NAVASOTA — Joie Miller moved to rural Grimes County to raise her daughter hunting, fishing and spending time with her grandparents on their 100-acre ranch. Then Elon Musk announced he was constructing the world’s largest building a little more than a mile from her in-laws’ property.
The Terafab semiconductor factory, which Musk has projected will be 50 times larger than the Pentagon, will produce computer chips for artificial intelligence. As construction kicked off, trucks rumbled past their property day and night. Big chunks of ash rained down.
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Miller, 31, started investigating, joining the ranks of outraged rural Texans who have seen wide open spaces suddenly sold off to support the state’s rapacious growth. The more she dug, the more Miller, a born-and-raised Republican, came to blame the party that’s run the state her whole life.
“You just look around and think, are things better or worse, and if they’re worse, who has been in charge?” she said.
Rural Republicans have long been the floodwall that’s held back hopes of a blue wave big enough to flip Texas. While they make up less than one-fifth of the electorate, rural voters turn out and vote red at such high rates they’ve reliably undercut Democratic gains in cities and suburbs. In what’s shaping up to be a razor-tight midterm election, Republicans are counting on these votes more than ever to hold onto Texas’ powerful statewide offices.
But some rural voters are revolting, angry over the sudden proliferation of data centers, massive power lines and other physical manifestations of the state’s relentless development.
Miller said she’s planning to vote Democratic for the first time in her life.
“The Republican Party doesn’t seem to care about us right now,” Miller said. “They do this every single time, where they say they’re going to fix a problem, despite having had decades to fix it, and I think a lot of us are sick of it.”
As early voting kicks off, the rural Republican firewall is showing its first real cracks since the Obama era, the last time a statewide Democrat broke 25% of the rural vote. James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominees for U.S. Senate and governor, are polling north of 30% in rural Texas, with Talarico hitting 42% in a late-September Fox News survey.
But it will take a lot of Joie Millers to change Democrats’ fate.
When he nearly bested Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke won a narrow majority of non-rural counties but was undone by Cruz’s 75% share in rural Texas. O’Rourke would have had to swing the rural margin 15 points in his favor to have changed the outcome, a Texas Tribune analysis found.
This cycle, Democrats are proposing a marriage of convenience to frustrated moderates, open-minded independents and disenchanted MAGA populists, asking them to put aside culture war differences in the face of shared causes, like data centers.
“If Democrats break through in rural Texas, it will be because Republican leadership was caught flat-footed by a new issue,” said Ali Zaidi, a Democratic political consultant who oversaw rural outreach for Mike Collier’s 2018 and 2022 lieutenant governor races. “Because on the fundamentals — low taxation, business climate, conservative values — they’ve got those locked down and there’s nothing a Democrat can do to explain that away.”
“It’s hard enough to get people to trust me”
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, half a dozen people gathered in a conference room in Corsicana, an hour southeast of Dallas, in dusty boots and business suits. They came armed with binders and printed dossiers, meticulously laying out their investigations into the data centers that are popping up across their communities. They’d documented persistent noise pollution, diminished air quality, spiking electricity bills and ignored pleas for help from the state.
These diehard Republicans were meeting with Hinojosa, they said, because they didn’t know where else to turn. Over the course of an hour, she didn’t ask for their vote. Instead, she gave them what every voice in the wilderness really wants — undivided attention.
“Talk to me like a dummy,” she said, as she put on her glasses to review their findings. “I can tell you’re in deep, and I’m sorry you had to get so educated on this.”
When Hinojosa, an Austin state representative, signed on to face three-term incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, it seemed like a suicide mission. A fundraising juggernaut, Abbott began the year with over $100 million in his campaign account and a record of smashing his Democratic opponents by double digits.
But few expected the data center curveball, least of all Abbott, who vowed last year that Texas would become the “epicenter of AI development.” In the face of rural rage, Abbott backtracked, temporarily pausing new projects and recommending the Legislature enshrine what he says are the toughest guardrails in the country on water and power usage. That has put him at odds with President Donald Trump, who said communities that reject data centers will end up “backwards and poor.”
