Ex-Trump Official Finds Gov Only Up 3 in Poll
Despite Bipartisan Data Center Plan Support
Texas General Election Polls
General Election Rankings
Capitol Inside
August 11, 2026
A major Republican pollster and strategist who's sounding the alarms on a blue wave in the making found Governor Greg Abbott leading Democrat Gina Hinojosa by 3 points in a bid for a fourth term despite significant support that his new plan to regulate data centers in Texas has reaped since its unveiling.
Mitchell Brown - a partner and pollster at the consulting firm Cygnal - said a poll of 880 likely Texas voters during the final four days of July found Abbott with support from 49 percent compared to 46 percent that the Democratic challenger received. The Cygnal survey was the fourth poll that found the Texas governor's race inside the margin of error out of six that were taken here in the month of July.
Abbott led Hinojosa by an average of 3.3 points in the six polls last month when the Republican who's leading the GOP ticket in Texas this fall - U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton - trailed Democrat James Talarico by 3.2 points on average in a half-dozen polls that tested the marquee Texas race in 2026.
The Texas governor had been up on Hinojosa by an average of 7 points in the polling on their race from the time Paxton eliminated longtime Senate incumbent John Cornyn in a primary runoff election late in May to the end of June. But Abbott's advantage started shrinking in line with Paxton's after the state attorney general left the country in the first week of July for a vacation in Europe with a girlfriend.
Paxton and Talarico had been running even during the month of June after the Republican surged for several weeks before he traveled abroad for the Fourth of July weekend. But Talarico seized the lead in the Texas Senate contest after Paxton returned from the holiday excursion - and he's been up in all of six surveys on the Senate race that were taken here in the second half of July.
Abbott found his lead on Hinojosa cut in half during the same time frame when Talarico's numbers were up more than 3 percentage points on average while the governor's average advantage shrunk by 4. Based on Brown's analysis of the Cygnal poll in an August 4 memo that surfaced on social media on Monday night, Abbott's new data center regulations proposal may be saving him from a potential disaster in November.
"Abbott has found the sweet spot to make data centers deliver for Texas," Brown said. "His data center plan is a major political asset, earning 82% support to 9% opposition."
The Cygnal pollster found that 94 percent of the Republicans in the survey backed Abbott's guardrails approach to data centers while 68 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of independent voters who were tested gave the governor's plan a thumbs up. "The reason is simple: voters want commitments and benefits from data centers, not prohibition," Brown wrote in the analysis.
But Abbott only led Hinojosa by 4 points overall on the explosive issue of data centers with 45 percent support in that critical new category. "The ground is unclaimed," Brown said. The Cygnal poll didn't take into account the Democrats' push to inform voters that the Texas governor had led the charge for data centers while receiving support from the industry until the recent about-face and pause that he ordered on new construction for the time being.
Brown has been one of the nation's higher profile pollsters and strategists as a former official in President Donald Trump's administration during his first term in an array of roles including a post to which he was appointed as the deputy White House liaison for the Department of Labor. Brown worked for Trump's campaign in the Milwaukee area in 2020 and led a Republican National Committee team in Georgia during the runoff elections there that year. Brown did double duty that year when he directed a search for ways to reduce the jobless rate during the covid pandemic in 2020 as well. He's been a recurring guest on Fox News, Fox Business and other national news programs and quoted often in major newspapers.
Brown suggested in a Wall Street Journal interview this week that the voters are more focused on the cost of living in 2026 than ever. “They know exactly, to the dollar, the amount of their power bill,” Brown said in the WSJ piece. He said voters are more in tune with the price of beef and health care than in the past.
Brown has been warning Republicans that they could be in store for a nightmare in November based on the tea leaves that he's been reading in the numbers and between the lines on the economy and affordability as the voters paramount priority in the upcoming midterm vote.
The tightening of the fight for Texas governor that the Cygnal poll pointed to is the latest bad sign for the GOP's candidates here and beyond in competitive races on the general election ballot November 3.
"If Cygnal, a conservative pollster, is showing this, Republicans might be on the verge of a bloodbath in Texas," MS NOW columnist Eric Garcia said Tuesday in a post on X.
more to come ...
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