Texas ranks 40th of 50 on the measures we track, with the second-worst food insecurity and second-worst women's health scores in the country. Greg Abbott signed the abortion ban and the school voucher law, never expanded Medicaid, and now runs on affordability after property tax levies rose to $89.4 billion and home insurance premiums rose 79%. Here is the record, and what each of the seventeen Republicans running for reelection has been busy with.
Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Insurance to act on home insurance costs on August 24, 2026, citing a 79% premium increase in six years. In 2025 his Legislature killed both bills that would have addressed it, insurance was not one of his seven emergency items, and it was not on his 18-item special session agenda either.
Abbott's new affordability plan promises to cut property taxes in half by zeroing out school taxes on homesteads. He has been governor since 2015, and statewide property tax levies have risen from $51.2 billion to $89.4 billion on his watch. Nearly 4 in 10 homesteads already owe no school tax, and Texas's 4.1 million renters get nothing.
Governs One of the Worst-Ranked States in the Country and Hasn't Moved the Needle in 11 YEARS
Greg Abbott has run Texas since January 2015 — the longest-serving governor in the country, and long enough to own the results. Texas has the second-largest economy in America, but that wealth isn't reaching the people who live here. Texas ranks #40 out of 50 states overall, and on the things that matter most for everyday families — staying healthy, putting food on the table, keeping women and kids safe, and having a say in our own government — Texas is near the bottom.
And we're shut out of our own democracy. Texas ranks #46 for voter turnout — among the very worst in the nation for the share of us who actually get to vote, after Abbott signed law after law making it harder.
Add it all up and Texas ranks #40 out of 50 states overall. For a state this big and this rich, that's a choice — and Greg Abbott has had over a decade to make a different one. These aren't abstract numbers; they're whether our families are healthy, fed, safe, and heard. We deserve better.
We all want what's best for our kids and for them to be set up to succeed.
Greg Abbott has spent years starving the public schools that 5 million Texas children depend on - holding their funding hostage to push private school vouchers, and censoring what's left of the classroom.
The state's basic allotment of $6,160 per student hasn't been raised since 2019, even as inflation soared - experts say it needs at least a $1,000 increase just to keep up.
Sitting on a record $33 billion budget surplus, Abbott refused to put more money into public schools unless legislators first gave him his voucher program.
He signed Senate Bill 17, banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices at every public college and university in Texas under threat of losing state funding.
Greg Abbott is failing a generation of Texas kids to score political points. We deserve better.
We all pay the electric bill, and we all depend on the same fragile Texas grid that collapsed and killed hundreds of people in 2021.
So what has Greg Abbott done since? He rolled out the red carpet for Big Tech - handing data centers and crypto miners the most generous tax giveaways in the country and piling their enormous power demand onto our grid, while everyday Texans get stuck with the bill.
Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google data center buildout while showering the industry with incentives.
The result is a flood of demand: regulators are fielding hundreds of gigawatts of interconnection requests - the vast majority from data centers - and Texas is on track to become the largest data-center market in the nation, surpassing Virginia.
Only now - in an election year, as voters in both parties turn against Big Tech - has Abbott suddenly claimed he'll protect "everyday Texans," after years of inviting the very buildout that put them at risk.
Greg Abbott sold out Texans' grid and wallets to Big Tech, then scrambled to look like the hero once the bills came due. We deserve better.
Voters are supposed to pick their politicians - not the other way around.
But in 2025, at Donald Trump's urging, Greg Abbott called Texas lawmakers into a special session to redraw the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade - a raw power grab engineered to hand his party five more seats in Congress before a single vote was cast.
On August 29, 2025, Abbott signed a mid-decade congressional map - drawn at President Trump's request and engineered to flip five U.S. House seats to Republicans, pushing the Texas delegation toward a 30-8 split.
Groups representing Black and Latino voters sued to block the map, arguing it dilutes the voting power of Texans of color to manufacture a partisan advantage.
More than 50 House Democrats fled the state to deny the chamber a quorum and stop the map. Abbott responded by threatening to remove them from office and asking the Texas Supreme Court to declare their seats vacant - a request the court refused.
Greg Abbott redrew the lines so your vote would count for less. We deserve better.
The most basic job of a governor is to keep the lights on and keep people safe.
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out the Texas power grid that Greg Abbott was responsible for. More than 4.5 million people in Texas lost power - some for as long as four days, and at least 210 Texans died - some independent counts put the toll far higher.
It was preventable, and it was the second warning. Federal regulators found that protecting just four types of power plant components from icing could have reduced ERCOT outages by 67 percent, and called for "stronger mandatory electric reliability standards." As FERC's chairman put it, the same thing had already happened once: "The devastating effects of extreme cold on our bulk power system's ability to operate in 2011 and now, 2021, must not be allowed to happen again."
