John Hryhorchuk opened a recent op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman with a line that sounds like it came from a campaign attack ad: Your Texas miracle has become my Texas nightmare.
It didn’t. It came from a voter, and it captured a contradiction Hryhorchuk has spent the fall trying to explain.
By almost any economic measure, Texas has had an extraordinary quarter-century. As senior vice president of policy and advocacy at Texas 2036, the Austin-based, nonpartisan think tank, Hryhorchuk can recite the numbers: among large states, Texas’s growth since 2000 has been unmatched in velocity and magnitude, and median family income has roughly doubled — up 20 to 30 percent even after inflation.
And yet, he says, only about half of voters report feeling that they’ve personally benefited from that growth.
“That is, to me, startling,” he says, “in light of all the economic evidence that points to such sustained and widespread economic growth.”
The gap between the miracle on paper and the one people experience is, in Hryhorchuk’s reading, the most important fact for lawmakers to absorb before they return to Austin in January.
The numbers man
Hryhorchuk has spent most of his career where Texas budgets get built. Before joining Texas 2036 in 2020, he was deputy director of budget and policy for Governor Greg Abbott, focused on school finance and property taxes, and earlier held budget and policy roles under former Lt. Governor David Dewhurst. Before that, he practiced law in New York and Washington. He holds a law degree from the University of Texas.
Texas 2036 — named for the state’s bicentennial — describes its work as data-driven and long-range, and Hryhorchuk frames it as operating in the territory where Texans already agree. “It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing to want your kids to be reading and doing math at grade level,” he says. “It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing to have water infrastructure that makes your economy grow.”
The organization’s polling is designed to find that territory. “We see a lot of issues where 80 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of Democrats agree,” he says. “You might not see that when you’re watching your television ads. Those are designed to motivate behavior.”
His op-ed’s actual headline was more hopeful than its first line: the October surprise of 2026, he argued, is that Texans agree on policy.
A record level of worry
Texas 2036’s tenth statewide voter poll, conducted by Baselice & Associates in late August, found 67.7 percent of Texas voters extremely or very concerned about the future of the state — the highest reading in the poll’s history.
What struck Hryhorchuk wasn’t only the size of that number but its concentration. Concern among Democrats reached a record in the 80s. Concern among Republicans rose sharply from last year, though it hasn’t returned to its 2023 high. Together, they produced a population-level record.
A longer-running question points the same direction. Since early 2020 — just before the pandemic, which makes it a useful baseline — Texas 2036 has asked whether the state is taking the steps necessary to remain the best place to live, work and raise a family. The share saying yes has drifted downward.
“This apprehension is not merely focused on the here and now,” he says, “but thinking iteratively — are we taking the steps necessary for 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future?”
The poll also borrowed a question from Gallup asking whether voters feel in control of their own lives or feel that circumstances are forced on them. A slim majority said they feel in control. Among independents, the answer tracked closely with voting intent: those who felt in control leaned toward incumbents; those who didn’t, didn’t.
“Nothing about that is mind-blowing from a conceptual standpoint,” Hryhorchuk says. But it reframes affordability and safety as questions of agency. “Am I in control of my own life, my own destiny? Or are things changing around me in a way that impacts me that I don’t control?”
What Texans say they want
The answers, in Hryhorchuk’s summary, are plain: someone to make daily life work better.
The poll tested 13 positions and asked whether each would make voters more or less likely to support a candidate. The top result was ensuring all Texas students read and do math at grade level, with 84.8 percent saying it would make them more likely to vote for that candidate. Health care affordability ran close behind. Making sure every high school graduate is college, career or military ready also ranked near the top.
Asked in an open-ended format to name the state’s single most important issue, voters put education second — statistically tied with the top answer. Hryhorchuk calls that “staggeringly high” relative to past waves, when border security dominated.
Border security hasn’t disappeared; it remains a top-five issue and shows the widest partisan gap of anything in the survey. But the content of those answers has shifted since 2024, he says, from securing the southern border toward immigration more broadly.
The data center surprise
The most counterintuitive finding concerns the issue dominating local headlines.
“Evaluating the growth of data centers was 13 of 13” among the candidate positions tested, Hryhorchuk says. About half of voters — 50.6 percent — said a candidate’s commitment to evaluate data center growth would make them more likely to support that candidate, the lowest share of any item. In the open-ended question, he puts the share naming data centers as their top issue at around 2 percent.
That doesn’t mean voters are indifferent to what data centers consume. Building necessary water infrastructure and addressing electricity affordability both drew support above 80 percent, across both parties.
