 2026 in legacy mode, cruising to a fourth term that would carry him into the post-Trump era as one of the most dominant state-level GOP figures in America, a kingmaker in a party looking for new heroes. Instead, he’s fighting a tougher-than-expected battle to retain his own seat, under weight from the unpopular war in Iran and rural blowback to data centers, Flock cameras and school vouchers. His longtime ticketmate, Attorney General Ken Paxton, is facing an even more arduous challenge in his attempt to keep the state’s U.S. Senate seat in Republican hands. A victory by Democrat James Talarico would crack a three-decade lockout from power in Texas for his party, and potentially redraw the national map ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Texas Republicans who have lost confidence in Paxton as a candidate, and are worried about the sour national mood more broadly, are now banking on Abbott’s finely tuned, expansive GOTV political machine to save the party. Ultimately, the election will reveal whether even the most powerful political force in Texas can fall — and determine what becomes of the Texas GOP if voters deliver a blow to the heart of American conservatism. “Paxton’s going to win the race,” Abbott told reporters in Austin in October as he kicked off a mad campaigning dash across the state, in response to being asked by POLITICO Magazine who gets the blame should Paxton lose. “So the real question is who gets the credit for it.” Not long ago there was a time when Abbott could clearly claim such credit. There’s arguably no Republican in America who has done more to nurture and benefit from the populist MAGA energy that President Donald Trump has unleashed over the past decade than Abbott. He has been able to navigate the yawning divisions between the two wings of the GOP by carefully riding the rise of the far right while also maintaining the respect of old school country club Republicans. That formula didn't work for Sen. John Cornyn, who found himself on the wrong side of MAGA a few too many times to maintain the fragile marriage of GOP factions and was ousted by Paxton in this year’s primary. Yet Abbott has deftly managed the party’s splintering, perhaps better than any other Republican whose rise pre-dated Trump. The question now is whether he can still motivate the base with the same intensity he’s done again and again. Even though most Texas Republicans — and many Democrats as well — quickly dismiss the scenario that Abbott himself could lose, public polling consistently shows Hinojosa within striking distance. Abbott has alienated rural voters over his staunch support for data centers and school vouchers, while his ties to megabillionaires have fueled a Democratic campaign that casts the election as a referendum on corruption as much as affordability. Meanwhile, some establishment Republicans have grown weary of the party’s fixation on culture-war battles that Abbott himself has helped stoke, particularly in an election where voters say they care more about the economy. It remains to be seen whether Abbott’s GOTV operation can surge turnout despite those headwinds. “He was the coattails for every cycle as governor,” said a senior Republican Texas official, granted anonymity to speak freely about the state’s dominant GOP leader. “He got people over the finish line in difficult House seats and Senate seats and congressional seats. He was the man.” This cycle, the official said, “Abbott has no coattails.” Texans of both parties say they’ve seen this scenario before: An abrasive, flamethrowing Republican is in the fight of his political life against a charismatic, rising-star Democrat who has reignited the party’s hopes of ending their decades-long losing streak in Texas by flipping a Senate seat. Faced with the limitations of his own ground game, the Republican leans on Abbott’s massive field operation to churn out votes, an organization powered by an army of thousands of volunteers and advanced data metrics. In 2018, Abbott’s operation helped Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by about 219,000 votes, running up the score in rural areas and turning out unreliable Republican voters. Cruz’s team saw the gap in the data: Abbott had a far broader coalition and a statewide field team that could help Republicans weather the unprecedented Democratic turnout O’Rourke was driving. The governor easily won his race by 13 points. “He’s feared because of a very effective organization,” said Bill Noble, a former senior adviser to Abbott’s predecessor, former Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry. “It’s better to be on the side of having the governor endorsing you, and with that endorsement comes more than just a press release. Money’s made available, lists and resources are made available [and] delivering the vote after the endorsement.” Abbott’s hope is that the 2018 magic that saved Cruz can play out in the final years of the Trump era for Paxton, even with his party in transition. But the barriers facing the GOP — and Abbott himself — are far stronger this time around. Sure, Abbott can give Paxton a ground game. But can he turn Abbott voters into Paxton voters? And more to the point: Are there as many Abbott voters as there were in 2018? Meanwhile, after decades of being outgunned by Republicans, Democrats are working on building their own turnout machine. Brazoria County is the blueprint. Stretching from Houston to the Gulf Coast, this county has been run almost entirely by Republicans since the Republic of Texas