{"id":444058,"date":"2026-09-22T13:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T13:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/444058\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T13:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T13:30:09","slug":"chris-hayes-says-gops-domination-of-texas-is-coming-back-to-bite-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/444058\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Hayes says GOP’s domination of Texas is coming back to bite them"},"content":{"rendered":"

When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for \u201cMS NOW Live: Together in Texas<\/a>,\u201d host Chris Hayes will be stepping into an environment he finds both familiar and necessary. For Hayes, host of \u201cAll In with Chris Hayes\u201d and author of \u201cThe Sirens\u2019 Call: How Attention Became the World\u2019s Most Endangered Resource,\u201d gathering face-to-face with his audience isn\u2019t just network promotion \u2014 it\u2019s nurturing the one thing he has left in a media environment defined by change.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love live events,\u201d he told me in an interview ahead of the event, describing having \u201ca head start\u201d on the live-events model with book tours and podcast live shows. \u201cThere\u2019s a great energy that comes from being in a room with people. I think it\u2019s a different energy than anything else, particularly true and truer every day in the increasingly screen-based and mediated world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Held at the College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, MS NOW\u2019s day-long fan event brings together 15 of the network\u2019s top anchors \u2014 including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O\u2019Donnell and Jen Psaki \u2014 for in-depth conversations with thousands of Texas viewers ahead of the November midterms.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hayes will arrive in Texas with a deep respect for his viewers, whom he calls \u201csophisticated and informed\u201d about the issues \u2014\u00a0from Democratic hopes surrounding state Rep. James Talarico\u2019s Senate campaign<\/a> to fights over data centers<\/a>, development and the future of Texas communities. But he will also be bringing a theory of what\u2019s been happening in the Lone Star State over the past several years. Describing the state as, \u201con its own terms,\u201d perhaps the country\u2019s most successful laboratory for right-wing policy, Hayes said that Texas\u2019 long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.<\/p>\n

Hayes said that Texas\u2019 long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere [are] certain parts about the Texas model that have genuinely been successful,\u201d Hayes conceded. \u201cHousing is pretty cheap. It\u2019s been pretty fast-growing, and in that cheap housing and fast-growing, it\u2019s a place that\u2019s diversifying, and a lot of immigrants have made a life there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the state\u2019s Republican leadership has to face reality: \u201cIf people want to move to Texas, which a lot of people do, then the state\u2019s composition is going to change,\u201d he said. The same in-migration fueling the Texas boom is also, in some measure, quietly padding the GOP\u2019s own coalition. \u201c[The state GOP] have a very ambiguous, ambivalent relationship to that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This tension surfaced most recently in the backlash to social-media posts<\/a> by former Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency with a remit that goes beyond its name, regulating oil, gas, alternative fuels, pipeline safety, and surface mining and reclamation. French posted a photo on X after Texas\u2019 upset win over Ohio State showing University of Texas students \u2014 many of them South Asian \u2014 in the stands, and appeared to condemn a changing, more diverse Texas. Hayes said the response from prominent Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, was partly about the political consequences of alienating the growing number of South Asian Texans, some of whom may already be conservative or Republican-leaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised if the people in the photo are Republicans,\u201d Hayes said, referring to the image French criticized. \u201cThis is Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hayes sees Talarico as a serious test of whether that opening can be exploited into statewide electoral gains for Democrats. \u201cTalarico, I think, is a strong candidate, and I think he\u2019s got a real shot,\u201d he said. Texas Democrats still need \u201ca whole bunch of things to break the right way\u201d to win statewide, he cautioned, calling Texas \u201cthe great white whale\u201d of statewide Democratic politics \u2014 a state the party hasn\u2019t won in three decades. But this cycle, Hayes argued, offers real structural openings. Ken Paxton, he said, is \u201ca worse candidate\u201d than even Sen. Ted Cruz; he isn\u2019t an incumbent and lacks basic retail political skills. \u201cHe\u2019s a real dud on the campaign trail,\u201d Hayes noted, adding that Trump himself may be reassessing his endorsement calculus<\/a> in real time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop, Hayes was direct about Republican efforts to turn Talarico\u2019s faith and masculinity into political liabilities. \u201cThey are all but calling him a gay slur,\u201d he said of the GOP\u2019s campaign against him, adding that the assault on Talarico\u2019s masculinity \u201creeks of desperation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hayes did not dismiss the possibility that Paxton and the GOP\u2019s attacks on Talarico could work with some voters, particularly in a polarized environment where campaigns often seek less to persuade than to cement partisan loyalties. \u201cYou just need to snap people back to their fundamental, their partisan fundamentals,\u201d he said. A Republican voter who may have doubts about a candidate can still be nudged toward the familiar conclusion: \u201cI don\u2019t really like the Democrat. Those aren\u2019t my people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Talarico, Hayes suggested, may be better positioned than past Democratic efforts<\/a> to resist that hyper-partisan reflex. What makes Talarico\u2019s race worth watching this cycle, in Hayes\u2019 framing, is less about the candidate himself than about the structural gap that\u2019s opened up on the other side. He noted that Democrats haven\u2019t come this close in decades: Beto O\u2019Rourke\u2019s 2018 run against Cruz, he noted, came down to roughly \u201c2.3 points\u201d \u2014 the modern high-water mark for a statewide Texas Democrat. \u201cTalarico has run a phenomenal race, and he\u2019s a really good candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Hayes expects the midterms to dominate the conversation in Arlington this weekend, audience members, he said, often arrive with their own closely held theories about what messages Democrats should use \u2014\u00a0and what could stop what he called \u201cthe desecration of our country\u201d by Donald Trump. He anticipates intense interest in artificial intelligence and the infrastructure behind it, particularly data centers. The issue, Hayes said, has become more salient to his audience in recent weeks as AI tools have visibly improved and communities are increasingly confronting the land, water, power and development demands associated with data center construction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe data center issue really gets something deep in people,\u201d he said. \u201cI think Texas is an interesting place for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with Georgia and Virginia, the Lone Star State has become central to the national conversation around data centers. It\u2019s become a wedge issue in at least one Texas congressional race \u2014 alongside anger over the Trump administration\u2019s attempt, which has been temporarily halted, to build a border wall in Big Bend National Park<\/a>, and broader frustration with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. (On Monday, Abbott ordered the state\u2019s environmental regulators to stop approving permits<\/a> for the construction of new data centers pending an electrical audit.) Hayes compared the reaction to a form of territorial politics. \u201cIt\u2019s territorial in a literal physical sense \u2014 the ground, your backyard, your community, the park that you love.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Hayes, the Texas event is a chance to hear directly from people confronting the physical consequences of the state\u2019s rapid development. The event also offers Hayes an opportunity to put into practice the central concern of his book, \u201cThe Sirens\u2019 Call,\u201d which examines how digital platforms commodify attention. MS NOW\u2019s live event asks whether journalism can build something more durable than a click or a fleeting social-media interaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like people,\u201d Hayes said. \u201cI feel energized by them.\u201d Such direct relationships, he stressed, are the core asset of modern journalism, even as tech platforms continually insert themselves between news outlets and their readers and viewers through algorithm tweaks. \u201cAs everything gets kind of disintermediated and chopped and screwed, and the platforms insert themselves between you and the audience,\u201d he said, \u201cwhat do you have? You have the people that like and respect your work . . . Nurturing that is pretty darn important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

from Sophia Tesfaye on the media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for \u201cMS NOW Live: Together in Texas,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-444058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}