What’s next for Texas? 4 big questions threaten the divided state in 2025

On December 31, 2024By Littum

Texas faces a tumultuous 2025, with simmering feuds within the state’s governing coalition poised to boil over during its upcoming legislative session.

The power struggle within the Texas GOP comes alongside a wave of new challenges for the state, from a burgeoning water crisis to the state of its electric grid — all poised to play out amid President-elect Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 , which could represent a double-edged sword for his allies in Austin.

From the battle for control of the state GOP to whether marijuana will remain legal in Texas, here are four big questions to watch in the new year.

Who will win the state GOP power struggle?

The highly charged race between incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and challenger Colin Allred (D) drew the attention of national observers this election cycle, but an even more dramatic battle has been taking place within Texas’ governing Republican coalition.

Over the past year, that battle then government officials such as Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton trials to clean the Texas House of other Republicans who had defied them.

Their goal: control of the lower house of the legislature, a body that, while still dominated by conservatives, has stood as a bastion of relative bipartisan collegiality and independence as the state party has become increasingly dominated by so-called MAGA- Republicans allied with Trump and his. supporters.

The officials’ efforts were overwhelmingly successful in replacing the incumbent House candidates who had fought Abbott’s push for school vouchers or voted to accuse Paxton. And in December, following candidates chosen by state party leaders at large claimed the victory in the November election, Abbott and his allies scored their biggest victory yet when Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) — who barely survived a bruising primary runoff for his East Texas seat — announced he would not seek re-election to the uppermost space of the chamber.

But Phelan’s withdrawal has not meant the end of the civil war. The involvement of Abbott, Patrick and Paxton in the business of the House – and the fact that they spent big money to oust members who had been largely loyal to them – left a lot of bitter feelings in their wake.

Now the Texas GOP is divided between two factions, each of which has declared victory in the Speaker’s race and a different path forward for the party. State Rep. David Cook (R) — Phelan’s primary challenger, who is backed by the hard-right “reform” wing of the GOP — wants to end the practice of giving committee chairmanships to Democrats and sending sweeping coupons.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Dustin Burrows (R), a former Phelan lieutenant, wants a more targeted approach to vouchers and to preserve the House’s current bipartisan nature. Burrows claims that, with Democratic support, he has enough votes to be chairman — while the state GOP has effectively threatened any members who support him stripped of party identification and support.

Regardless of who wins, the race is likely to leave the Legislature steeped in bad blood — just as Texas must confront a wave of serious new problems.

What happens when the White House stops fighting Texas on immigration?

Texas’ GOP leadership spent the Biden administration in a state of open opposition to the federal government and Democratic-run localities on immigration, with state leaders like Abbott railing against asylum policy in the White Housechallenges the administration for control of the state border with Mexico and buses migrants to cities in the northeast.

These efforts have gained national attention for the Texas governor and helped drive national concerns about immigration. But their influence on policy appears to have been limited, as the Biden administration has pursued its own approach to immigration and opposed many of Abbott’s moves.

The rise of Abbott-ally Trump to the White House signals a significant shift in federal immigration policy — and potentially what Texas will be able to do on the issue. Texas officials have offered access to more than 13 million hectares of state land for internment camps for the incoming Trump administration, which ran on a platform of mass deportations. The state is too fighting in court to carry out its own deportations – which, if successful, would effectively make it the first state to establish its own immigration policy.

The prospect of such deportations has spurred fear not only among Texas, living in the country illegallybut also among business owners who trust them — especially in areas such as constructionbut also within agriculture and oil and gas. Workers who lack legal status set an estimate net of more than 11 billion dollars into the state economy, according to a 2016 analysis.

Those concerns have led to some state Republicans to urge cautionaccording to the Texas Tribune. In November, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R) that mass deportations were bad policy combined with bad policy. “If the message is, ‘We’re here to deport your abuelita,’ that’s not going to work well,” Gonzales said on ABC News. “It has to be a way to hold these hardened criminals accountable.”

But Gonzales is something of a maverick in the state Republican Party, which has criticized him for voting with Democrats. In this perspective, he is opposed by other US House members such as Rep. Chip Roy (R), who told Fox Business he wanted to see the deportation net cast wide, starting with those who entered since 2020.

“They need to be removed. They need to be deported. That’s the starting point,” Roy said. “Congress is going to have to support (Trump), and frankly, I don’t want to hear excuses from my Republican colleagues.”

