Everything has changed.
A blue tsunami of epic proportions swept through Texas Tuesday night, decimating the largest and most influential red state and ending the longest shutout of any political party in the country. Democrats across the spectrum, buoyed by national anger at President Donald Trump, won seats for which they had not been viable contenders for decades, despite their opponents’ historic spending.
Governor Greg Abbott, the most powerful and well-resourced governor in modern Texas history, was ousted by Gina Hinojosa. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who in previous elections renounced impeachment, indictment and infidelities, lost to James Talarico in his bid for the US Senate. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the iron-fisted leader of the Texas Senate, spoke to a little-known state representative. Republicans lost the attorney general’s office, one of the most influential conservative legal positions in the country. The Republicans’ new congressional map brought them no gains – in fact, they lost one seat overall.
The only question remaining in the early hours of Wednesday morning was whether Democrats would take control of the Texas House, and by what margins.
As floodwaters recede, Texas’ first divided government in decades is left in its wake. Democrats will have to learn how to govern a state that has become the world’s eighth-largest economy since they last held this much power in the 1990s. Texas Republicans will have to sort through the rubble and chart a new path back to power.
First, both camps will need to emerge from what appears to be a collective shock that has befallen the Lone Star State’s ruling class.
It was a devastating night for Republicans nationally – a resounding rejection of Trump and his policies. Deep-red Texas has proven impervious to blue waves in the past, which perhaps explains Republicans’ willingness to take on additional responsibilities this cycle, such as scandal-plagued Paxton for the U.S. Senate and Bo French, known for his racist social media posts, as railroad commissioner. After a bruising primary, the winners refused to rebuild bridges with the party’s more moderate establishment types, dug themselves into tired culture war tropes, and never found their footing after being accused of hosting in data centers and Flock cameras.
Democrats, accustomed to not responding to the hype that Texas might turn blue, were hopeful this year. Talarico led Paxton in nearly every poll for months, putting gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa and the rest of the state’s field within reach of their better-funded Republican opponents. They had someone running to every seat for the first time in modern history, preparing for some extreme twists and turns.
But nothing could have prepared either side for what happened Tuesday night: a total overthrow of statewide political control on a scale not seen in this state since Reconstruction.
Based on pre-election nightly projections, Jason Villalba, a former moderate Republican member of the House of Representatives and president of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, put together a model showing Talarico winning and Hinojosa closing in. As the night went on, he shifted his projections toward better prospects for Democrats.
But he could never have imagined the erasure that so completely sidelined his party.
“I consider myself pretty hip, pretty astute and adviceable, and today caught me off guard in a way that I didn’t expect, and I think that’s true for both sides,” he said.
“It’s a new day,” he said. “But what does tomorrow bring? I have no idea.”
“Clear repudiation”
It was hard to believe Mayes Middleton was going to lose. Middleton, a wealthy oil and gas magnate and conservative state senator from Galveston, ran for attorney general pledging to continue the record of right-wing legal victories that have come to define the agency on the national stage. He self-funded his primaries, spending nearly $20 million to brand himself as “MAGA Mayes,” then sat back and remained largely silent during the general election.
Meanwhile, his opponent, state Sen. Nathan Johnson, has scraped together enough money to run a few statewide ads promoting his plans to focus on the agency’s bureaucratic functions. Johnson also criticized Middleton for her loyalty to the president, a risky proposition in a state that voted for Trump by 14 percentage points in 2024.
But on Tuesday night, Middleton called on Johnson to concede, handing the reins of the red state’s largest attorney general’s office to the other team. The effects will be cataclysmic for the conservative legal movement that has come to rely on Texas to bring risky lawsuits against Democratic administrations, blue states and private businesses.
“Nobody ever thought he was going to lose. Nobody thought about it. Nobody talked about it,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP consultant. “He was a rock-solid candidate and that tells me that this is about something bigger than the candidates we ran or the races they ran.”
The election was a clear rejection – that’s the phrase used by several Republican Party political consultants – of Trump’s recent policies. The crushing cost of groceries and gasoline has hit the Republican brand particularly hard. The war in Iran, immigration measures and outrage over data centers haven’t helped. These factors also contributed to shocking losses for Republicans in South Carolina, Kansas and Iowa.
“Voters have talked about it and people are frustrated,” Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, said at Abbott’s downtrodden watch party Tuesday night. But these are issues, he said, over which Texas leaders “have no control.”
But they have control over how they adopt the face of those policies, Villalba said, noting that the Texas GOP has fallen in step with the national MAGA movement over the past decade. As a moderate Republican who has felt like an outsider in his own party in recent years, Villalba hopes this rebuke will cause Texas Republicans to reconsider their loyalty to Trump.
“I don’t expect us to return to the days of George W. Bush-style conservatism, but I hope we can all agree that abject racism and outright populism is not a winning model,” he said. “If you cede your authority to one individual, well, we see what happens.”
Texas Republicans should hope that this election was decided by a large number of Republicans choosing to stay home, or even cross partisan lines, in rejection of Trump, Steinhauser said. The only other alternative would be for the state to suddenly find many more Democratic voters, making these victories more sustainable in the future.
One guy, at least, thinks the Texas Republican Party’s loyalty to Trump isn’t to blame for Tuesday’s results. In fact, he blames Texas Republicans for not being MAGA enough.
“If Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, had not become a RINO in the last six months of his political life, he would not have lost,” Trump said on social media Tuesday evening. “He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!”
What comes next
The last time Democrats held most of these statewide seats, Talarico was in kindergarten. The party has spent much of the past three decades playing defense, trying to curtail the harms of right-wing legislation and cobbling together uncomfortable coalitions with its less partisan Republican colleagues.
All that changes now.
As governor, Hinojosa will have the power of executive action, the ability to call special legislative sessions, appoint individuals to boards, commissions and judicial vacancies, and veto legislation she disagrees with.
Lt. Gov. Vikki Goodwin will oversee the Senate, a role Dan Patrick has wielded with an iron fist. But Republicans are expected to retain a majority in that chamber, and there is already talk of finding ways to restrict his authority over crucial roles, like deciding what legislation to bring to the chamber.
As attorney general, Johnson could decide to reverse the state’s position on, or drop altogether, the controversial lawsuits in which Paxton has implicated the state. He could also join other blue states — because that’s what Texas is now, by some metrics — in filing lawsuits against the Trump administration. Suing the federal government is certainly something the agency is no stranger to.
Comptroller Sarah Eckhardt will hold the state’s purse strings, overseeing the billion-dollar school voucher program that she and the rest of the Democratic lawmakers voted against. Agriculture Commissioner Clayton Tucker will be responsible for programs designed to support farmers and shape policy around data centers and rural Texas.
These are significant and historic victories that will change the state’s political landscape overnight. Additionally, Texas still remains a conservative state, with many fossilized bastions of Republican power that will take more than one election to uncover. Many of these candidates ran on promises of moderation; they will now have to decide whether to honor that or take these results as an endorsement of their wider party.
Hinojosa, at least, indicates she plans to find ways to work with the party that has spent tens of millions of dollars to keep her out of power.
“We didn’t end one era of one-party rule and start another,” she said at the Texas Tribune Festival in September.
