The startling transformation of Texas from a solid red state to a remarkably blue state is still hard to believe. For years, Texas Democrats have prayed for this change. They have been disappointed so many times that the reality is hard to absorb. Democrats won every statewide office, won control of the Texas House, and missed winning the state senate by one vote.
Dan Solomon of The Texas Monthly asks, what can Democrats accomplish?
He writes:
Back in January, Dan Patrick drew up the first charges on his biannual list of priorities for next year’s legislative session. In it, he outlined a handful of items that he would task the Ninetieth Texas Legislature to address, starting with “Preventing Sharia Law in Texas” and concluding with “Promoting America & Texas First in Our Schools.” It seemingly hadn’t occurred to the longtime lieutenant governor that he had to win an election first.
And why should it have? Patrick had cruised to victory in three previous elections—most recently in 2022, by an easy ten-point margin—and the last Republican incumbent major statewide officeholder to lose a general election was Bill Clements, back in 1982. There was little reason to make plans for anything other than another term of Texas under Republican control.
But then Texas voters chose to sweep Republicans out of power, electing Democrats to every statewide office on the ballot. They will now assume the levers of power in Texas, which have been oriented around one-party control. Patrick was a lead architect of that structure, implementing a rule that allowed Republicans to bring legislation to the Senate floor without a single Democratic vote and changing the precise number of votes required to advance a bill based on how many seats the GOP held in the chamber.
With Democrats preparing to assume control of many of the state’s institutions—only the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the Railroad Commission still have GOP majorities—there are questions about what their governance of Texas will look like in practice. Let’s explore some of the most immediate and consequential policy matters now in play.
Can Gina Hinojosa Finally Expand Medicaid?
Under Greg Abbott—and Rick Perry before him—Texas has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act—one of only ten holdout states to decline federal benefits. In practical terms, accepting Medicaid expansion would allow Texans who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance on the ACA marketplace to obtain subsidies through the federal government. Forty states have opted into this; Texas is the largest that hasn’t, and expansion could help more than a million Texans get coverage. Texans alone represent 46 percent of the entire U.S. population that could benefit from expansion, per a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa pledged to expand Medicaid during her campaign, but the decision isn’t strictly hers. Implementing it will require the Legislature to act, and while Democrats claimed control of the House, Republicans maintain a majority in the upper chamber. Because the federal government covers around 90 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion, the issue will be a test of one of the key questions facing the Lege this year: How conciliatory are Republicans in the Senate feeling? On its face, Medicaid expansion is an easy compromise—it costs Texans little, it has been implemented successfully even in Republican-controlled states around the country, and hospitals have long supported it.
If the Senate opts to find opportunities for bipartisan compromise, Medicaid expansion is likely the starting place; if the members of the chamber’s Republican majority won’t play ball, we’re all in for a good reminder of how unproductive a Texas legislative session can be.
What Happens to the Public Universities?
The terms of more than a dozen regents at Texas universities are set to expire shortly after Hinojosa takes office. She’ll appoint their replacements, subject to Senate confirmation. Hinojosa alone won’t shift the balance of power at any university—appointments are staggered, and Abbott appointees will still make up the majority of the folks atop the University of Texas, Texas A&M, and the rest of the state’s public universities, at least until 2029. But those institutions have been shaped by more than simply the legal power the current and previous governors have exercised—and it’s an open question whether Hinojosa will be able to wield influence and apply pressure in a manner similar to how Abbott and Perry did before her.
UT-Austin and Texas A&M have been roiled by political pressure in recent years. Last year, A&M president Mark Welsh resigned after spending several months as a punching bag for conservatives (including Abbott). Welsh’s sins were mostly related to a trip the university was sponsoring to a conference that Abbott decried as too woke on X, and to a viral video in which an instructor discussed gender in ways that were unpopular with conservatives. Abbott didn’t possess the power to fire Welsh, but he was able to leverage his control over the board of regents to force an otherwise well-liked administrator to step down. At UT, meanwhile, Jim Davis, a former Ken Paxton aide, took over as president last year despite lacking any academic background, and he has been working to remake the institution in a conservative image.
Hinojosa can’t fire Davis any more than Abbott could fire Welsh—but Abbott wanted Welsh out, and out he went. Will Hinojosa be able to wield similar influence, or was Abbott’s leverage the product of more than a decade spent consolidating power within the state? Even if Hinojosa is not able to directly replace the president—should that be her desire—to what extent do public universities that oriented themselves to appease right-wing state leaders change course now that Texas voters have made this a blue state?
What About School Vouchers and Data Centers?
School vouchers were the subject of Abbott’s most challenging legislative fight. They’re deeply unpopular among rural Texans, who have far fewer education options than their urban counterparts. In 2023, rural Republican legislators who represent such districts joined the Democratic caucus to block the passage of a school-choice bill. After taking $12 million from a pro-voucher out-of-state billionaire, Abbott retaliated by backing primary challengers to those incumbents, knocked off most of them, and then was able to pass the state’s voucher programin the 2025 session. In 2026, voters responded by choosing to put Democrats in charge of the state. (A significantly larger percentage of rural voterswent blue than in recent history.)
Hinojosa campaigned on ending the voucher program. The newly Democratic House could defund it in the next budget, and Lieutenant Governor–elect Vikki Goodwin, who will preside over the Senate, could hold the line in the upper chamber. If that doesn’t happen, Hinojosa does have line-item veto power to drain the program of funding.
Data centers will be another key issue. During the campaign, Abbott instituted a moratorium on environmental permitting and grid connections for new projects. Hinojosa has vowed to maintain that moratorium, which can slow down such projects, if not fully stop them indefinitely, until the Lege passes new rules for the industry. She’s promised that any already-permitted projects can continue.
On its face, the politics of the issue appear bipartisan—voters around the state don’t like data centers, and Republicans have responded by signaling opposition to such projects. This is an area where Hinojosa ought to be able to deliver.
That’ll be important, because whether Democrats deliver on the issues that animated voters also has electoral implications. It’s admittedly early to look to 2028—but there is no greater force shaping national presidential politics than the possibility of Texas as a true swing state. Was what happened on election night a onetime fluke driven by once-in-a-generation circumstances or a true realignment in Texas politics?
The answer is likely to be partially determined by how Democratic control of Texas actually plays out. For years, a core message to voters from the state’s Republican leaders was that electing Democrats risked everything they currently enjoyed about the state—that newcomers to Texas moved here to get away from Democratic mismanagement of blue states, and that longtime residents enjoyed low taxes and general prosperity that had started with the so-called Texas Miracle.
If it turns out that Texans can still enjoy living in a blue state as much as they did under Republican leadership, then voting for Democrats consistently, even if there’s not a full sweep in every election from here on out, starts to seem a lot more likely. The electoral college map looks wildly different with a blue Texas than a reliably red one; if Republicans don’t have our state, then the map that gave Trump 312 votes in 2024 is no longer a winning one, provided the GOP loses literally any other state (it can’t even spare a Dakota!). Joe Biden’s 2020 map with a blue Texas becomes an overwhelming landslide. National politicians and their advisers will spend a lot of time trying to understand whether the successes Democrats achieved in 2026 are durable, fluky, or something else—and a lot of the answer to that question will rely on how the statewide slate of elected Dems performs for Texans over the next two years.