At Hinojosa’s roundtable discussion in Corsicana, the attendees said they still blamed Abbott for what they described as violent incursions on their tranquil way of life.
“But didn’t he fix it?” Hinojosa asked with a cheeky smile.
“Greg Abbott has enticed them,” Michael Ellis said with vitriol, referring to data center developers.“He didn’t fix anything.”
Ellis, 70, and his wife live less than a mile from a new data center going up in Navarro County. They’re worried their quiet patch of countryside will soon have lights shining on it around the clock, with noise, air pollution and the possibility of accidents that could endanger the neighbors.
Abbott’s initial support of data centers is “disqualifying” to Ellis. He worries the recent executive orders are election-year pandering, and Abbott will roll the red carpet back out if he’s reelected. Abbott has said he will work to enshrine his executive actions into law when the Legislature reconvenes.
Ellis isn’t sold on Hinojosa, either, and said he needs to do more research before he decides who is getting his vote.
“We like her personally, and the fact that she even asked us questions, that’s a big plus,” he said. Ellis has historically voted for Republicans, but the urgency he feels about data centers has pushed everything else down his priority list. “Call yourself whatever you’re going to call yourself, Republican, Democrat, I don’t care. You need to oversee this industry,” he said.
Hinojosa is running neck-and-neck with Abbott, according to an assortment of public polls since late September, which have shown her getting between 28% and 38% of the rural vote.
Abbott has also been barnstorming rural Texas, shoring up his longtime small-town support and highlighting his recent efforts to rein in data centers. Eduardo Leal, a spokesperson for the campaign, said the governor “will always put rural Texans first,” and criticized Hinojosa for “pretending to be something she’s not.”
In round-the-clock television ads, Abbott has hammered Hinojosa’s left-leaning record in the Legislature, especially her support for LGBTQ+ people, saying she wants to “trans your kids.”
“These policies are out of step with Texans, especially rural Texans,” Leal said.
Rural Texas is older, whiter and more religious than the state as a whole, and rural areas are “inherently socially conservative,” said Kal Munis, a political science professor who studies rural voters at Montana State University.
“If you have a party system that is in some ways defined by a socially conservative party and a non-socially conservative party, then you’re going to have an urban-rural divide,” he said.
On abortion, guns, prayer in schools and myriad other social issues, rural voters align with the Republican Party. Joni Clonts, the chair of the Houston County Republican Party in East Texas, said she thinks those shared values will win out in the voting booth.
“Democrats, their platform is pretty out there, and I think most of us don’t want somebody that has those values and plans to make any decisions for our state,” she said.
Clonts said she’d barely heard anything about Hinojosa, who was in town that week, but was alarmed by comments Talarico made, especially a 2021 clip of him saying there are six genders. He has since said he “missed the mark” with that comment and believes there are two sexes. But the fact that he said it at all is enough for Clonts.
“I still have not figured out what the six genders are, but anyone with that kind of thinking, why are they trying to govern our state?” she said.
The Democratic Party has tried to gloss over these divides in previous elections, Zaidi, the political consultant, said.
“Instead of meeting voters where they are, the Democratic approach has been to try to get them to be where we are,” he said. “We had two decades of denial that the Democratic brand was culturally out of step with rural voters and no amount of economic explanation was going to get us out of that.”
Even now, many of the Republicans planning to cross party lines are doing so for individual races, not as a wholesale embrace of the blue team. Hinojosa has asked voters to look at her record on specific issues, rather than the (D) next to her name.
“I’m not asking voters to trust Democrats,” she said at The Texas Tribune Festival. “It’s hard enough to get people to trust me.”
Hinojosa has also tried to home in on areas where rural Republicans tend to disagree with the party at large, like public education. In the Legislature, Hinojosa joined forces with rural Republicans who opposed school vouchers, fearing it would worsen perennial budget shortfalls. Many of those lawmakers were ousted with Abbott’s help and replaced with pro-voucher votes, an affront that’s not been forgotten in these communities, said Byron Cook, a former Republican state legislator from Corsicana.
