Business-friendly Texas flips: Democrats end nearly 40-year drought, winning Senate seat and governor’s mansion

James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa turned Elon Musk’s $190 million campaign blitz into their closing arguments. It’s been nearly four decades since Texas sent a Democrat to the US Senate, and 36 years since one occupied the governor’s mansion. That all changed Tuesday night. While Democrats notched historic upsets nationwide — including in places like Kansas, which broke a 90-year streak — Texas carries outsized national weight given the recent corporate stampede to the state.

SpaceX, Tesla, Chevron, and Caterpillar are among the corporate giants that relocated to Texas in search of lower taxes, light-touch regulation, and a business-friendly political climate. “In Texas, we’re welcome,” Chevron’s Andy Walz said after announcing a move from California. Last month, the parent company of the new Texas Stock Exchange raised $155 million in a third funding round meant to lure companies away from the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.

Like Walz, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has cast Texas as a foil to California — a state Musk famously decried as the “state of overregulation, overlitigation, and overtaxation,” and whose billionaire wealth tax on the ballot Tuesday has alienated business leaders. Yet that corporate embrace has proved double-edged. Musk directed roughly $190 million of his $445 million midterm war chest into Texas, largely backing Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott.

That deluge offered Democrat James Talarico an irresistible target down the stretch, allowing him to portray the race as Musk’s bid to buy a Senate seat. Abbott, a three-term incumbent, was also called out for being on Musk’s payroll. “Does Texas belong to the people, or is this the billionaires’ world and we just live here?” said Gina Hinojosa, who defeated Abbott to become the first Democrat elected governor since Ann Richards in 1990. “In less than one month, Elon Musk gave Greg Abbott $5 million to try and buy this election so that he can keep buying up Texans’ land, energy, and resources,” she added.

Hinojosa, described as “a long shot” by the Texas Tribune and mostly ignored by Abbott for much of the year, also tapped into rising backlash over data center sprawl. She campaigned against what she termed a “Big Tech takeover of Texas land, resources, and schools.”