When Greg Abbott took office as governor of Texas a decade ago, the state’s economy was the 12th largest in the world. Now, it’s No. 8, having grown an additional 60 percent and attracting 324 more corporate headquarters.
The days of Texas relying primarily on oil and cattle are over. It remains by far the largest energy state but has emerged a major player in areas such as finance, health care, semiconductor manufacturing, space exploration and artificial intelligence. Texas is now the headquarters location of more Fortune 500 companies than any other stateand is home to 1 out of every 10 publicly traded companies in the country.
None of this is an accident. Like a smart investor, Abbott knew the state needed to diversify. “I had the idea of creating the Texas Stock Exchange,” he says. “It injected competition that attracted both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to open up regional offices in Dallas.”
Abbott, 67, is one of the most prominent conservative leaders in the country, moving both his state and the nation to the right on issues including abortion and immigration. But he’s also the manager of the nation’s greatest boom state, despite the historical reputation that Texas governors have only weak institutional powers.
“The strength of Texas governors is only as robust as the way they use the tools they have,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “Gov. Abbott has been successful at maximizing those limited powers. After he got school vouchers passed, we can put a tombstone on the idea that governors are not the strongest executive in Texas.”
Vouchers had been a goal for Texas conservatives since at least the 1990s but never made it through the Legislature. That was still true in 2023, when an Abbott proposal got tanked in the state House. He didn’t take that defeat lying down. Armed with millions of campaign dollars, he targeted 15 legislators who opposed him on the issue in primaries last year, unseating 11 of them.
This May, Abbott signed thelargest private school choice package in the nation’s history. “Passing school choice was very important but it was not an end unto itself,” Abbott says. “It’s a means to a bigger end and that is to put Texas on a pathway to be No. 1 for education, to prepare Texas for the economy of the next 50 years.”
He’s best known nationally for his efforts on immigration, including the idea ofbusing and flying migrants to northern cities. Although his efforts were initially derided as a cruel stunt, Democratic mayors to the north quickly echoed his complaints about the costs associated with undocumented immigrants, helping to turn the tide of the national debate on the issue. “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,” he says. “The first place to send them was obvious: There were many communities that were self-declared sanctuary cities that provided food and lodging and care for these individuals.”
This year, Abbott pulled off an unlikely ask, convincing Congress to reimburse Texasfor more than $10 billion it spent on border security during the Biden administration. “A lot of what we did are permanent improvements inherited by the United States,” he says, “such as miles of border wall that otherwise would have cost the federal government billions of dollars.”
Dogged and disciplined, Abbott had a long career in state government prior to his first election as governor in 2014, serving as a justice of the state Supreme Court and then as Texas attorney general. In that latter role, he frequently said, his job involved getting up in the morning, suing Barack Obama and then going home. (The number of times Abbott and other Republican state AGs sued the administration was unprecedented but has since been surpassed many times over by partisan lawsuits filed against the Biden and Trump administrations.)
This summer, he became an even greater villain in Democratic circles with his successful push to redraw the state’s congressional map, which should help elect five more Republicans next year. In the course of that fight, Texas Democrats found their hand was so weak they could only delay matters by leaving the state.
When Abbott took office a decade ago, there was still a lot of talk that Texas would inevitably turn blue due to growth and demographic changes. You don’t hear that much now. “He is a very shrewd and calculating political actor,” says James Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. “He successfully presided over a shift in the politics of the Republican Party further to the right, in a way that is going to have lasting effects on the state.”
Texas has always been a low-tax state, with no income tax. Back in 2019, he helped add a more robust ban on income taxesto the state constitution. “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, to have a transactions tax,” Abbott says. “And so we’ve made unconstitutional pretty much every tax that exists.”
Growth still means the state has enormous funds at its disposal, with Abbott overseeing a 10-year surface transportation plan currently budgeted at $146 billion, with even more allocated for ports. Over the past couple of legislative sessions, he’s pushed through outsized property tax cuts, including a $50 billion package voters are expected to approve in November. Abbott intends to do yet more, ready to fight thousands of local governments over their own authority to raise property taxes.
Texas consistently ranks near the bottom among states for health-care access and affordability, with easily the highest uninsured rate among adults. The state also ranks at the bottom for its share of the population that goes hungry.
Texas may not be paradise for everyone but to the extent Americans vote with their feet, it’s the top choice of people moving in search of better lives. Texas has gained 4 million more residents since Abbott took office, easily the most growth of any state.
The state has led the nation in job creation three years running, with more than 2.5 million jobs created on Abbott’s watch. “Much of the growth that’s occurring is a function of net in-migration,” state demographer Lloyd Potter said earlier this year. “We’re seeing people moving into those areas largely because jobs are being created.”
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