“This program is to the detriment of rural areas that depend on public education,” Cook said. “That’s why rural legislators resisted it, until the political pressure became so great that many of them were forced to make a decision that went against the strong feelings of their districts.”
Cook, a moderate Republican who often clashed with the conservative wings of the party, said he’s backing Hinojosa and has heard from a surprising array of Republicans following suit. The data center backlash is the face of a much wider set of frustrations, old and new, that rural Texas has been dealing with, he said, including vouchers, the state’s THC ban, Flock cameras, threats of a border barrier in Big Bend National Park and the endless growth reshaping their way of life.
Nine counties that were considered rural in 2018 have surpassed the 50,000 resident benchmark, five of them growing by more than 10% as subdivisions and shopping centers move in. Navarro County, southeast of Dallas where Cook and Ellis live, is one of them.
“This is the traditional backbone of the party, hard-working, family people,” Cook said. “Elected officials need to show that they truly care about rural residents and don’t take them for granted, and right now, I don’t think rural Texas has been respected the way it should be.”
A referendum on Big Tech
Caitlin Rourk’s campaign website doesn’t mention her party affiliation, let alone her stances on abortion or gender. She touts that she’s an Army officer, and in interviews, mentions her experience working as deputy finance director of the Texas National Guard during Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s state-run immigration enforcement program.
Rourk is running for the 10th Congressional District, which stretches across 13 counties from downtown Austin to just this side of the Louisiana border. The district was redrawn last summer during mid-decade redistricting and is designed to elect a Republican, having voted for Trump by more than 20 points under its new configuration.
She’s one of many Democrats running long-shot bids in districts drawn for Republicans. For the first time in modern history, the Democratic Party left no state or federal race in Texas uncontested, hoping to capitalize if a blue wave sweeps through in November — and create an army of down-ballot advocates to spread the good word about the Democratic Party.
“James [Talarico] is going to seem very far away from a lot of voters, but your local state House candidate, even if they can’t win, them being there doing personal advocacy can soften up the ground,” Zaidi said. “And that helps up the ticket, but also just going into the future, re-introducing the Democratic Party.”
Rourk has knocked on more than 20,000 doors, mostly targeting people who have voted for Republicans.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions and some well-earned conceptions about the Democratic Party in these areas,” Rourk said. “But with everything that’s going on, I’ve noticed a lot more willingness to at least have a conversation about this race.”
Rourk’s district covers Grimes County, where the Terafab development is generating a lot of buzz — and a lot of local angst, an echo of concerns she’s heard across the district with data centers and Big Tech development.
Rourk is trying to make her race a referendum on the billionaires who are profiting off of this growth. Her opponent, Chris Gober, is Elon Musk’s lawyer. A nationally prominent conservative attorney, Gober ran Musk’s America PAC during the 2024 presidential election, and has accepted campaign donations from pro-AI groups. Gober did not respond to a request for comment.
While many in the area are excited about the jobs that Terafab might bring, Rourk said she’s heard a lot of concerns about how this massive development will change Grimes County — and who is benefiting from the deal. Her internal polling shows that when voters are educated about Gober’s connections to Musk, they tend to switch their support to her. But with limited funding to reach the five media markets this district covers, she’s facing an uphill battle to get the word out.
Danette Miller lives a little more than a mile from the Terafab development, but said she likely would have voted for Gober as the Republican nominee if her daughter-in-law, Joie, hadn’t told her about his connections to the project next door. Now, she’s planning to cross party lines, at least for Rourk.
“He’s Elon’s person, so I can’t vote him in,” she said. “We’re never going to get the true story. We’re never going to get a fair shake.”
Miller is a lifelong Republican, but for her, this election is about something far more existential than she’s used to considering in the voting booth. She worked her whole life to retire on this property. As she sees it, the candidates who win in November, and the way they decide to regulate development, could mean the difference between getting to stay on the land or selling at a loss to avoid the worst of the construction and traffic.
“I just worry that midterms are going to pass and they’ll all start building up again,” she said. “And then even if we do move, what’s to stop them from putting a data center next to us there?