Each New GOP Voter Would Cost Texas
$1.2 Million at $30B for Five NM Counties

Capitol Inside
April 9, 2026

The statehouse corridors in Austin are swirling with speculation that's apparently unsubstantiated and next to impossible to believe amid stories on the possibility of Texas offering to pay - and you better be sitting for this - a cool $30 billion for the right to acquire counties in New Mexico in a move that Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows is pushing.

After launching a special committee search for ways to facilitate the expansion of the nation's second largest state at the expense of its western neighbor, the powerful lawmaker from Lubbock and a trusty hometown sidekick who's been hawking the plan discovered that Democrats who run the show in New Mexico see it as hair-brained and swear that their state is not for sale.

But Burrows and GOP allies who are pitching the proposal are refusing to take no for an answer - and Lubbock State Rep. Carl Tepper unveiled the plan to try to make a deal that the Democrats who hold all of the cards in Santa Fe simply can't refuse. Tepper argued in a television interview last week that everyone has a price - and the number that's been floating around on the Texas Capitol grapevine suggests that he and the speaker think it would be staggering if the thirty billion figure was a real starting offer. The entire state budget in New Mexico for fiscal 2027 is $11 billion.

Regardless of the amount that the West Texans want to dangle as bait, the shift of the Texas and New Mexico boundaries would be practically impossible and economically unfeasible for an array of reasons including the costs that would be passed on to consumers when the private and public sectors were forced to replace all of the maps with the United States or North America in general. None of the boundaries for states in the U.S. have changed since the end of the Civil War.

Four of the five counties on the eastern border in New Mexico are poorer places with more people living in poverty and median incomes that are substantially lower those in counties nearby on the Texas side. Texas would become a poorer state if they gained admission here. The fifth - Lea County - is anchored by the modern American boomtown of Hobbs, which would have a thriving local economy destroyed with the overnight closing of the Zia Park Casino that would be illegal the moment the jurisdiction became a part of Texas. The Hobbs casino is owned by the international gaming titan Penn Gaming. It's one of the few casinos in New Mexico that isn't controlled by Native Americans on federal land.

Tepper has suggested behind closed doors that the Zia Park Casino could be grandfather to get around the Texas prohibition on an expansion of gambling beyond racetracks and the state-operated lottery. He will need some magic to slip that possibility by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick - the Texas Senate president who opposes gambling and says he doesn't plan to change as long as he's in office.

And then there's the question on the fate of three dozen marijuana dispansaires or more in Hobbs, which has been the third largest source of state and local tax revenues since top-of-the-line THC products were legalized in NM for adult recreational use in 2022. They, too, would be outlawed in one fell swoop if Lea County sececeded so it could hook up with Texas. Hundreds if not thousands of jobs would be lost in Lea County with a shift to Texas.

But Tepper insisted that he and the speaker were serious about the proposed annexation of NM counties that secede despite countless reasons why it appears to have no chance whatsoever. And they seem to be believe that the Democrats there can be convinced to give away parts of their state if the money is right. Whatever the potential price, Tepper struggled to come up with examples of who would benefit from the realignment of New Mexico counties with the Lone Star State.

Republican State Rep. Ken King of Canadian has been on board the New Mexico annexation train as well as a lawmaker who represents a House district that stretches from the Panhandle to the Permian Basin with five of its 19 counties on the New Mexico line. But King hasn't raised concerns about losing some of his constituents in order to make room for new Texas residents that House District 88 would have to absorb if the border with New Mexico is pushed farther to the west. That wouldn't be a problem if King, who chairs the powerful State Affairs Committee on the Burrows team, thinks he has more in common than the people in New Mexico than those in his current district.

But the speaker and his allies in the attempt to corral parts of New Mexico have tried to give the impression that they're chief concerns are about the happiness of the people who've complained about the way they're treated in a blue state and how they yearn to be in Texas instead. Burrows apparently feels that it's wrong for people to have to live in a state that's controlled by politicians who are liberal when the could be Texas residents instead. It's an epic show of empathy for longtime New Mexico residents who've shown no interest in actually liviing in Texas unless it came to them.

The two GOP lawmakers behind the secession in New Mexico filed a resolution earlier this year for local votes on bolts to Texas. The pair - Randall Pettigrew of Lovington and Jimmy Mason of Artesia - knew the measure would never get a hearing or a vote in a House committee there. But Pettigrew and Mason would be lawmakers no more if the counties where they're based left their current state. Across the line in northwest Texas, King and the representative who wins an open race in House District 86, would find their constituencies undergoing the most substantial changes if all five of the New Mexico counties on the Texas border reinvented themselves here.

So who wins if the Texas speaker pulls off the impossible? That's been the central question since Burrows created the Select Committee on Governmental Oversight and asked it to try to determine what it would take to pull off the roping of New Mexico counties into the Lone Star State. Tepper - a member of the special panel that Burrows picked a Republican from the Gulf Coast to chair - admitted that the GOP in Texas might get a bump with the addition of voters from areas that have been dark red.

But it would be a drop in the bucket at best. Based on the results of the presidential election in 2024, the GOP would see a net increase of almost 16,000 voters if Lea and Roosevelt counties became parts of Texas. Those were the two NM counties that had piqued the West Texans' initial interest. At the hypothetical and arbitrary price of $30 billion, Texas would be spending $1,882,766.41 for each new Republican voter when all the Democrats who'd be coming with them were subtracted from the equation if Lea and Roosevelt counties - the New Mexico jurisdictions that piqued the Burrows team's interest initially - were the only pieces in a package deal with Texas.

Texas would have a net increase of 24,000 new Republican voters if all five of the counties on the eastern border in New Mexico realigned with Texas. That would be costing Texas $1,209,579.87 for each new GOP voter on the Texas roles if the state shelled out $30 billion and got all five New Mexico counties on the Texas border in return. Trump had 24,802 more votes than Harris in 2024 when all of the counties on the Texas border - Lea, Roosevelt, Curry, Union and Quay - are calculated together.

But the taxpayers in Texas would getting the most bang for their buck at $169,422 for each new Republican voter if House leaders decided to go for broke and hatched a plan to lasso all of 19 New Mexico counties that Trump carried in his two most recent presidential campaigns in 2020 and 2024 for a maximum price of $30 billion. San Juan County in the state's northwest corner is the only NM county that Trump won in both of his last two White House races that isn't contiguous to any of the others where he beat Harris both times.

If President Donald Trump's record low approval ratings are a telling sign, the number of new GOP voters who would become Texans overnight might be considerably smaller. Then the costs to bring 15,000 to 25,000 more new GOP voters into Texas than Democrats would have been much higher if Trump fails to rebound and some of the president's former voters never return to the GOP.

But anyway you cut it, the number of new GOP voters that Texas would have under any of the various scenarios in the luring of New Mexico counties here would be a drop in the bucket for the Grand Old Party here. Thirty billion? Get outta here!

So the only real winners would be the folks who are chronically discontent and want to pay fewer taxes with less state regulation and be around people who are more like them without having to do the work to make it happen. Texas would become a poorer place overall if all the counties on the border with New Mexico made the leap to the Lone Star State. These are the kind of things the new Texas House committee if the New Mexico annexation proposal if it's really more than another publicity stunt.