And the fix still isn't real. Four years later, the Texas State Auditor's Office found the state's gas weatherization inspections are close to meaningless: of 8,732 inspections across the 2024-2025 winter seasons, inspectors issued just two violations - and current rules allow gas companies to decide for themselves what constitutes sufficient winter preparedness for their own operations.
People died, and Greg Abbott cashed the checks. We deserve better.
We all want our kids to come home safe from school and our families to come home safe from the store.
Texas has suffered some of the deadliest mass shootings in American history on Greg Abbott's watch - Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe High School, El Paso, Midland-Odessa, Uvalde, and the Allen mall. His response to all of it? Make guns easier to get.
In 2022, a gunman murdered 19 children and 2 teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde while police waited in the hallway. The families begged Abbott to raise the age to buy an AR-15. He refused.
2 years after the back-to-back El Paso and Midland-Odessa massacres, Abbott signed permitless carry into law - letting Texans carry handguns in public with no license, no training, and no background check - over the objections of police chiefs across the state.
Imposed One of the Most Extreme Abortion Bans in the Country
Decisions about pregnancy should be made by a woman, her family, and her doctor - not by politicians.
Greg Abbott took those decisions away. He signed a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, deputizing private citizens to sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion.
Abbott signed Senate Bill 8 in 2021, banning abortion at about six weeks - before most women even know they're pregnant - with no exception for rape or incest.
Asked why the law forces rape victims to carry pregnancies to term, Abbott said Texas would simply "eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas" - a promise no government on earth has ever kept, and one he took no real action to fulfill.
Once Roe v. Wade was overturned, Texas's near-total ban took effect, putting doctors at risk of prison and leaving women denied care even during dangerous medical emergencies.
Greg Abbott put the government in the exam room and told rape survivors they were out of luck. We deserve better.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
Greg Abbott works for billionaires, big business and special interests, not for us. He has raised $71,434,049 for this campaign and is sitting on $67.5 million of it. Just ten donors account for $16.3 million of that total - nearly a quarter of everything he has raised has come from ten people.
And that money buys things. A September 2025 Public Citizen investigation found that donors to Abbott's PAC had received roughly $950 million in no-bid state contracts - 89 contracts awarded between 2020 and 2024 during declared emergencies including COVID-19, border security and Hurricane Beryl, when the normal competitive bidding rules were suspended.
Look at who some of his top funders are:
John L. Nau III, Silver Eagle Distributors - $774,811. Nau runs the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributor in the country. He wrote Abbott his biggest check of the cycle, $500,000, on June 29, 2026 - and thirty-two days later Texas reclassified hemp-derived THC, beer's fastest-growing competitor, as a Schedule I felony drug. Abbott had legalized those products himself in 2019 and publicly vetoed a ban on them in 2025, then let an agency in his own executive branch impose it anyway. Read the full story.
MacKenzie Price, Alpha School - $1,100,000. Abbott held public school funding hostage until legislators gave him a $1 billion private school voucher program. Price co-founded Alpha School, a private school network charging up to $75,000 a year that is eligible to take those very vouchers.
DOGE money - $2,000,000. Joseph Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder, Tesla board member and DOGE staffer, gave $1,500,000. Elon Musk gave another $500,000.
Harlan Crow - $325,000. The Dallas real estate billionaire is best known for the undisclosed luxury travel he provided to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The electricity companies that stand to replace CPS Energy - at least $230,000. In August 2026 Abbott moved to open San Antonio's market to retail competition, calling the city-owned utility an "energy monopoly" - though CPS has the cheapest combined residential rates in Texas. Utility PACs that would profit from the change have given his campaign at least $230,000, led by Oncor's state PAC; Oncor's chief executive and his wife gave another $342,500 personally.
Greg Abbott is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Pushed Christian Nationalism and Targeted Muslim Texans
Texas is home to people of every faith and no faith, and our government is supposed to belong to all of us equally.
Greg Abbott doesn't see it that way. He's worked to write his religion into our public schools while singling out Muslim Texans for suspicion, investigation, and exclusion.
In 2025, Abbott signed a law requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in every public-school classroom in Texas, along with a companion bill pushing prayer and Bible reading into the school day - both immediately challenged as violations of the First Amendment.
Abbott tried to kill "EPIC City," a planned Muslim community near Dallas, declaring it would "never see the light of day" and unleashing a barrage of state investigations - even a federal probe he encouraged was closed without finding any wrongdoing.
He posted that "Sharia law is not allowed in Texas," signed a law targeting so-called "Sharia compounds," and moved to bar groups like the Muslim civil-rights organization CAIR from owning land - prompting a lawsuit over religious discrimination.
Going back years, Abbott made Texas one of the first states to refuse Syrian refugees (2015) and later all refugees (2020) - moves critics condemned as state-sponsored Islamophobia - and signed a 2017 "foreign law" bill widely understood as an anti-Muslim message.
A governor who uses the state to promote one religion and persecute another isn't protecting religious freedom - he's attacking it. We deserve better.
