“How do you expect somebody to keep voting blindly for a party that’s destroying your way of life?” asks Jet Parker, a lifelong Republican. “It’s a betrayal to the massive rural voter base.”
In March this year, Parker entered the vast art moderne Grayson County Courthouse in Sherman, Texas, for a county commissioners meeting. Sherman is a city of around 40,000 inhabitants, up near the northern border with Oklahoma. The stories she heard there about the expansion of data centres across the state were so horrifying that they called her Republican allegiance into question.
That month, commissioners approved a resolution for more local control over data centre expansion, amid uproar over a centre planned in neighbouring Fannin County. Concerned about the impact on air quality, water usage, noise pollution, public health and on cattle farmers, Parker has set up Save Rural Texas, an organisation concerned with protecting rural Texas and its way of life. “You can’t estimate what people, especially Texans, will do,” she said.
Texas is the second-largest state in the US and has the second-largest state economy. It has also been at the sharp end of some of the most contentious issues of Donald Trump’s second term, from data centres to migration and beyond. Texas has been a Republican stronghold since the 1990s. But now, from Grayson County in the north down to Hidalgo County on the Mexican border, there’s an increasing sense that the Texan way of life is increasingly under attack.
That is changing the state’s political character. The polls show that a Democratic victory is increasingly plausible in the midterm races next month: Gina Hinojosa against the Republican incumbent governor Greg Abbott, and James Talarico, a member of the Texas House of Representatives since 2019, in the Senate race against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.
Spending has risen rapidly, particularly in the Senate race. Paxton and his allies are outspending Talarico by more than two to one, and much of that has focused on attacking Talarico’s support for transgender rights. Talarico’s own ads paint Paxton as the most corrupt politician in Texas.
Recently, an ugly spat erupted over Talarico’s temporary absence after contracting flu. He ended up taking nine days to recover, but the response of his Republican opponents was to run a series of “wanted” posters online. Meanwhile, Trump joined Paxton on the campaign trail and demanded that the ill Talarico “should immediately report to a Debate Stage against Ken Paxton, who is ready, willing, and able.”
Paxton chipped in, remarking: “James Talarico claims he was missing for 13 days because he had the flu. Who actually believes that?” He even demanded Talarico provide “proof of life”. Right wing influencers suggested Talarico had gone to Ohio to seek treatment for mental health issues, which quickly turned out to be a fabrication.
Talarico announced his return to fitness by appearing at a Kacey Musgraves gig in Dallas. He later told MS Now, in an interview, “I honestly didn’t think it was going to become a whole thing.”
This is a state with little patience for such game playing – its unofficial slogan “Don’t mess with Texas” was originally devised as an anti-littering campaign back in 1986, and you still see it on road signs across the state. In the decades since, it’s become an expression of the Lone Star State’s ingrained sense of defiance. That Texan instinct may well turn against the Republicans on November 3.
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Just over an hour south from Sherman, through the rolling Blackland Prairie, fertile grasslands merge with the US’s fourth-largest metropolitan region: the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, a mass of suburbs punctuated with artificial lakes that eventually give way to a cluster of high-rises.
Dallas is a favourite of the Republican Party, which held its first GOP midterm convention in the city back in September, despite the area consistently voting blue. In fact, it’s such a favourite that if you happen to call up Dallas County’s Republican office, you’ll be met with the dulcet tones of none other than president Trump, telling you he doesn’t normally do this, before talking you through the options on the switchboard.
“If you need to start this message from the beginning,” Trump says, “press star. Otherwise, God bless Dallas County and make America great again.”
And yet plenty of Dallas County voters do not like Trump’s vision for Texas and the country. Every Monday morning at 8am, a prayer vigil is held at the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office, just outside the city centre. It’s organised by an interfaith coalition named the Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (Clear). Though a non-partisan organisation, its vision of faith offers an alternative to the intense rhetorical heat of US politics.
“It’s not about standing up at political conventions and declaring that your opponent is not Christian,” says the Rev Dr George Mason, co-founder of Faith Commons, one of Clear’s constituent organisations. “It’s about actually demonstrating your faith by being alongside people who are hurting and brokenhearted, who are afraid.”
Standing every Monday morning as rush-hour traffic speeds by on Interstate 35, members of Clear and of the public who choose to join them stand quietly in prayer outside the ICE field office. They’re met with what Mason terms “drive-by approval” from the passing traffic.
The expansion of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE has become a deeply polarising issue in Texas. Detention centres and the actions of ICE around the state are pushing some voters away from the Republicans, who persist with their hardline stance on immigration enforcement.
The vision set out by Mason and the other members of Clear, regardless of their faith and denomination, is not new. “It’s a renewed movement,” he tells me, “and it’s one that Talarico is demonstrating in his approach to faith and political life.” Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who has regularly invoked his faith in his politics, framing it as all about loving God and your neighbour.
In 2023, Talarico gave a sermon against Christian nationalism that was subsequently uploaded to YouTube the following year. It has had 2.1 million hits. One of the top comments reads: “I’m weeping because it’s felt like my faith has been robbed from me and misrepresented over a lifetime by extremists… and it’s so beautiful to see people with reason taking it back with Truth.”
