It was the first day of Texas’ 2021 winter storm when Sarah Williams’ family was closing on their new home in Harker Heights, about an hour’s drive outside of Austin. She remembers salt being sprinkled on the entryway outside the title company she visited as the town prepared for snow and freezing temperatures.
Williams, her husband, and their two young children—one a newborn and one still in diapers—were staying with family in the area when the power went down due to a failure of the state’s electricity grid. They bundled inside as the weather outside turned deadly, sweeping across the state and resulting in at least 246 deaths.
“We were at one of the most vulnerable points in our lives,” she told The Daily Beast.
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A year later, Williams says she now constantly thinks about emergency preparedness and stockpiles supplies for her family in case the grid goes down again, worrying for her kids and their grandparents down the road. She lacks confidence that changes by the state genuinely fixed the power-grid’s resilience—calling it “sad and frustrating.”
And she’s not alone in her lasting resentment against the power-grid’s failures. Texas Democrats see that as an opportunity.
While the Texas 2021 legislative session pumped out a six-week abortion ban and a new set of voting restrictions, state lawmakers did little to address the grid’s faulty infrastructure. Cynthia, a 79-year-old from Houston, told The Daily Beast it’s been frustrating to see those policies get enacted while the grid goes on unaddressed.
Cynthia calls herself “lucky” to have only lost power for 25 hours during the 2021 winter storm, which she weathered out at home. “It was all negative stuff,” she said of policies passed by state lawmakers this past year, adding that the grid “definitely is an issue” for her this election cycle. Williams also said the grid will be “top of mind” this November.
Democrats running for statewide office in Texas are pinning the grid on their list of priorities for 2022, calling for investments into the state’s critical infrastructure and accountability for the breakdown of the system in 2021. The issue intersects two of the party’s top legislative priorities from the past year—climate and infrastructure—in a way they’re betting will resonate with voters come November.
Texas Democratic candidate governor Beto O’Rourke toured the state earlier this year to talk with voters about the grid failure, campaigning on a message of fully weatherizing the grid and connecting it to one of the two national power grids.
The state currently survives on its own power grid in an attempt to avoid dealing with the federal government, according to the Texas Tribune. El Paso, Texas, for instance, which is individually attached to the western part of the national power grid managed to not lose power during the 2021 winter storm.
“This wasn’t an act of God or mother nature. This was a failing of the person in the highest position of power and public trust in the state,” O’Rourke said at a campaign stop in February, alluding to incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who led the state through the storm.
Democratic lieutenant governor and attorney general candidates are hammering on the grid, too, hoping the issue can help launch them to success. Mike Collier, a Democratic lieutenant governor candidate who’s worked in the energy sector, frequently quips it’s time to “fix the damn grid,” while others like Democratic attorney general candidate Joe Jaworksi released an ad criticizing incumbent AG Ken Paxton for going to Utah during the 2021 storm.
A poll conducted of Texans between Feb. 21-22 showed there’s a bipartisan concern for the grid, with about 82 percent of respondents are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about the grid. More than half of the poll’s respondents identified as Republicans.
A separate poll from the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune conducted in October found only 18 percent of respondents approve of how state leadership handled the grid failures. “Our polling shows that, despite high-profile attention paid to the issue by Republican incumbents who must politically own the response due to their dominance of state government, most Texans have consistently shown little confidence that the response will prevent future problems,” Jim Henson, co-director of the UT poll and director of the Texas Politics Project, told The Daily Beast in a statement.
Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project, also told The Daily Beast in a phone interview that he believes Democrats homing in on the grid could be part of a broader strategy to push voters toward treating 2022 as a referendum on Abbott.
“The grid right now is just the simple go-to,” he said, adding that “it activates negative attitudes toward Abbott.” And once those negative feelings are flowing, voters could be persuaded to evaluate their opinion of the last four years of the governor’s administration. This winter, Abbott sought to boost public confidence in the power system, promising the lights in Texas will stay on, pointing to improvements since the outage. Last year, Texas lawmakers implemented some structural changes to leadership at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs Texas’ power grid, and enacted a law mainly targeting electrical plants that require resources to be weatherized.
The bill was much more relaxed regarding natural gas facilities, which were behind many of 2021’s grid failures.
Abbott’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
But state-level candidates aren’t the only ones trying to play in 2022’s grid politics. Some Texas candidates running for federal office are trying to bring a national approach to the issue.
Democrat Greg Casar, a former Austin city council member who’s running for Congress, told The Daily Beast he wants increased federal oversight of the grid and supports finding a way for Texas to join the national power-grid system. He also wants to incentivize moving toward renewable energy in the state in a broader attempt to combat climate change, which scientists believe will increase the frequency of extreme weather in the coming decades.
“When we talk about addressing the climate crisis during this campaign, it's not a theoretical conversation just about future generations. It’s a conversation about what's going to happen just in the next few years,” Casar said.
But with winter waning and Texas’ grid having avoided any major hits this season, questions remain whether voters will still be angry enough to turn their backs on Republicans this November. “Absent another comparably catastrophic failure, it’s very unlikely that the issue will convert Republican votes to the Democratic ticket. Republican discontent on the issue is neither very high nor very intense,” Henson said.
Douglas Bruster, a literature professor at the University of Texas Austin, said the storm for him was “miserable” and “hard as hell.” Bruster says he had a working gas stove—which his wife used to help cook meals for their neighbors.
“It was so bad that I was just certain it would make a difference down the road,” Bruster said. But a year later, he’s not confident it’s going to have an impact on how folks vote.
“It’s dismaying that a huge failure of governance won’t have any repercussions at the polls,” he said.
