Riding political wins, a once-restrained Gov. Greg Abbott is increasingly steamrolling foes

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Loaded with $43 million in his campaign coffers and facing no serious electoral threat, Gov. Greg Abbott in 2017 plunged into uncharted waters for a Texas governor: the state House primaries.

The first-term governor mobilized his support — an arsenal of endorsements, ads and stump speeches — behind three candidates taking on incumbent representatives he had clashed with in the state’s lower chamber. It was, at the time, somewhat remarkable for Texas’ top elected official to enter the trenches against lawmakers from his own party. The House speaker, a Republican, said Abbott was putting one of the seats at risk of falling into Democratic hands.

Ultimately only one of the Abbott-backed challengers won. But the anti-incumbent play laid the groundwork for a far more ambitious effort six years later, when the governor responded to the Legislature’s failure to deliver taxpayer dollars for private school tuition — his top priority — by targeting 15 anti-voucher incumbents and unseating 11 of them.

The strong-arming worked. Earlier this year, the Legislature passed a school voucher package with little GOP defection, and the governor unlocked a new effective strategy to accomplish his goals: playing hardball.

Fresh off the political and policy victory, it appears the once-restrained governor is now bolder than ever, loaded with an unmatched abundance of campaign cash and a determination to emerge victorious in any battle — even if it requires dipping into his own party’s legislative primaries. Abbott’s political zeal has been on full display lately as he moves to boot the Texas House Democratic leader from his duly elected office over the ongoing redistricting impasse, sparked by dozens of Democrats who left the state to stall a new GOP congressional map.

“All of this is unprecedented,” Abbott, who was not made available for an interview for this story, told radio host Mark Davis this week. “The Democrats were used to the old fashioned way, where Republicans weren’t going to do anything about it. This time we pulled out every tool in the toolbox.”

As the quorum-breaking Democrats remain out of state in protest, Abbott has asked the state Supreme Court — an all-Republican body whose nine justices include six of his appointees — to vacate the seat of Houston Rep. Gene Wu. And he initially sparred with Attorney General Ken Paxton over who had the legal standing to bring the suit.

Abbott has vowed to continue calling overtime legislative sessions, which only he has the authority to do, and threatened further retribution by targeting even more Democratic seats and suggesting he could add more conservative priorities to the already ambitious agenda, which he solely controls. The governor already caught some off guard when he rolled out a legislative to-do list that included several unfinished priorities of hardline conservatives, including cracking down on abortion pills, requiring people to use bathrooms that align with the sex they were assigned at birth and allowing the attorney general to prosecute state election crimes.

Also on the agenda was a call to more firmly regulate THC products, coming after Abbott vetoed the outright THC ban championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whom the governor was once reluctant to challenge in head-to-head combat.

People who have worked closely with the governor say it’s not that he is bolder now as much as that he has come into his leadership role — and rising national profile, thanks largely to Abbott’s boundary-pushing border initiatives under Operation Lone Star.

“The issues and the environment have changed. He hasn’t changed,” said Matt Hirsch, a former deputy chief of staff to Abbott. “He’s always been someone who I think the best way to describe it is determined. … People underestimate his determination, and every time they do so at their own peril.”

Critics disagree. They see a governor drunk on power looking for more.

“We said we would defeat Abbott’s first corrupt special session, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Wu said in a statement this week.

Sending a message

Shortly after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, Abbott criticized the Democratic administration's immigration policies and accused Biden of leaving the southern border “open” for migrants to cross.

Abbott took matters into his own hands. He launched Operation Lone Star, deploying thousands of Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard soldiers to the 1,250 miles of border Texas shares with Mexico. He drew the Biden administration into numerous legal battles and infuriated immigrants’ rights advocates, who accused state officials of illegally jailing migrants without charges, among other due process concerns.

But no aspect of the crackdown elevated Abbott’s clout across the country quite like his busing of asylum-seeking migrants from Texas to northern cities run by Democrats.

The idea scrambled the politics of immigration across the nation, as Democratic leaders struggled to respond to the influx of migrants needing help, while trying to appear supportive of immigrants’ rights. The number of illegal border crossings spiked during the Biden administration, which failed to respond until months before the 2024 election.

The governor would later say he “took the border to” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“What you're seeing is a governor who is probably more popular than he's ever been, a governor who has more political capital than he's ever had, and I think he's looking to push his advantage,” said John Wittman, who worked for Abbott, including as communications director, for seven years until 2021.

Wittman was an aide to the governor — whom he described as “the hardest worker that I have ever met in my life” — when Abbott first stepped onto the House primary battlefield in 2017.

“People can judge whether or not, you know, that ended up being successful,” Wittman said. “But the reality is that the governor sent a message that he was serious about his agenda.”

Since then, Abbott has increasingly flexed his power, typically favoring blunt force methods over give-and-take deal-making to drive his agenda through the Legislature.

In 2021, after state Democrats similarly fled the state to kill GOP voting restrictions, the governor vetoed the part of the state budget that funds the Legislature, declaring that “funding should not be provided for those who quit their job early.” The move threatened to withhold pay for more than 2,100 state employees caught in the middle, but lawmakers approved a stopgap measure extending the funding and Republicans ultimately passed the voting bill.

The following session, Abbott went to work on his push for a school voucher program — a topic he had broached several years earlier, when he asked lawmakers during the 2017 session to create such a program for children with disabilities.

As in 2017, Abbott’s renewed push to unlock public funds for private school tuition failed to clear the state House, meeting loud opposition from rural Republicans who argued the policy would reroute funding from public schools that are important pillars in their communities.

By October, Abbott had returned lawmakers to the Capitol for three emergency legislative sessions following the regular 140-day one. No deal appeared in sight.

That month, the governor — who would call a fourth overtime session — made a straightforward pitch to his fellow Republicans: You can do this the easy way. Or the hard way.

“We will have everything teed up in a way where we will be giving voters in the primary a choice,” Abbott said during a tele-town hall.

He followed through. His campaign unleashed ads accusing Republicans — including some he had openly supported in the past — of being soft on border security, even after they had voted to fund his border initiatives and pass a law to let Texas police arrest people suspected of being undocumented.

“The nutshell bottom line is, policy is never divorced from politics,” said John Colyandro, who worked in various capacities for the governor dating back to his time as attorney general. “If you have an issue that you take on — that's a challenging issue like school choice — it was imperative for the governor to take that leadership role.”

“Relic of a softer age”

A prolific fundraiser, Abbott is sitting on an $86 million campaign stash and has already begun deploying it with ads against absent Democrats, knocking them for holding up disaster relief in the wake of Central Texas floods that killed more than 100 Texans.

He’s also floated the idea of running Republican candidates against the absent Democrats once their seats are vacated, assuming he gets his way. Abbott’s political strategist, Dave Carney, has encouraged GOP candidates to “start thinking about running in the upcoming special elections” and accused Democrats of misreading the moment.

“Watching from the outside its clear the current Texas leadership [ain’t] playing anymore,” Carney wrote on social media. “Past make-up and forget, let bygones, etc. is a relic of a softer age.”

Abbott has also suggested he could apply his more assertive tactics to accomplish other goals. In recent remarks he has credited his primary campaigning for the voucher victory — as well as stiffening the state’s bail laws.

And he’s already eyeing his next political push: potentially reducing property taxes by capping local spending.

“I’m just thinking, well, it worked with these two strategies, maybe it’s time to employ the same strategy as it concerns property taxes,” Abbott reportedly said. "I was not out in the trenches fighting for that in the same way."

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