“You’re walking on dead cows right now,” rancher Tony Coleman told me in January, as we crossed burial pits on his Johnson County farm. He said all 84 of his cattle died after sewage sludge carrying PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” washed onto his land.

County officials and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller backed Coleman’s request for a disaster declaration to fund testing. But Gov. Greg Abbott wouldn’t sign it, county commissioner Larry Wooley told me.

The source of the PFAS has not been established. But Coleman, an evangelical Christian and Republican, believed Abbott was protecting an industry push to spread treated drilling and fracking wastewater on farms.

“We can’t get no help from the state level,” he said.

Nine months later, Abbott is facing the toughest gubernatorial race of his career. Despite outspending Democrat Gina Hinojosa 6 to 1 from July to late September, his average lead has fallen below 3%. For the first time in four campaigns, he has trailed in multiple polls conducted in the election’s final weeks.

That contest isn’t about Coleman’s dead cattle. In the governor’s race and the Senate race between James Talarico and Ken Paxton, candidates are fighting over billionaires, water, electricity and public health, largely through the issue of data centers. But oil and gas and their waste hang over both contests.

In June 2025, Abbott signed House Bill 49, shielding the companies that produce, haul and treat fracking wastewater — and the landowners who accept it — from most liability for harm. Hinojosa and Talarico voted against it. The state’s environmental agency has now drafted rules for spreading the wastewater without testing for PFAS.

Future Heist, the investigative nonprofit I lead, analyzed 448 public comments on the proposed rules: 97% opposed them or demanded major changes. The industry and its allies insist they have no choice.

Texans know what happens when drilling waste ends up beneath their communities. In Johnson County, a subdivision and an elementary school of about 500 students were built on a former drilling-waste dump. Families who bought there said no one told them. A partner in the homebuilder said there was “nothing to disclose.”In Joaquin, in eastern Texas, a geyser erupted from an old oil and gas site, and benzene in some water wells reached about 23 times the drinking-water standard. A year after the leaks began, the residents had received no notice of the threat to the town’s water despite state regulators’ growing concerns. In April, an old oil well beneath a church parking lot in the town of Grandfalls released more than 1.5 million gallons in eight days.

By analyzing state records, Future Heist has mapped more than 25,000 plugged wells across Texas that it classifies as at critical risk of failure—roughly 50 times the number previously reported. Pressure from nearby wastewater disposal wells can break old well plugs where they pass through drinking water aquifers, allowing contaminated fluid into the water supply.

Our research also found that 2 in 5 Texas schools and daycares have an active oil or gas well within a mile. A Pennsylvania study linked living within a mile of fracking operations to higher rates of childhood lymphoma.

Texans have fought such intrusions for years. As drilling expanded into the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs in the 2000s and 2010s, unlikely bipartisan citizen movements fought wells near homes — and often won. In November 2014, nearly 59% of Denton’s voters banned fracking. A few months later, the Lubbock City Council doubled the required distance new wells had to keep from homes and businesses “for the health and safety of the community,” as one council member said.

But the industry sued Denton within hours of the ban’s passage, then went to the Legislature. Abbott signed a law overriding Denton’s ban and restricting cities’ authority over drilling. When Texans used local government to resist the industry, the state took that power away.

The Railroad Commission—which regulates oil and gas, and whose commissioners took 68% of their campaign money from the industry between 2015 and 2020—has shut the public out, too. When eastern Texas residents fought a new waste dump, commissioners who had taken donations from its owner approved it over their own staff’s objections. In August, the commission voted 2 to 1 to remove public comment as a standing item at monthly meetings.

Texas pumps 42% of America’s oil. Attorney General Ken Paxton used the state’s power to fight federal restrictions on the industry nationwide. He sued to block fees on oil and gas companies’ methane pollution among more than two dozen suits against federal climate and energy rules and defended the state’s blacklist of financial firms that factored climate change into their investments until a federal judge threw the law out in February.

In September, the City Council in Lubbock, the same city which in 2015 made oil and gas drillers move further from homes, voted 5 to 2 to begin adopting a 90-day moratorium on data centers. The oil and gas connection is literal: The state issued what the developer called the country’s largest air pollution permit for a gas plant and data center complex in Pecos County. Hinojosa has accused Abbott of having “taken millions from data center CEOs” while communities suffer.

Whether the issue is data centers or oil and gas, the question is the same: When Texans’ interests collide with those of companies, whose side does the state take?

Responsibility crosses party lines. In 1980, Texas Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen sponsored the amendment exempting oilfield waste from federal hazardous-waste rules. More recently, many Democrats in the state Legislature voted for the 2025 liability shield signed by Abbott.

But with no Democrat winning statewide since 1994, the decisive elections in Texas have long been the Republican primaries. There, oil money dominates. The industry has been the largest donor throughout the careers of both Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The same was true for Paxton until this election cycle, when Elon Musk gave tens of millions to a super PAC backing Paxton.

By Future Heist’s tally oil and gas donors have given Abbott $82.8 million since 2001, Patrick $18.8 million since 2008 and Paxton $13.7 million since 2002. Texans can object to what the industry does. But the industry helps choose who hears their objections.

The waste fight, however, has also split the Texas GOP. Last year, Commissioner Jim Wright championed the first overhaul of the Texas’ oilfield waste rules in about 40 years. Oil billionaire Tim Dunn’s CrownQuest sued to void the rules — and backed businessman Bo French against Wright. Dunn-linked donors supplied 41% of French’s campaign money.

Abbott campaigned for Wright, warning that French’s agenda “would wreck the miracle that we have in producing more oil and gas than ever before.”French won the primary on a platform of rolling back the oilfield reforms.

Jon Rosenthal, French’s Democratic opponent in the general election, was one of the Democrats who voted for the 2025 liability shield. But he has pledged to restore public comment at the commission, and, unlike French, wouldn’t just be a rubber stamp for the industry.

Earlier this year, for instance, Corpus Christi risked becoming the first major American city to run out of water. News reports pointed to the state’s refusal to plan for climate-driven drought and a fracking boom that brought thirsty plastic and chemical plants to the arid region — including one plant that uses more water than all the city’s households.

French, however, offered another explanation on X: “Maybe we wouldn’t be using as much water if we didn’t have millions of illegal aliens and foreigners who steal American jobs.”The industry he was running to regulate escaped his blame.

When I think about what this way of governing has cost Texans, I think of Tim Ruggiero, a deeply religious conservative in northern Texas who didn’t own the rights to the oil beneath his land. (In Texas, those who own the rights to what is under the surface trump those who live on it.) When fracking came, a gas company drilled and fracked two wells there against his wishes. The state fined it $35,500 for emissions violations.

Ruggiero eventually moved his family away. He still carries a business card with a verse from Leviticus: “ … and if you defile the land, it will vomit you out.”