We all want a border that's safe and orderly, and we want the people who come here treated with basic human decency.
That's not what Greg Abbott gave us. Through his multi-billion dollar "Operation Lone Star," Abbott strung razor wire along the Rio Grande and dropped a chain of floating barriers into the river - not to make crossings orderly, but to make them deadly. And he did it with our money.
A Texas state trooper-medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote to his superiors describing what he witnessed: troopers ordered to push a group of about 120 exhausted migrants - including children and nursing babies - back into the Rio Grande, and a 4-year-old girl pushed back through razor wire who then passed out in 100+ degree heat.
In the same report, the trooper pointed to a mother and her two sons who had drowned that month, and said troopers were told not to give water to migrants in extreme heat. He called the wire and barrels in the river an "inhumane trap."
Mexican authorities recovered bodies from the Rio Grande, including one found caught against the floating barrier Abbott installed.
In 2023 Abbott signed Senate Bill 4, making it a state crime to cross into Texas and letting police arrest anyone they suspect of entering illegally. In May 2026 a federal judge blocked four of its provisions - including the power it handed magistrates to issue deportation orders - warning the law would "moot the uniform regulation of immigration throughout the country." The illegal-entry crime took effect anyway.
In January 2024, Abbott seized Shelby Park in Eagle Pass and used the Texas National Guard to block U.S. Border Patrol from a stretch of the Rio Grande. After the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to remove his razor wire, Abbott refused to give an inch - declaring an "invasion" and insisting Texas's authority "supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary."
Operation Lone Star has cost Texas taxpayers roughly $11 billion - money diverted from schools, health care and other services Texans actually need.
Abbott has spent more than $148 million bussing over 100,000 migrants - many of them people legally seeking asylum - to cities around the country as a political stunt.
Greg Abbott turned human suffering into a press release. We deserve better.
Greg Abbott has spent a decade concentrating power in his own hands and making it harder for Texans - especially Texans of color - to hold him accountable at the ballot box.
In June 2018, Abbott ordered every state agency to run proposed rules past his office before the public could even see them - before they are published in the Texas Register for public comment. Nothing in the Texas Government Code requires the governor's involvement at all.
He wields his veto pen knowing the legislature can't stop him.The last time Texas lawmakers overrode a governor's veto was 1979 - because governors wait until after the session ends to veto, when no override vote is possible. Abbott vetoed 76 bills in 2023; only two came during the window when lawmakers could have done anything about it.
In 2021, Abbott signed Senate Bill 1, which banned 24-hour and drive-thru voting, restricted mail-in ballots, and empowered partisan poll watchers - targeting the diverse, high-turnout methods pioneered in Harris County.
Greg Abbott works to keep power away from the very people he's supposed to serve. We deserve better.
Most of Abbott's settlement came from non-economic damages for pain and suffering - exactly the kind of award he later worked to cap for everyone else.
As a Texas Supreme Court justice and then as Attorney General, Abbott backed tort "reform" that capped pain-and-suffering damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000 - with no adjustment for inflation.
Critics of the caps Abbott championed say that under them, the kind of recovery he received would be far harder, if not impossible, to obtain today.
Greg Abbott pulled the ladder up behind him. We deserve better.
In a public health emergency, we need leaders who follow the science and let local communities protect their own people.
Greg Abbott did the opposite. As more than 90,000 Texans died of COVID-19, he spent his energy blocking the very tools - masks and vaccines - that could have saved lives, and stripping cities, school boards and even private businesses of the power to protect anyone.
Abbott's Executive Order GA-38 banned local governments, school districts, and public universities from requiring masks - even at the height of deadly surges - and threatened violators with $1,000 fines.
He issued orders barring any entity in Texas, including private businesses, from requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination, overriding employers trying to keep their workers and customers safe.
When Texas's largest counties and school districts tried to impose local mask rules to protect kids, Abbott and his attorney general took them to court to stop them.
Greg Abbott put politics ahead of Texans' lives and then handcuffed everyone trying to save them. We deserve better.
We count on our justice system to treat everyone equally and to mean something when a jury reaches a verdict.
Greg Abbott threw that away. In 2024, he granted a full pardon to Daniel Perry, a man a Texas jury had convicted of murdering Garrett Foster, a Black Lives Matter protester, at a 2020 demonstration in Austin.
Perry was sentenced to 25 years in prison for shooting and killing Foster, an Air Force veteran - and evidence at trial included Perry's own messages talking about wanting to harm protesters.
The day after the conviction, Abbott publicly called for a pardon, and his hand-picked Board of Pardons and Paroles then recommended exactly that.
Travis County's District Attorney said Abbott and the board "made a mockery of our legal system" and proved that in Texas "some lives matter and some lives do not."
When a governor overturns a murder conviction to make a political point, no one's justice is safe. We deserve better.
