Austin. The exploitation of seemingly endless oil fields, strict immigration policies, gun ownership: Texas, like hardly any other US state, was perceived in Germany as a stronghold for Donald Trump's Republicans and their conservative values. The triumph of the Democrats in the midterms, who secured the Senate seat for the first time in decades and prevailed in the gubernatorial election, is all the more surprising.
“We just took back Texas,” said Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico to great cheers late in the evening (local time). The “politics of division” is no match for the “politics of love”. Referring to Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk, the 37-year-old said the Democrats were against "the richest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world and the entire Washington D.C. establishment." won.
In the gubernatorial election, 52-year-old Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican incumbent Greg Abbott - making her the first Latina to lead the southern state. People with roots in Latin America make up almost 41 percent of the population in Texas. “We shook the world today,” Hinojosa said. “We showed that anything is possible.” The Democrats also took other important positions in state politics from the Republicans. “The blue wave is sweeping Texas,” wrote the Houston Chronicle newspaper.
Hinojosa triumphed over Abbott, even though he went into the election campaign with bulging campaign coffers and prominent supporters, including an oil mogul in the important oil-producing state and Musk. It has several of its headquarters and the Starbase spaceport in Texas and is planning a semiconductor factory in the state, which is increasingly developing into a center of the technology industry.
But the rapid expansion of data centers increasingly caused resistance, which Hinojosa took advantage of. She accused Abbott of making politics for billionaires and of making life in Texas much more expensive during his previous terms in office. She rarely missed an opportunity to accuse Abbott of putting the interests of the wealthy tech industry ahead of those of his fellow citizens by opening the door to data centers.
Trump, who won the 2024 presidential election in Texas with 56 percent, dumped Abbott shortly after the results were announced. On his Truth Social platform, the US President wrote that Abbott would not have lost the election if he had not become a “RINO” (“Republican in Name Only”) in recent months - a politician who officially belongs to the Republican Party but, in Trump's opinion, does not represent its principles. Since 1995, Republicans have always held the office of Texas governor.
“The long era of one-party rule in Texas is over,” commented The Dallas Morning News. Texas, “the most powerful and reliable of all deep red-Republican states,” is now Democratic-blue. However, there is still greater concern about the uncertainty about how the Democrats will now govern. Despite the results, Texas remains “fundamentally conservative.”
Talarico, who formerly worked as a teacher and was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 2018, celebrated the first Senate victory for a Democrat since 1988 by referencing the biblical story of David versus Goliath. The alliance of Trump and Musk was their all-powerful Goliath, said the 37-year-old, who prevailed against Republican candidate Ken Paxton: “We have just proven that all the money in the world is no match for the people in Texas.”
Trump had expressly supported Paxton, who is often referred to by the media as “scandal-ridden,” in the party’s internal primary. The extent to which the US President and his Republicans feared for their Senate seat in the southern state could also be seen in the fact that the US President made several stops there during the election campaign. "Vote for Ken. Get him in there," he urged his supporters at a campaign rally in San Antonio in early October. "This is so important. It's crucial."
The Republicans had previously held their first major party conference before the midterm elections in Dallas, Texas, in September. Musk supported Paxton with a good 150 million US dollars (the equivalent of around 134 million euros). Talarico, on the other hand, received support from the family of former US Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush - one of the Republican dynasties in Texas.
During the election campaign, Talarico presented himself as a politician who would fight for affordable living in Washington - and against corruption. He portrayed his opponent Paxton as the epitome of a corrupt system. He relied on a message of charity and portrayed Texas as a state whose strength lies in its cultural diversity. Talarico stands for a progressive understanding of the Christian faith and said, for example, that God is “male, female and everything in between”.