The distinction, as Hryhorchuk sees it, is between the facility and its effects. Voters care intensely about their water and power bills; data centers as such rank well below. He allows that some opposition may reflect the same sense of lost control — a neighborhood or rural landscape changing around people — but “at a population level, it was not up there in the same ballpark as education or health care or electricity or water.”
Health care: almost no one likes the status quo
If one issue shows near-unanimous impatience, it’s health care.
Asked whether they want to keep the health care system as it is, roughly 17.5 percent of Texas voters said yes, he says — and the figure barely moved by party. Around 90 percent want to know who owns their hospitals, physician groups and insurers, a reaction Hryhorchuk ties to consolidation, surprise bills and facility fees. Support for state action against health care consolidation is now a strong majority position; Texas 2036’s polling puts it around 81 percent.
Texans also report skipping care because of cost — including Texans with insurance. “If somebody is skipping the care that they need, even with the insurance, that is of great concern,” he says.
He flags one data point that will catch partisans’ attention: support for single-payer health care, long a fringe position in Texas, has roughly doubled in Texas 2036’s polling, from around 20 percent to around 40. It remains a minority view, and Hryhorchuk reads it less as an ideological shift than as frustration. “That is a sizable movement of just like, I’m mad as hell, I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Texas 2036’s own preference runs in a different direction — market-based reforms that let people access care “when they need it, at a transparent price that they can afford.”
A specific target is health coverage for teachers. Hryhorchuk argues that premium increases in TRS-ActiveCare, the state’s main plan for school employees, have been outpacing the raises the Legislature has worked to deliver — by his account, rising about twice as fast as teacher pay — and that for some teachers on family plans, health costs can consume as much as 40 percent of income. The plan’s total premiums rose an average of 9.7 percent for 2025-26 and just under 10 percent for 2026-27, even with $369 million in supplemental funding from the last session and a one-time state offset this year; what an individual teacher pays depends heavily on how much the district contributes.
“We want that money that we’re paying teachers to keep you in the classroom to go into your pocket,” he says.
Making government talk to itself
Some of Hryhorchuk’s priorities are the kind that make audiences’ eyes glaze — he apologizes in advance — but he insists the stakes are concrete.
Take child care, which he says is spread across five or six state agencies. “Nobody is in charge. Nobody gets yelled at by the Legislature when they screw up.” The Texas Workforce Commission rates child care quality through its Texas Rising Star program; the Texas Education Agency measures kindergarten readiness. Because their data systems don’t connect, he says, the state can’t tell whether a subsidized child care seat leads to a child better prepared for kindergarten.
The same problem hobbles workforce policy. The state knows who graduated in 2026 and knows who’s employed, but linking the two takes years. In an economy where artificial intelligence may be reshaping entry-level hiring, he argues, that lag is costly: a university that learned this spring’s computer science graduates were struggling could adjust for next spring’s.
“That is attainable,” he says. “That is just synchronizing data systems and making them transparent.”
Better data could also lower costs — TRS, he suggests, could use its own claims data to steer members toward high-value, lower-cost care.
Math, trades and the first rung
On education, Hryhorchuk returns repeatedly to a single concern: only about half of Texas students read and do math at grade level, and Texas math performance has slipped roughly two grade levels from where it stood in 2011.
He rejects the idea that AI makes basic skills obsolete. “Critical thinking is never going to be more important than in a world where algorithms can have the perception of authority,” he says.
His most practical example comes from the trades — the jobs often pitched as a safe harbor from automation. Licensing exams for electricians include a calculations section, and he says only about 20 percent pass it. “This is opportunity that is being snatched away from the young people that have been passed through a system not ready for what comes next.”
The Legislature, he notes, has aligned school incentives behind career credentials of value earned in high school — what earns a school money now also helps its accountability rating and a student’s earning prospects. That matters more as employers question whether entry-level work will survive AI. On AI in classrooms, he says voters are clear about the order of operations: student safety and data security first, then effectiveness, where early research suggests teachers trained to use AI for differentiated instruction can improve learning.
The rest of the list
Hryhorchuk’s ask for the 90th Legislature is broad: make Texas a leader in math; address teacher health costs; follow through on the 2023 community college funding overhaul; drive market-based health care reforms; assign someone to be accountable for the child care system; and rethink water planning.
That last item draws on a Texas 2036 review of 25 years of state water plans, prompted in part by Corpus Christi’s recent water crisis. His conclusion is that the plans are projections, not accountability documents. “If you have a plan, do you follow it? Does it lead to more water in cities? Our plan isn’t structured in that way right now.”
He’s optimistic, he says, because the people he talks to at the Capitol hear the same things from their constituents. Once the election passes, he expects attention to shift to the work itself.
“If you want to define success as making material improvements for the lives of 31 million Texans,” he says, “they’re telling you what they want.”