CHUCK DEVORE: Texas turns blue, but here’s where the next 4 big battles are coming

After November’s election verdict, Texas isn’t doomed to become California overnight — but not for a lack of trying.

As in much of America (Florida excepted), Texas saw major midterm losses for a Republican Party that has dominated the Lone Star State for the past quarter century. Inauguration Day in 2027, all statewide executive offices were held by Republicans — now the opposite will be the case.

Democrats took the state House of Representatives, but Republicans still hold the state Senate. Republicans also retain a one-vote margin on the state Supreme Court, and the state’s powerful Railroad Commission (the agency that regulates the oil and gas industry, gas utilities, pipeline safety and surface coal and uranium mining) will have a 2-to-1 Republican majority.

DEMOCRAT GINA HINOJOSA STUNS ABBOTT, MAKES HISTORY AS FIRST LATINA TEXAS GOVERNOR

Democrat Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa will bring Texans an entirely new set of priorities and a vastly different style of governance. She began her career as a labor attorney, including working for a powerful government union. In 2005, she was on the legal team that pursued lawfare against then-Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on money-laundering charges.

Former President Barack Obama, now-Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico, center, and now-Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa meet patrons at the Taco Joint restaurant in Austin, Texas, on May 12, 2026. (Joel Angel Juarez-Pool/Getty Images)

DeLay was driven from office, convicted in 2010 and fully acquitted in 2014 — the process is the punishment. Before her election to the Texas House in 2016, Hinojosa served on the board of trustees for the Austin Independent School District, a district that has struggled with declining enrollment and the threat of state takeover after campuses received five consecutive failing accountability ratings.

How might Texas under Hinojosa’s leadership fare? Here are four things to watch.

1. Taxes and spending

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For decades, Texas has benefited from lower taxes and a smaller, less intrusive government than peer-state rivals such as California, Illinois and New York. The population has soared as millions of Americans — and foreign nationals — sought opportunity. That is unlikely to change overnight. What is likely is incremental slippage as other states, notably Florida and Tennessee, work to attract talent and investment.

2. Regulation and lawsuit climate

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Texas last passed major tort reform in 2003 and has seen its national lawsuit-climate ranking slip since then. Hinojosa’s ascent likely means a gradual strengthening of the state’s trial bar at the expense of economic growth.

Ironically, it will likely also increase the cost of living — with affordability an explicit promise of the incoming Democratic leadership. Further, Texas’s innovative Business Court and the Fifteenth Court of Appeals, both created in 2023, saw all three Republican members of the Fifteenth Court lose to Democrats. This flip may tilt the landscape against larger employers when interpreting the scope and power of state regulatory actions.

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Hinojosa has already moved against billionaire Elon Musk’s plans to expand SpaceX’s Starbase site in Cameron County. Given the governor-elect was part of the lawfare posse that destroyed DeLay, will Hinojosa and her lieutenants resist the urge to go after Musk personally at the risk of harming job creation and innovation in Texas?

3. Culture and higher education

Here is where Hinojosa’s victory may have a significant long-term effect. She is positioned to reverse strictures that banned the use of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in hiring and curriculum, especially in the university system. Her appointments to higher-education governing boards could reverse many of the commonsense gains made under outgoing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, including the 2023 ban on DEI offices and related practices.

4. Border security

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Here Hinojosa’s campaign promises could have an immediate and dramatic effect. Texas has worked alongside the federal government under Republican President Donald Trump, and in spite of the federal government under former Democrat President Joe Biden, to secure its roughly 1,254-mile border with Mexico.

Texas last passed major tort reform in 2003 and has seen its national lawsuit-climate ranking slip since then. Hinojosa’s ascent likely means a gradual strengthening of the state’s trial bar at the expense of economic growth.

The state’s effort — with National Guard soldiers and Department of Public Safety troopers — aims to protect Texans’ health and welfare by interdicting transnational human smuggling and drug-cartel operations, which include the use of increasingly sophisticated and deadly drones.

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The federal government has some 12,000 to 19,000 Border Patrol, Customs, DEA and active-duty military personnel deployed along the border in Texas at any given time. The state of Texas, through Operation Lone Star, has augmented that with up to 5,500 Guard soldiers and 1,600 DPS troopers for a total of up to 7,000 personnel — meaning Texas provides about one out of every two people guarding the long Rio Grande frontier.

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Ending Texas’s border effort removes thousands of state law-enforcement and surveillance personnel from the border. The result could be more deadly fentanyl, more human trafficking, and more dangerous illegal aliens successfully crossing into Texas and causing death and injury. All of this could be avoidable, and it is unlikely that the voters who gave Hinojosa her margin of victory were fully aware of this portion of her platform.

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Texas’s long-run advantages in taxes, regulation and energy will not vanish on inauguration day. But the direction of travel for the next four years is now clear, and the four areas above will show how quickly — and how far — the state embraces California-style dysfunction.

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