was established in 1836. It’s the former political home base of the libertarian-leaning Republican Ron Paul and hotbed of the Tea Party movement before its reactionary politics went national in 2010. Therefore the odds are daunting for the small group of Democrats who, in 2025, devised a plan to mount a coordinated campaign within Brazoria County to assemble strength from the bottom up. The Brazoria project grew out of a statewide coordinated campaign launched this year by a coalition of Democratic groups who have invested $30 million in an effort to end the party’s 30-year drought in winning higher office. The experiment is targeting Brazoria this midterm and if successful, Democrats plan to replicate it across the state the next cycle. Texas Democrats have long yearned for year-round, state-wide campaign infrastructure. That burden typically falls on the Democrat at the top of the ticket to build out themselves, as in 2018 when O’Rourke created a massive, decentralized GOTV operation that relied on armies of volunteers. But after he lost, it evaporated. This cycle’s statewide coordinated campaign running in tandem with the Brazoria project intends to copy-and-paste that strategy but in a permanent way that will exist after the fumes of the 2026 election dissipate. Democrats believe the ingredients in Brazoria are all there, a microcosm of the story of Texas’ demographic growth over the last decade. Over the past 15 years, new residents from both inside and outside Texas have poured into the region, drawn by good schools, plentiful jobs and proximity to a major city — and by the promise of planting roots in the massive master-planned communities that have become a hallmark of Texas living. Brazoria’s growth is reshaping not just its suburbs but its demographics. Hispanic residents now make up about 32% of the county’s population, while Black residents account for roughly 18% and Asian residents nearly 9%. Those demographics work in Democrats’ favor: Enraged by ICE’s aggressive immigration enforcement under Trump, Latino voters are rapidly moving away from the GOP after a record number of them supported the president in 2024. But Texas Democrats are learning that demographics alone won’t deliver them power without some grit. The idea, Texas Majority PAC’s Katherine Fischer said, was to borrow from Republicans’ 1980s playbook: invest in rural, Democratic-leaning counties that were beginning to trend Republican — just the reverse. Brazoria caught their attention as they observed it shifting bluer cycle after cycle, although Democratic gains stalled slightly in 2024 when Trump won it by 20 points. They wanted to accelerate that shift, starting by recruiting a full slate of candidates for the first time. Republicans have so dominated the state’s politics that Democrats in the past didn’t even bother to field candidates in many down-ballot races. The Texas Democratic Party and Texas Majority PAC decided to fill every seat in Brazoria and partnered with County Democratic Chair Monica Morgan to make that happen. Those groups poured $450,000 into the project — hiring staff, paying for an office and covering the thousands of dollars in filing fees that dissuades potential candidates from making the leap. Candidates were then given one-on-one training through Texas Majority PAC, which provided campaign strategy, fundraising support, voter-data guidance and canvassing help. “[The PAC is] really pushing us in a healthy way to be successful,” said Becky Singleton, a Democrat running for county commissioner. “It took my own campaign to a whole new level.” The slate of Brazoria Democrats, who have become close friends throughout the cycle, got an early jolt of inspiration: In May, Democrat Quentin Wiltz flipped Brazoria’s biggest city of Pearland, winning by 263 votes in a city of about 130,000. For them it was a sign that Democrats had a chance to prevail, even in a county Trump carried by a wide margin. “We have millions of people in Texas who historically have been under-engaged,” Wiltz said. “When you give people a reason to participate and organize, and then when you have the resources to invest in them, you can reach them and you can see the change that’s possible.” Brazoria Republicans, in the face of a real opposition this year, are digging in. They’re even consolidating behind a deceased judicial candidate who died in September. Should the candidate win next week, the GOP-controlled board of county commissioners will appoint his replacement. (The Democrat in the race, Shenequa Harrison, makes the case that “if you vote for him, you literally you don't know who you're voting for.”) Democrats’ ambition now is to scale this model dramatically, with organizers saying they could recruit and support three times as many local candidates next cycle. “If we see that the experiment in Brazoria seems to be successful, we can then export that experiment to other counties across the state,” Fischer said, pointing to rapidly growing Kaufman County outside Dallas and the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley as potential next targets. “We're not going to win overnight, but we will win one day, and we want to speed it up and make sure that we have good people in these seats when we do actually win.” Many Texas Republicans see Abbott’s GOTV dominance as an expression of his reputation as a hardworking overachiever with an intense obsession with detail. That reputation is in part a result of his biography: As a 26-year-old law firm associate studying for the bar, he