Gov. Greg Abbott has spent much of the summer working to quell a roiling backlash to data centers in rural parts of the state where Republicans need to maintain strong support in the upcoming midterms.
He’s called on lawmakers to strip their lucrative tax breaks next session, and ordered regulators to set new restrictions and conduct an audit before permitting any more projects to break ground.
But those efforts aren’t winning over all skeptics. Several rural Republicans say they don’t trust the governor whose biggest donors are increasingly invested in the data center boom and who praised Texas as the “epicenter of AI development” as recently as November.
“Rural Texas is not buying Abbott’s thing,” said Mason McAllister, a resident of a small town in Grayson County in North Texas. “The guys around here are fired up. ‘The king of bait and switch,’ is what they’re saying.”
The 34-year-old North Texan started a group called Save Rural Texas with the mission of organizing grassroots opposition to data centers into a “powerful voting bloc” willing to go against Republican politicians many of its members have long supported. He said about 1,000 people have subscribed to its newsletter so far.
“Come voting time, we’re going to let people know who was helpful and who was not,” McAllister said.
Data centers have become an unexpected flashpoint in an already heated midterm election in which public polling shows most statewide races within single digits.
It’s unclear how widespread the pushback is, but there are signs it could remain an issue for some Republicans. Several GOP chairs in rural counties signed a letter to Abbott last week urging him to call a special session to set new rules for data centers. Anti-data center groups have sprouted up in communities across the state, with some openly urging members to vote against Republicans, or not vote at all.
Democrats are trying to capitalize on the rare potential weak spot. State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, the Austin Democrat running against Abbott, is calling for a moratorium and, at a recent campaign event, appeared with two Republicans who described themselves as single-issue voters focused only on data centers.
“A lot of Republicans have the mindset, ‘You vote red no matter what,’” said McAllister. “I’m trying to get it through to them, ‘Yeah, but you don’t reward bad behavior.’”
McAllister said he has voted for Abbott before, but doesn’t think he will in November. He said he does not trust the governor is actually committed to cracking down on data centers like the one planned near his property, in part because of the donations Abbott has taken from the industry.
Rhett Bennett of Black Mountain, an energy company building data centers across Texas, is one of the governor’s biggest campaign supporters. He gave Abbott $500,000 earlier this year. Black Mountain owns land near McAllister’s property.
Still, McAllister said he isn’t sure if he is ready to support a Democrat. He said he might just not vote at all.
Others say they may vote for the first time in a long time. Nancy White, a Canton resident and activist fighting a battery storage facility there, said she hasn’t voted since the early 2000s when she supported George W. Bush. She said she won’t vote for Abbott, but she also won’t support Hinojosa. She’s considering writing in an independent candidate.
“I used to jokingly say I don’t want to talk about politics,” White said. “Now all I want to talk about is politics.”
[…]
In the upcoming election, Republicans likely cannot afford to lose support in rural parts of the state that have long been their strongest firewall against Democratic gains in the cities and suburbs.
But the data center boom has been especially galvanizing in those rural areas because it touches on deep-seated feelings of being overlooked, said Suzanne Bellsnyder, a former Republican legislative staffer who now runs a rural-focused media platform.
“It’s the schools, the underfunding of our hospitals, it’s our roads that don’t get appropriate funding,” she said. “We’ve always been just a secondary thought at some level. This feels more like an attack into our communities, where we finally realized Texas does care about us, but only for our resources and not our people.”
[…]
Bellsnyder said she has never seen an issue mobilize rural voters like the data center boom has. But she said she still does not have a handle on whether that means those voters will take out their frustrations on the governor.
“I know that rural folks vote Republican and I don’t know if what I’m saying changes that,” she said. “Maybe they just stay home. Maybe they take it out on their local governments. I don’t know what it looks like.
“That’s what this election will be all about.”
It’s a gift article so read the rest. I’m not going to relitigate the data centers issue here, you know what the overall background looks like. The question I’m interested in is to what extent can Greg Abbott lose support in rural areas and still build up enough of a cushion to win, given the population increases and overall blue shift in the biggest counties. I’ve seen some generalized wisdom on Twitter and the like that Republicans need something like 75% of the vote in rural areas to win. That doesn’t address the turnout level, though. I’m playing with some numbers now and will report back in a future post. Basically, in the way that Democrats had issues with their base voters in 2024, Republicans are having them this year with theirs. Abbott is acting the way he is now because he recognizes that, though I’m not sure he’s willing or able to really address it. To be fair, that’s a hard thing to do almost by definition. Maybe, if they suffer some painful losses as Dems did in 2024 they’ll have a real debate about it in their next set of primaries. But first they have to do some losing, and the jury is still out on that one.
The rural republicans who now don’t trust Abbott to do right by rural communities, as it relates to data centers, are the same rural republicans who helped Abbott stab other rural republicans in the back over school vouchers. These are the same people who conspired and colluded with Abbott to primary republican legislators who stood in the gap for public schools.
They’ve been in the smoke filled back rooms and personally witnessed both of his faces. They know from first-hand, personal experience he’ll “bait and switch” lie, cheat, and steal to serve the interests of his billionaire donors. They know that if he was really serious about addressing their concerns about data centers, he call special sessions just like he did for his wealthy donor’s voucher bill.