Alan Steelman, a former Texas congressman who served from 1973-77, is optimistic about the Talarico campaign. What’s remarkable is that Steelman is a Republican, one of 21 officials and party figures who now make up the “Republicans for Talarico” coalition. “He certainly lives and governs from the better angels of his nature,” Steelman told me.
Continuing down the I-35 from Dallas, you hit the modest city of Belton, in Republican-dominated Bell County, just north of the state capital, Austin.
“Voters are concerned about the temporary spike in gas prices,” Jeff Howard, vice chair of the Bell County GOP, assures me, “but they’re overall satisfied with the way the economy is going.”
Gas prices, rising as a result of the Iran war, are a major concern of Republicans in the midterm cycle, even in Texas, with all its oil and gas reserves. On October 7, Axios reported that Paxton had privately told donors that gas prices were hurting his campaign. Despite the release of a recording in which he said, “It’s over $6 a gallon… I don’t know what’s behind some of the decisions,” his campaign later dismissed this report as a non-story.
The area where Howard sees the greatest risk for the Republicans, however, is voter turnout. Getting a good turnout among semi-rural and rural voters will be key in these midterms. The risk is twofold: voters switching their vote to the Democrats, and disillusioned Republicans who decide to stay home because they are put off by the whole Trump show.
When it comes to state-level issues, as in Grayson County to the north, data centres remain a concern further south. “The governor has already dealt with many of the issues surrounding the data centres,” Howard says, referring to Abbott. He recently pivoted from championing Texas as a frontrunner in artificial intelligence to issuing a memorandum on construction of new data centres in August 2026.
Ads put out by the Democratic Hinojosa campaign have latched on to this sudden change of heart. Although her own voting record in the Texas House shows some support for tax incentives for data centres, the issue has become a problem for the Republicans. They’re on the defensive.
South of Belton, the I-35 highway cleaves through Austin, Talarico’s home town, where Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a Venezuelan national, was shot by an ICE officer in late September. It marked the third shooting involving immigration agents in Texas since the start of Trump’s second term. Garces Perez was taken to a detention centre, where he was imprisoned, with a bullet still lodged in his back. In July, a Mexican national named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot in Houston during a traffic stop.
‘Talarico is humane, articulate and engaging, while his Republican opponent is weighed down by his association with Trump. And yet Texas last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1988’
The interstate also runs through San Antonio, Texas’s second-largest city, where earlier this year ICE acquired a warehouse on the east side, planning to use it as a holding site for up to 1,500 detainees. According to data from TRAC, a research nonprofit, Texas has the most ICE detainees of any state.
On October 3, hundreds of people marched against the plan. Four days later, on Wednesday, October 7, Trump arrived at a rally for Ken Paxton. It was his third trip to the state in less than a month, and with typical restraint he hailed Paxton as “perhaps the greatest attorney general in the United States of America… if you get elected on job performance, you’re going to have a blowout because there’s nobody like him.”
From San Antonio, you take the I-35, followed by the I-37 and then US 281 down to the southern border. A “Trump 2028” sign adorns a lawn in one of the small towns the route passes through. McAllen, Texas, sits on the north bank of the Rio Grande, directly opposite the Mexican town of Reynosa.
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On a (very) good day, San Antonio to McAllen is a five-hour drive – in making that journey, you drive through a substantial part of Texas’s 15th congressional district, which was recently redrawn in an effort to favour the Republicans. At sunset, a red glow takes over the semi-arid south Texas plains, and there is a smell of natural gas in the air. A distinctive Tejano accent takes over, inflecting both the English and Spanish spoken in the fast-food joints along the highway.
Texas-15 was one of the first Latino-majority districts in the country and is currently represented by Republican congresswoman Monica De La Cruz. She is the first Republican to ever represent the district and has served two consecutive terms since first being elected in 2022. In the 2026 midterms, De La Cruz is opposed by a Tejano singer named Bobby Pulido. Texas 15 was Democratic from its creation until it went Republican for the first time in 2022.
If you trace the border along to Big Bend National Park in west Texas, you meet perhaps the most visceral expression of the threat that the current administration poses to Texas. In August this year, border wall construction began in the area. It was met with bipartisan opposition and numerous lawsuits. A preliminary injunction from a federal judge was issued in early October, halting construction. Demonstrators outside the El Paso courthouse held signs that read: “Don’t mess with Big Bend.”
Here in Texas, the Democrats look more competitive than they ever could have hoped. Talarico is humane, articulate and engaging, while his Republican opponent is weighed down by his association with Trump. In a recent poll, conducted by the New York Times and the Siena Research Institute, Talarico was leading Paxton by six points. And yet Texas last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1988.
Stopping for the night in McAllen, I spent the evening with a family who’d lived in the border region for three generations. The conversation over dinner centred on the divisions that had entered their community. They tell me that they have neighbours who share their distinct Tejano culture, with roots in both Mexico and the US.
Despite that dual sense of identity, some of them may have voted Republican at the last election. Some of them, they tell me, are ICE officers themselves.
