MAGA Report Cards — New Mexico

Tampa Electric's Rates Are Up 86%. Ohio's Bills Are Up 53%. These Five Republicans Took the Utilities' Money and Handed Data Centers the Grid.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:58:01 +0000

An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.

A typical new one runs 100 to 1,000 megawatts — a load equal to a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes, around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.

That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?

There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.

We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.

This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.

Greg Abbott gave away $3.2 billion and put the bill on the grid

Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.

Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.

What he gave them:

A sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost $3.2 billion in forgone sales-tax revenue over two years — already one of the state's costliest incentive programs, and soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation.
A regulatory door held open. ERCOT expects Texas power demand to nearly double by 2030, with large-load projects wanting up to 56,458 more megawatts queued for its approval. Texas now has more data centers under construction than any other state — 142, against Virginia's 141.

What Texans got:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push wholesale electricity prices at ERCOT's North hub roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
A $33 billion transmission build-out — ERCOT's own estimate for its 765-kV expansion plan — that shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers.

And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started saying data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers."

He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.

Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike

Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:

Tampa Electric: up 86%
Duke Energy: up 49%
Florida Power & Light: up 45%

Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General for six years, until January 2025 — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.

She never did it. Not once.

That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.

A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.

Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays

Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.

Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.

His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.

The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.

Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax

Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.

At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.

He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.

Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.

At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.

Gregg Hull's answer for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste

New Mexico is drying up. At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, faced a flurry of questions about whether he supports a moratorium on data centers. He said he is not opposed to them. What the state should explore instead, he said, is requiring developers to cool their servers with alternative water — brackish water, or produced water from oil and gas operations.

"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries. Every time we tell an industry that we don't want them here or we push them out of the state without coming up with a way that we can actually work with those industries, we're sending a message out to the rest of the United States that we don't want those opportunities here."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.

That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.

Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules so water can be safely treated and reused only within the industry while protecting our freshwater resources." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.

So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't back a pause on data centers, and an answer that points them at the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste streamlined.

The pattern

Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.

The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.2 billion in Abbott's giveaways.

And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.

None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.

The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.

You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.

Sources

The build-out. The scale of a single facility is EPRI's, from Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary, updated Feb. 25, 2026: "A typical new data center of 100 to 1000 megawatts represents a load equal to that of a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes."

Texas. The 2021 blackout death toll is from Andrew Weber and Mose Buchele, "Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known," KUT via Texas Standard, Aug. 5, 2022 — the state's official count is 246, which researchers call a severe undercount. Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan, "Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break," Texas Tribune, April 8, 2026 — the comptroller's $3.2 billion two-year estimate, the tax break as "soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation," and the 142-to-141 count of data centers under construction against Virginia's. The interconnection queue and ERCOT's demand forecast are from Kayla Guo, "Data centers are booming in Texas. What does that mean for the grid?" Texas Tribune, Jan. 24, 2025. The price forecast is Robert Walton, "Data center demand spike could drive 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027: EIA," Utility Dive, March 16, 2026 — EIA's 78.9% is for the ERCOT North hub under a high-demand scenario. ERCOT's $32.99 billion estimate for its 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan is reported in Paige Feild, "Permian Basin Power Fix Becomes $33 Billion Statewide Project," Texas Scorecard, Oct. 28, 2025. Abbott's directive to the PUC and ERCOT: Sarah Davis, "Abbott seeks new limits on Texas data centers," The Hill, June 11, 2026. The "epicenter of AI development" quote and the $40 billion Google announcement are from the governor's own press release.

Florida. Mitch Perry, "Florida's GOP AGs used to intervene in utility rate cases, but no longer," Florida Phoenix, June 17, 2026 — the Tampa Electric, Duke and FPL increases from December 2020 to January 2026 (Food & Water Watch), Moody's $431,000 in career money from the investor-owned utilities (CLEO Institute), her lead among Senate candidates in electric-utility fundraising (OpenSecrets), and the McCollum and Crist rate-case interventions. On SB 484: Samantha Putterman, "Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed," PolitiFact, Aug. 7, 2026.

