A crucial battle for the future of the Republicans is being fought in Texas

Each of the fifty US states has a complex identity, but Texas beats them all. A place that has always had a frontier mentality and the memory of once being the only state to have been an independent nation – the ‘Lone Star’ remaining its hallmark – Texas is a land of wide open spaces and stark contradictions. Take, for example, its history of being unwelcoming towards Black people, yet welcoming to immigrants. There has been little sympathy for civil rights struggles – the very ground on which the Democrats lost the state in the 1960s – but a great deal of openness towards those arriving in search of fortune. Or at least this was the characteristic that the Republicans, who have dominated the state for decades, have long claimed to embody. And it is precisely the issue of immigration that could now lead Texas to send a Democratic senator to Washington in the mid-term elections, for the first time since 1988.

Texas is increasingly the focus of attention in the November elections, not only because of the Senate race between the Republican Ken Paxton and the Democrat James Talarico, with the latter holding a 4–6-point lead in the polls. At stake is the state’s political future, a phenomenon whose full significance has only become clear in recent days, when Karl Rove – a Texan by adoption and the strategist behind George W. Bush’s victories in Texas and in the presidential elections – announced that he would be voting for a Democrat. This is seen as a sign that local Republicans have completed their shift toward the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement and its isolationism, and have thus—in the eyes of Rove’s political generation—permanently lost their soul. Some analysts now suggest that the time may be ripe for Texas to return to a political stance similar to that of the period before the 1960s. That is, before a true Texan, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, decided to sign the Civil Rights Act. That move put an end to segregation, but also caused the Democrats—who until then had been the party of white racism—to lose the South.

It took Texas some time to break completely away from the political faction that had dominated it since the nineteenth century, but the shift proved unstoppable. In presidential elections, the state began to turn Republican red as early as the Richard Nixon years. The Democrats held on to local state offices for a while, and when Karl Rove arrived from Virginia in the late 1970s, the Republicans controlled only one of them. But by the time Rove left Texas with Bush to move to the White House in 2001, the Republicans controlled them all – and they have not relinquished them since.

Texas has long been regarded as an impregnable Republican stronghold. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win its electoral votes was Jimmy Carter in 1976. The last Democratic senator was Lloyd Bentsen, elected in 1988. The last state office won by a Democrat dates back to the 1994 election of Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, the only Democrat to date whom Rove has admitted to having voted for in his lifetime. The Democrats have a delegation of 13 representatives in the House of Representatives in Washington, compared with 24 Republicans, and the redrawing of constituencies appears to be working against them in the mid-term elections. In 2024, Donald Trump won by a landslide here, even managing to secure 55 per cent of the Latino vote among those living along the border with Mexico and to win over the Rio Grande Valley.

Yet today everything seems to have changed. The economy is a factor – it is at the forefront of voters’ minds across the country and has helped drive Trump’s approval rating below 43 per cent here. The war in Iran is a factor. But in Texas, the issue of immigration counts for a great deal. Here the tide has turned, and Rove, as a shrewd political analyst, has sensed it. What has definitively infuriated Bush’s strategist – and presumably also the former president, who lives in Dallas and remains silent, but harbours no sympathy for Trump or the MAGA movement – were the racially charged and nativist outbursts against immigrants by Bo French, the Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, which, despite its name, does not deal with railways but with Texas’s main industry: oil, gas, pipelines and refineries. For Rove, this was the final straw: “These people are destroying the party instead of building it; I’m not having any of it,” he said, announcing that he would vote for French’s Democratic challenger, Houston MP Jon Rosenthal.

Over the past twenty years, the ecosystem of ‘compassionate conservatism’ that Bush, Rove and their generation had built in Texas – and subsequently sought to roll out nationwide – has vanished. For them, as for Bush Senior or Ronald Reagan before them, immigrants were a great resource to be managed with care, and welcoming them had always been the party’s hallmark, ever since it had wrested Texas from the Democrats. It was here, in 2001, that the first law in the United States granting lower tuition fees to students living in Texas as undocumented immigrants was passed with broad bipartisan support. The words of the Republican governor at the time, Rick Perry, now seem to come straight from the world of democratic socialists: “We must make it clear to every child and young person studying in Texas that we are not interested in where you come from, but where you want to go, and we will do everything we can to help you achieve your goals. And this vision must also include the children of undocumented immigrants.” When Perry stood as a presidential candidate in 2012, he took this Texan approach to immigration to a national level and clashed fiercely in the primaries with Mitt Romney – then the Republican frontrunner – who criticised the concessions Texas was granting to undocumented immigrants. “I think you have no heart,” was Perry’s retort to Romney during a debate.

Today’s Texas Republicans – who, incidentally, regard Romney as a moderate has-been – seem to be from another galaxy. When Bo French caused a scandal across half of America by publishing a photo of supporters of the University of Texas at Austin football team, making light of skin colour and the multi-ethnic mix in the stands, Governor Greg Abbott – who occupies the same office once held by Bush and Perry – merely stated that French’s message “is not mine”. But immediately afterwards, he launched into a description of Texas as the national showcase for the MAGA-style fight against illegal immigration, claiming to have implemented “the toughest laws of any state and a freeze on H1B visas for those working at state universities”.

Paxton, the Senate candidate whom Trump favoured over the outgoing John Cornyn, was in turn careful not to distance himself from French and the nativist milieu he represents. Instead, on this occasion too, he confined himself to attacking his rival Talarico, the 36-year-old seminarian who, with his blend of politics and Protestant Christianity, is seeking a new approach for Democrats in the South.

The ‘Christian’ right and left are clashing in Texas, with Catholic bishops caught in the middle – bishops who have no hesitation in taking a stand on immigration, encouraged by the American Pope Leo XIV. ‘This is racist and sinful rhetoric, which seeks to cause harm and sow division,’ said Michael Olson, Bishop of Fort Worth, commenting on French’s remarks. “It is disturbing that this comes from a candidate for public office. He should apologise.” This is the position the Bishops’ Conference also holds at national level, having rediscovered, precisely on the issue of immigration during Donald Trump’s second term, the unity it had lost during the years of Pope Francis’s pontificate.

If the Republicans’ ‘Texas model’ were to be rejected in November – with a victory for Talarico in the Senate race and defeats for some local candidates, such as French – the ‘Lone Star State’ would become a testing ground for the 2028 presidential election and for the future of the MAGA movement. Trump is aware of this, which is partly why he chose to hold his ‘Trumpapalooza’ in Dallas—the recent, unconventional Republican gathering that will be remembered primarily for his pledge to give five thousand dollars to every American if the Republicans win the midterms. A Texas no longer dominated by the Republicans would be one of the most striking signs of the decline of Trumpism and its hardline stance on immigration.