How Greg Abbott Emerged as a Powerhouse Governor

Most governors and mayors who win election to a third term end up being lame ducks, running out of ideas or clout. For Greg Abbott, the opposite has happened. Since winning a third term as governor of Texas in 2022, the Republican has notched the biggest victories of his career and emerged as one of the nation’s most effective conservative politicians.

After decades of stalled attempts, Abbott pushed through a private school choice bill in May, which was the largest new voucher program in the nation’s history. In November, Texas voters will presumably approve his plan to cut property taxes by more than $50 billion. Abbott has helped reshape the national debate about immigration while also presiding over a state that’s enjoying enormous economic and population growth. He keeps upping the ante on a 10-year transportation plan that’s now on track to provide $146 billion for roads and other infrastructure.

“Abbott leaves the governor's office much more powerful and influential than he found it,” says James Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. “He successfully presided over a shift of the politics of the Republican Party, taking it further to the right in a way that his is going to have lasting effects on the state.”

Abbott has drawn criticism both for his anti-immigrant stances and his recent backing of a plan to redraw the state's congressional map to favor his party more strongly. Abbott waves all that aside. "You just have to ignore that, tune that out altogether," he says. "Focus on what your vision is. Focus on the steps that need to be taken to achieve that agenda and then execute."

He appears to be positioning himself for a run for a fourth term next year. After this year’s legislative session ended, he raised $20 million in eight days, bringing his campaign war chest up to $87 million.

Governing spoke by phone with Abbott about what he’s achieved so far, how he’s grown on the job and what his plans are for the future. Here are edited excerpts from that interview:

Governing: You got the school choice bill through this year and have enacted enormous property tax cuts, as well as convincing Congress to refund Texas billions for immigration enforcement. Can you talk about taking such big swings more than a decade after you first took office?

Abbott: You know, I learned along the way during my first two terms, gaining experience as well as political clout, and I was able to use that political clout to be able to achieve certain legislative goals, as well as to use my experience to be able to better manage the state, knowing far more today about how all the different agencies operate that I did when I was first elected governor.

You’re known for your policy positions but you’ve also presided over a period of enormous growth for Texas.

Since I've been governor, the Texas economy has grown larger than the economies of the countries of Australia, Brazil, Russia, Italy and Canada. We have a diversified portfolio of businesses in the state of Texas. We were known decades ago as being just an oil and gas state, and we are still the leading oil and gas state. But on the energy side alone, we're not only No. 1 for oil and gas, we're No. 1 for wind and solar. Texas ranks No. 1 for the most power generation, so much so that we generate far more power than the No. 2 and 3 states combined.

If you look at the financial sector, the largest financial businesses in the country are moving either their headquarters or primary offices to the state of Texas. I had the idea of creating the Texas Stock Exchange, which is now in full bloom as we speak. It injected competition that attracted both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq exchange to open up regional offices in Dallas, where they are now actually trading stocks in Texas. So the Dallas area has really become ground zero for the future of financial transactions. We’ve got the finance sector, the energy sector, we have artificial intelligence and, I'm sure you know what's going on with Stargate. SpaceX is just one of literally dozens of space businesses in Texas that are launching or involved in the launch process, going to the moon and going beyond.

As you know, when you talked about flying migrants to blue cities, you were criticized because it was supposedly a cruel stunt, and yet it almost immediately changed the conversation nationwide. You made your point that immigration was not just a Texas issue. Where did that idea come from?

I was at a meeting at a small town on the border with local sheriffs, local police chiefs, local county administrators. And in these tiny little communities, they were having hundreds, even thousands, of people who were processed by the federal government and then dropped off in those communities. Those communities had no way of dealing with it, and that's when the idea arose that we needed to take these people who had already been processed and allowed to remain in the United States, and move them away from these small, little towns on the border.

The first place to send them was obvious. There were many communities across the United States that were self-declared sanctuary cities that provided both food and lodging and care for these individuals. And so it was just a natural progression, helping the local communities and sending them to places that had an open invitation for them to arrive.

When I saw your release asking for repayment for $11 billion from the federal government for border security, I thought it was a longshot. But it happened. This is one of the top issues for the president, but it does seem like the needle has moved on this issue.

It was very important, what we did in using innovative strategies to staunch the flow of illegal immigration, and it's something that President Donald Trump admired, but to be able to get reimbursed from Congress just takes a lot of effort. I spent a lot of time up on Capitol Hill, working with the speaker, working with Senate leadership, working with the Trump administration, and it's something that just required ongoing discussions of involvement and engagement.

A lot of what we did are permanent improvements inherited by the United States, such as Texas building miles of border wall that would have otherwise cost the federal government billions of dollars. And so basically, the federal government inherited billions of dollars of improvements that Texas put in place that made the border more secure, that they didn't have to pay for up front.

What comes next?

For one, we must continue our efforts on property tax reform. We've addressed taxes in such an enormous way, making it unconstitutional to have an income tax, to have a wealth tax, to have a death tax, to have a capital gains tax. We've made unconstitutional pretty much every tax that exists.

Property taxes are something, however, that continue to burden Texans. And even though we used $50 billion this past session for property tax relief, there's still more that has to be done, but part of it has to be done on the reform side.

And we need to achieve my education goals. Passing school choice is very important, but was not an end unto itself. It's a means to a bigger end, and that is to put Texas on a pathway to be ranked No. 1 for education. To do that requires more than just school choice. It requires attracting and keeping the best teachers. It requires curriculum reform and enhancement in core subjects such as reading and math. It requires empowering parents to be involved in their child's education. It also requires broadening career and training education, to ensure that we're doing more than preparing students to go to a four-year college — which some kids do not want to do — but still making sure that we're going to have the workforce available for all the demands that our growing number of employers will have.