Ohio. Bonnie Lucas, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy PACs as bills soar," TiffinOhio.net, Aug. 6, 2026 — the $97,468.91 total, the $65,603.24 that arrived after the Energy and Policy Institute flagged the giving, the July 31 checks, the governor's five PUCO appointments, Ohio's 53% rise in electricity bills since 2021, and AEP Ohio Power's 15% disconnection rate, first reported by Canary Media.

Georgia. Ross Williams, "Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 5, 2026 — the luncheon, the property-tax proposal, the Medicaid answer and Jackson's stake in a Texas data center. His net worth is from Forbes. The 566,000 projection is the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of health care cuts.

New Mexico. Joshua Bowling, "NM GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull touts experience leading, growing Rio Rancho," Source New Mexico, May 12, 2026, reporting the Albuquerque Journal town hall of May 11. On produced water, the Western Environmental Law Center's releases of May 14, 2025 and May 12, 2026. Hull's regulatory position is from his own campaign site.

Asked If He'd Work With Abbott to Reduce Texans Coming to New Mexico for Abortions, Gregg Hull Said 'Fully Committed.' Then He Said It Was Out of Context.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:04:22 +0000

On August 11, at a Republican Party of Lea County meet-and-greet in Hobbs, a woman in the audience asked Gregg Hull a very specific question.

Not a general one about cooperating with neighbors. A specific one:

"You mentioned abortion tourism. When you become governor, what will your relationship with Governor Abbott be like? And will you commit to meet with him to address the problem of abortion trafficking to New Mexico and do what we can to reduce Texans coming to New Mexico for abortions?"

Hull's answer, in full, began: "Yeah. Oh no, I'm fully committed to working with Governor Abbott."

He said his team had "already reached out" to Abbott. He said that if Abbott is reelected this fall, "absolutely, we're committed to working with Governor Abbott on all of these issues."

And he closed with this:

"As I said before, I'm pro-life, so we're gonna see what we can do."

The walk-back

A week later, on August 18, the New Mexico Political Report and The Paper. called him about it. Hull said the comments were taken "out of context."

"There was one guy there from Texas — he specifically asked me, are you willing to work with Governor Abbott? I said I'm always willing to work with anybody. Of course they're going to take that out of context, but it is what it is."

Two problems with that.

First, the person who asked was a woman, not "one guy," and the outlet published the transcript. Read it again above. She did not ask whether he'd work with any governor. She asked him to commit to meeting Abbott specifically to reduce the number of Texans getting abortions in New Mexico.

Second, "I'm always willing to work with anybody" is not what he said. What he said was "fully committed," then "absolutely, we're committed," then "I'm pro-life, so we're gonna see what we can do."

Nobody misquoted him. The full transcript is published. What changed between August 11 and August 18 is who was listening.

He also told the reporter that his outreach to Abbott's office was just a hello: "I've reached out to him just to say hello, to make contact, but I haven't had any response back."

Why Hobbs, of all places

The room where Hull said this is not a random room.

Hobbs is one of the New Mexico towns that tried to shut abortion clinics down on its own. In late 2022 and early 2023, Hobbs and Clovis passed ordinances with tough licensing requirements aimed at abortion clinics, built around the Comstock Act — an 1873 federal anti-vice law. Lea County, where Hobbs sits, added a $300 fine for each use of the mail to help someone get an abortion. Roosevelt County went furthest, letting private citizens sue a clinic for at least $100,000 per violation.

On January 9, 2025, the New Mexico Supreme Court blocked all of them, unanimously, because state law overrides them.

So Hull was standing in front of the county that lost that case, being asked to bring in the governor of Texas. And he said he was fully committed.

What "state funds" actually means here

Hull told the reporter his real objection is narrower — he doesn't want New Mexico taxpayers paying for abortions for people from other states.