was out for a jog when in a freak accident, a tree fell on him, leaving the lower half of his body paralyzed. The accident didn’t halt his meteoric rise from attorney to judge to state attorney general to governor. “He’s tenacious,” GOP state Sen. Paul Bettencourt said. “Incredibly disciplined,” said Republican state Rep. Greg Bonnen. “He has overcome a tremendous amount of adversity,” state Sen Phil King said. Abbott’s campaign knew that this would be a tough election year, so his aides adjusted their GOTV strategy. “We increased the targets and we increased the universe,” Dave Carney, Abbott’s top political adviser, told me. Rather than begin canvassing immediately after the primary, as it had during his previous reelection bid, the team held back its volunteers until the fall, betting that voter contact would be more effective once the race was on voters’ radar. Those volunteers — about 10,000 — have identified 3 million potential voters through the Abbott Impact App by uploading their contacts and matching them to voter files to confirm party affiliation and determine if they have voted. The app gamifies voter outreach, which occurs either through text or door knocks, and rewards top users with prizes like a Traeger grill, Dyson blowdryer or private tour of the governor’s mansion. “It’s basically a field operation on your phone,” Carney said. Abbott’s team insists they’re still focused on the governor’s goal of flipping seats in Harris County, which includes Houston and has a history of swinging between parties although it is currently Democratic-run. Abbott has devoted more than $30 million of his war chest to the effort. In 2024 Republicans successfully flipped several Harris judicial races and this year they’re eyeing races toward the top of the ballot like county judge — which would amount to an exceptional coup in a difficult year. “Any vote we pull out of Harris County is going to help the statewide ticket,” said Jessica Colon, Abbott’s senior adviser running the field operation in Harris County. “If it’s a voter numbers contact game, we’ve got ‘em smashed with that,” said Jeff MacGeorge, a district field director in Harris County, who said his team has sent more than 3.5 million texts to voters since the primary and 2,000 people in the county have downloaded the app. Republican state Rep. Gary Gates, who represents a district in the Houston area, said he opens the Abbott Impact App every Monday morning to see how many blocks the governor’s volunteers walked the weekend before, efforts the four-term Republican says he has never seen as organized or extensive. In one week in October the Abbott team knocked on more than 5,300 doors and completed 1,300 voter surveys in his Fort Bend County district, he said. But even with those efforts, Gates is pessimistic about how Republicans will fare next week given the negative national environment. After all, knocking on a voter’s door does not ensure they will show up at the polls for your side. “You just can’t go tick off and declare war on the Latinos and not have it come back and bite you in the rear end,” Cates said. “That’s going to have consequences.” Early vote returns signaled some warning signs for Republicans, with Democrats showing up in slightly higher numbers while rural voter turnout is lagging. Of course, those dynamics can quickly reverse, a possibility Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows is betting on, thanks largely to Abbott. “Many of them believe Election Day is the right day to vote,” he said. “So I expect us to have a huge Election Day for Republicans.” Burrows was doing his part, participating in a cross-state bus tour to mobilize Republicans: “It feels really good on the ground,” he told me. “It feels a whole lot better than what it sounds like on Twitter.” That confidence in the rural firewall is not shared among all Republicans, particularly with Abbott’s biggest detractors within the party. Former GOP state Rep. Glenn Rogers — whom Abbott successfully chased from office in his vendetta against lawmakers who opposed his school voucher push — said he’s had many conversations with Republicans in his small town of Graford indicating slipping support for the governor. Abbott’s efforts to attract data centers to Texas — which he dialed back following backlash — coupled with private school advocacy has alienated those supporters and promoted a “distrust” of him, Glenn said. A Republican defeat next week might trigger a recalibration within the party away from the culture wars and toward bread-and-butter economic issues, he said. “It’d be the best thing that could happen to them,” Glenn predicted. “I don’t see any change occurring in the Republican Party unless they get their ass whipped in November.” Back at the saloon in Houston, after Abbott concluded his remarks, a long line of fans waited to snap a photo with him before being rushed aside by an attentive staffer. Standing on the outskirts of the crowd stood a retired rancher from the border town of Brownsville, a longtime Republican in a family of other longtime Republicans who cast a ballot as soon as the polls opened. Asked about recent polls showing Hinojosa within a few points of Abbott, the rancher, who declined to share his name, dismissed them as “driven by Democrats.” And questioned about how he thinks his party will fare next week, he shrugged. “It’s Texas,” he said. This article originally appeared on Politico at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/10/31/texas-abbott-gop-turnout-paxton-01136886