In the name of democratic norms, we will pretend there is a serious race in the Republican primary for governor.
There isn’t. There is Gov. Greg Abbott, who has held the job for more than 11 years. He’s as sure a bet to win this primary as you get in politics.
A slate of 10 candidates signed up to run against him, so Republican voters technically have a choice. But there is no one on the ballot who offers a compelling reason to vote against Abbott.
As we have written before, Abbott deserves great credit for steering Texas as a high-growth, low-tax state that has enjoyed the arrival of great new businesses from the Rio Grande Valley to the Panhandle to right here in Dallas, where Y’all Street is poised to take off thanks to key regulatory reforms.
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Abbott was also right to step forward when the Biden administration decided that the border didn’t need any policing, a time of crisis that put border cities at risk and imposed a great cost on the rest of the state.
And he has been right to have the Texas Education Agency work aggressively to intercede in failing school districts. In major cities across the state, large districts did too little for too long to ensure that Texas’ most vulnerable kids were getting the education taxpayers were paying for.
That said, Abbott is a far cry from the governor Texans elected in 2014. As the GOP has become harder to recognize, so has the measured man who took the governor’s office not long after social media got a death grip on the internet.
Abbott chased seasoned and conservative legislators out of office in the last cycle in pursuit of a totally unfettered voucher program. We support greater school choice, and a limited, means-tested program like the one that is now in place. But Abbott crushed the careers of good lawmakers, many of them attacked in indefensible campaigns of character assassination.
He has demonstrated an increased beholdenness to major donors. He has joined a chorus of those GOP leaders who are diminishing the separation of the state and Christianity. Abbott is now further from a small-government conservative than Laredo is from Amarillo.
We live in big-government Texas now. And the big government is in Austin. The strong arm of the state is ever poised to strike, from threatening schools with a takeover if kids dare exercise their First Amendment rights to undermining locally elected district attorneys.
Absent the unforeseen, Abbott will be the Republican nominee. Even if his opponents had a better message (and from what we can tell, they don’t), they lack the means to reach voters.
Texas is better in many ways for the service Abbott has given. But as he drifts further from genuine conservatism and expands the reach of the state, he must be wary of whether Texas will prosper as it has. We urge him to remember his roots as he moves forward.
Also on the ballot are Bob Achgill, Evelyn Brooks, Pete “Doc” Chambers, Charles Crouch, Arturo Espinosa, Mark V. Goloby, Kenneth Hyde, Stephen Samuelson, Ronnie Tullos and Nathaniel Welch.
This editorial is part of the Dallas Morning News Editorial Board’s slate of recommendations for the 2026 primary. Find the full project here.
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