How will Texas tackle the energy and water crises fueled by its booming growth?

Texas cities and suburbs are growing fast: The state now boasts six of the 10 fastest growing counties in the United States, and it gained more inhabitants than any other state in 2023.

That growth, however, puts the state’s population centers on a collision course with looming shortages of water and potentially electricity. Texas’ agriculture commissioner has warned that large parts of the state is “out of the water”, and grid managers have warned that a 2021-style freeze would lead to power outages like those that left millions of homes and businesses without power that year and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Texans.

The rapid increase in demand for water and electricity coupled with tight supplies is perhaps the biggest long-term problem facing Texas’ infrastructure and governance, and it will likely be of paramount importance when the state’s 2025 legislative session begins next month.

When it comes to water, all eyes are on upcoming legislation from Lubbock-area state Sen. Charles Perry (R), who has warned that the state is short about 10 to 11 million acre-feet of water—about double the amount currently used by its cities—and proposed the creation of a state “water grid” based on the electric grid.

Meanwhile, those who want to strengthen the power grid are divided on several different approaches. Power utilities and cleantech trade groups are pushing for several mains batteries to help Texas store its abundant renewable energy; an Abbott-aligned faction is calling for the construction of more gas plants, indicating regulators don’t think will help stabilize the network; and some federal officials and lawmakers are seeking to connect Texas’s isolated network to the rest of the country.

The debate over the future of the electric grid is likely to be intensified by the recent memory of prolonged blackouts in the Houston area this summer. left millions of households without power in sweltering temperatures as well as widespread and bipartisan anger at a system of government power that critics say allows big utilities to make billions of desperate customers in times of crisis.

Who will win the state culture wars over schools, abortion, LGBTQ rights and cannabis?

When the 2025 Texas legislative session begins in mid-January, lawmakers will face a number of hundreds of bills on bitterly contested issues.

The flagship battle will be around Abbott and Patrick’s perennial quest to pass a school voucher program that — after this year’s push against voucher opponents within the state GOP — Abbott says he now has the votes to do.

But some opponents remain in the Legislature and are likely to fight the issue. They argue that Abbott’s plan – which allows families to use the money the state would spend on their education to send their children to private school – would effectively repay many of Texas’ public schools.

One such opponent, state Rep. Ken King (R), has largely conceded defeat, at least in the big picture of stopping voucher reform altogether. At a Texas Tribune panel in September, King said urged other voucher skeptics to “make the best deal you can, protect our public schools the best way we know how, and put some responsibility on it.”

Fights over Texas’ strict abortion laws, which state OB-GYNs argue, are also likely blocking them from giving life- or health-sustaining medical care, and as reporting by ProPublica suggests has led to at least three deaths.

Austin’s Democratic state representative Donna Howard has filed legislation that would give doctors more protections for perform abortions they deem medically necessary; across the aisle, state Rep. Steve Toth (R) is resuming legislation that would allow Paxton to prosecute abortion-related crimes.

After a national Senate election in which Cruz’s closing pitch focused on the illusory threat of naked men in the high school girls’ locker roomTexas Republicans have also filed dozens of anti-trans billsthe Dallas Observer reported.

These include a new wave of bills that would require people to use bathrooms corresponding to their biological sex; proposal to require school officials to tell parents if their children dress in a manner “inconsistent with the student’s biological sex”; and a bill that would require blood tests to ensure high school athletes are the same biological sex as their teammates.

But one of the session’s biggest upcoming battles — and one where the partisan lines are far murkier — will likely be over Patrick’s push to ban sale of intoxicating cannabiswhich have arguably been legal in certain cases at the federal level since Republicans legalized the hemp industry in the 2018 omnibus farm bill. A Texas Monthly investigation found that marijuana was indistinguishable from what is available in legal states was sold openly all over Texasoften at levels that violate state law. (California, which has a recreational cannabis program, is a state that in 2024 moved to ban the sale of such productssold as “hemp.”)

Cannabis lobbyists familiar with the issue have told The Hill that Patrick’s push to ban unregulated cannabis products is the price of expanding the state’s medical marijuana program to cover millions of Texans with chronic pain — as well as eliminating the main competitor to the state’s heavily regulated medical program .

But striking that trade will require the legislature to take on an industry worth at least $8 billion alone in Texas, and one with many friends in the Republican coalition. Competing long-term legislation, on the other hand, would create a regulated recreational cannabis industry similar to that operating in states like California or Colorado.

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