Grid politics haven’t affected Texas elections, but voters’ doubts about reliability may be more resilient than the grid itself

In the three and half years since Winter Storm Uri triggered a massive power outage in Texas that resulted in utility failures across the state and the deaths of 246 Texans (according to the official count), voters have repeatedly expressed little confidence in the reliability of the state’s electric grid, or in elected officials’ efforts to make it more reliable. Yet despite the widespread impact of the 2021 grid failure, in what might be a reflection of the much-discussed nationalization of state politics, neither polling nor electoral politics have revealed grid reliability to be a dominant preoccupation of a Texas electorate more focused on other issues.

Voters were apparently not inclined to hold elected officials accountable for the 2021 grid failure in the last statewide election in 2022. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke was quick to criticize Abbott in the run-up to the election over repeated requests that Texans conserve energy during that summer’s particularly brutal months, “The governor of the 9th largest economy on earth — the energy capital of the world — can’t guarantee the power will stay on tomorrow,” while the Democrats’ Lieutenant Governor candidate, Mike Collier, kept it short and simple with his campaign slogan: “fix the damn grid.”

But voters returned Abbott and most other incumbents up and down the ballot to office. Nor did the grid emerge as a significant issue in the hotly contested 2024 Republican party primaries, either. Border security, anti-Washington hostility, rising prices, and conservative purity dominated those campaigns (with voucher politics running below the surface).

Yet if voters’ doubts about the reliability of the grid have been given short-shrift by candidates more eager to activate immediate partisan priorities like border security, abortion, and the economy, the persistence of voters’ lack of confidence in the grid remains near enough to the surface to be reactivated by weather events or even routine reminders about managing energy use.

As recently as the June 2024 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll, when what has turned out to be a comparatively mild Texas summer was just getting underway, half of voters (51%) said it was either “very likely” (17%) or “somewhat likely” (34%) that there would be “a widespread failure of the grid this summer.” On the more confident side, 29% said such a failure would be “not too likely” and only 9% “not at all likely.”

The June poll was completed a couple of weeks before Hurricane Beryl hit Houston, leaving nearly one million customers without power and triggering a weeks-long recovery period that put the legislature’s efforts to improve grid resilience and disaster recovery back in the news, and on the agenda of the relevant legislative committees doing interim work. The scale of the outages in the Houston area, the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country by population, and the long lag in restoring power, likely triggered voters’ evident doubts about just how effective the state’s leadership has been in responding to the weaknesses in Texas’ utility infrastructure.

Public opinion polling since the earliest days of the state leadership’s rush to mount some kind of political and policy response reveals the persistence of these doubts. The legislature spent a lot of time on the issue in both the 2021 and 2023 sessions, though much of this effort was drowned out by the high-profile political fighting over other priorities, including property taxes, border security, and, of course, vouchers/educational savings accounts. Whatever the mix of factors — a lack of awareness of the specifics of what the legislature has tried to do, the extreme complexity of the issues involved, or a general lack of trust in political institutions — polling throughout the two sessions has shown a consistent a lack of confidence in what the state’s political leadership is doing to increase the reliability and resilience of the grid.

• After the first round of urgent attention to the grid in the 2021 legislative session, only 22% approved of how state leaders and the legislature handled the reliability of the electricity grid, while 52% disapproved – 36% strongly.
• Going into the 2022 mid-term election, in April polling, only 36% of Texas voters approved of the job Governor Abbott had done on the electric grid in Texas, with 45% disapproving.
• Asked in August of that election year who they trusted to do a better job handling the state’s electric grid, voters were split, with 39% trusting Abbott and 38% preferring O’Rourke. (Abbott would go on to win re-election by a comfortable 11 point margin, 55% to 44%.)
• Following that election, at the start of the 2023 Legislative Session, February polling found that 75% of Texans had heard either “a lot” (32%) or at least “some” (43%) about the reliability of the energy grid in Texas — on par with the share who said they had heard a lot (36%) or some (36%) about changes to the state’s abortion laws.
• With the session underway in April polling, 80% of voters said it was either “extremely important” or “very important” for the legislature to improve the reliability of the grid — including 86% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans (belying the notion that concerns over the grid was/is merely Democratic carping and/or messaging).
• By the end of the regular session, in June 2023 polling, only 8% of voters said that they strongly approved of how the legislature had handled the reliability of the grid, with a paltry 20% approving somewhat.
• In that same June poll, only 18% of Texas voters said that they were “extremely” (6%) or “somewhat confident” (12%) that the legislature had increased the reliability of the state’s electric grid — including 14% of Democrats and only 20% of Republicans in a state in which their leaders dominated the entire process.

 Seen in the light of voters’ persistent lack of confidence that the policy actions taken by state leaders and the legislature have increased reliability, voters’ expectations of future problems suggest that the issue still has the potential to be politically activating, even if it wasn’t in 2022 or (so far) in 2024. The 2022 election took place in a political environment already disadvantageous to Democrats in Texas, with a Democratic president in the White House, rising prices, and surging migration on the U.S.-Mexico border. Smaller scale grid issues during a winter cold snap ultimately didn’t gain the sustained attention voters paid to other issues reinforced by national politics, though, again, polling suggests that the February outages likely kept underlying skepticism about the grid percolating among the electorate.

Even if this public opinion dynamic has not had an apparent impact on elections, the underlying doubts about the grid and the recurring problems that activate these doubts create a vicious cycle for lawmakers.

Texas’ struggle to maintain infrastructure amidst economic and population growth, combined with the vicissitudes of climate change, result in expected but difficult-to-anticipate events that provide recurring reminders of the seeming fragility of the grid. The communications  that ERCOT routinely issues to Texans to conserve power during peak usage times, while probably good (even necessary) conservation policy, nonetheless also have the unintended consequence of activating underlying doubts about the grid (in part a reflection of ERCOT’s damaged brand). This all sustains perceptions that lawmakers have failed to adequately address problems with the grid.

At the same time, and maybe most consequently for politicians always sensitive to voters’ economic sentiments, June 2023 polling found voters saying that they expected the legislature’s efforts to result in higher electricity prices for consumers, while polling conducted during that session found the vast majority of voters saying that state government or the utilities should be responsible for the cost of improving the reliability of the grid — with only 6% saying this cost should fall to ratepayers or consumers. And by all indications, prices have gone up.

None of this guarantees that the grid can form the foundation for a Democratic critique of Republican stewardship in the 2026 elections that might enable a future Democratic statewide candidate to succeed where O’Rourke failed — at least on those terms alone. But it does suggest that the issue will continue to lurk as a latent weakness for Republican candidates.

The persistence of semi-public infighting among Republicans over the issue suggests that current incumbents are all-too-aware of their lurking vulnerability. But the combination of extremely powerful and entrenched interest group politics along with the persistent supplanting of grid concerns by other issues viewed as more ideal for partisan mobilization makes it difficult for Democratic general election candidates (or Republican primary challengers) to gain political leverage by relying on grid politics.

That said, the same factors that keep the issue bubbling just below the surface might also propel the issue more forcefully into electoral politics under circumstances that aren’t difficult to imagine given the recent record. It would take a disastrous combination of severity and timing to elbow out other issues fueled more by the far noisier national environment and Republican incumbents’ ability to deflect the subject come election time. But the persistence of voters' low expectations and lack of confidence in the actions taken so far suggests that incumbent Republicans in Texas can’t count on perpetually deflecting the issue in future elections. You know what they say about the Texas weather.