Via Michael Adams-Hurta on Twitter, the most wild poll result so far this cycle may be this one.
DATE: Tuesday, August 4, 2026
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Mitchell Brown, Partner & Pollster, Cygnal
RE: Survey of n800 Likely General Election Voters in TexasExecutive Summary
Data centers are a highly volatile issue in Texas, and the politics are evolving. Voters want guardrails, not a ban, and Abbott’s “guardrail” plan is the strongest consensus in this survey. Texans support requiring data centers to pay their own costs, protect water, limit impacts on community character, while delivering tangible benefits such as jobs, local revenue, and infrastructure improvement. Whoever owns enforceable protections owns this issue.
The Landscape: Volatile and Moveable
• Despite negative headlines, just 8% of voters call data centers a top voting issue, and attitudes shift dramatically as voters are presented with information on the issue.
• This volatility creates opportunity, but neither party owns the issue. Abbott leads on data center trust just 45%-41%, behind his own 49%-46% ballot. The ground is unclaimed.
Emphasis mine. That’s Republican polling firm Cygnal reporting the results of an internal survey that shows Greg Abbott, who beat Beto O’Rourke by eleven points in 2022, is leading Gina Hinojosa by just three points. And they made that public! Which normally only happens when a campaign thinks it’s a good result. This is why internal polls are treated with skepticism by poll aggregators – you’re getting cherry-picked results, unlike with public pollsters.
Here, this result has been released to bolster Abbott’s ongoing defense of his evolving position on data centers. And maybe that will work, and maybe they’ll post a followup survey result in the coming weeks showing a wider Abbott lead and more favorable numbers for him on this issue. He’s certainly got the money to push such a narrative.
But even that comes with some baggage.
Now at odds with Trump, Abbott gets big tech support on his guidelines from the industry giants building data centers in Texas.
Google, Open AI, Meta and others weighed with support for Abbott’s temporary guardrails; Democratic nominee for governor Gina Hinojosa said “When the companies being regulated are cheering for the rules, you know the rules were written for them, not for Texans”.
After President Donald Trump said Gov. Greg Abbott is making a “mistake” to tap the breaks on construction of data centers in Texas, the biggest names in tech came out very strongly in the last 24 hours to say they support the governor’s moves.
But insurgent Democrats – most of whom have joined with some Republicans like GOP Ag Commissioner Sid Miller in pushing for an immediate moratorium and special legislative session – said the whole thing is a ruse to help Abbott deal with an issue with the potential to upend the November election.
Gotta say, that’s a pretty good quote from Gina Hinojosa. Again, Abbott has the money to push his side of the story. And really, all he has to do is win over some reluctant rural voters. It’s not the tallest of orders by any means. It’s the fact that he’s compelled to do so that is so noteworthy.
Oh, and did you notice what was missing from that Cygnal memo? A topline result in the Senate race. You know they asked that question, because if nothing else it’s a reality check on the race they’re really interested in. If they got a weird result there, it would call the rest of their data into question. The result they did publish is in line with other recent polling, and so it strongly suggests that Cygnal also found James Talarico to be leading Ken Paxton, by some unknown amount. I mean, surely if they had Paxton up, even by just a point or two, they’d have said so.
And speaking of Paxton.
The data center industry has donated thousands to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s campaign as Hood County waits for a ruling from his office on a proposed moratorium.
Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate and Texas Attorney General, received at least $448,000 as of June from executives and political committees of data center companies according to reporting from the Washington-based digital news outlet NOTUS, which covers government and politics.
That narrative sure is complicated, isn’t it?