"Right now our state funds out-of-state parties coming in to pay for those procedures here in the state. I don't think our taxpayers should be paying for that. If we have out-of-state individuals coming here and receiving services at the expense of New Mexicans, that's a problem for me."

Understand the scale of what that touches. New Mexico borders two states with total abortion bans — Texas and Oklahoma — and it has become one of the country's main destinations for people traveling for care as a result. The Guttmacher Institute counted 8,230 patients who traveled from out of state to get abortion care in New Mexico in just the first six months of 2023, one of the largest increases in interstate travel anywhere in the country.

That is the population Hull is describing. A policy aimed at "out-of-state parties" in New Mexico is not a small carve-out — it points at a large share of everyone the state's clinics see, and the woman who asked the question in Hobbs clearly understood that. She said so out loud: "reduce Texans coming to New Mexico for abortions."

"Unless the legislature flips"

Hull's other defense is that he couldn't change the law anyway. "The legislature has passed the law, and unless the legislature flips, this doesn't change." He told the reporter it wasn't fair to say he'd roll back reproductive rights because "I wouldn't have the authority to do that without legislative support."

That is a statement about arithmetic, not about what he wants. He is not saying he wouldn't. He is saying he couldn't — yet. In the same breath he said he isn't currently backing specific candidates or legislation on the issue.

A governor has a veto pen, an appointments list, a budget, and a bully pulpit. Hull is telling New Mexicans that none of that counts because the legislature is the legislature. He is also telling a room in Hobbs that he's pro-life and "we're gonna see what we can do."

Both of those cannot be the honest version.

This is the pattern

It is the same move we've watched Hull make on other issues. He wouldn't rule out "scaling back" Medicaid in the state where Medicaid covers 42% of residents — more than any other state in the country. He wants voter ID across New Mexico, the state that wrote the first Native American Voting Rights Act. And he'd like to cool AI data centers with fracking wastewater in a state running out of water.

Say the hard thing to the friendly room. Soften it for the reporter. Hope nobody plays the tape.

This time somebody printed the transcript.

Hull faces Democrat Deb Haaland, the former interior secretary, in November.

Source

Kevin Hendricks, "Hull says he is 'fully committed' to working with Texas Gov. Abbot to stop New Mexico aid for Texans seeking abortions in New Mexico", The Paper. and New Mexico Political Report, August 18, 2026. Photo: Source New Mexico.

Gregg Hull Wants Voter ID Across New Mexico — the State That Wrote the First Native American Voting Rights Act

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:30:00 +0000

New Mexico's Secretary of State answers the voter ID question in one sentence: "You do not have to present identification to vote in a statewide election."

There is one exception the state itself flags. Some New Mexico cities require ID in their own municipal elections — and the example the Secretary of State names is Rio Rancho.

Which is where Gregg Hull was mayor for twelve years, and it's the model he wants to take statewide.

What his campaign says

Hull's "Election Integrity" page is unusually direct for a candidate who has been famously vague on almost everything else. It says, in his own words:

"I support Voter ID. New Mexicans deserve election laws that protect legally registered voters, strengthen confidence in the process, and make it clear that every eligible vote is counted accurately and fairly. Voter ID is a common-sense safeguard that should be applied in a fair, consistent, and accessible way across the state."

And on his record:

"As Mayor of Rio Rancho, I stood up for our community's voter-approved election protections, including photo identification requirements in city elections. When efforts were made to move Rio Rancho's local elections into a statewide system that would have weakened local control and removed local Voter ID protections, I opposed that change."

Then the operative promise:

"I will work to support uniform enforcement of voter identification requirements, absentee ballot handling, ballot security, and election procedures statewide."

Read together, that's a plan: New Mexico currently has no statewide voter ID requirement, and Hull says the rules should be uniform statewide and that he supports voter ID. There is only one direction that goes.

Why New Mexico, specifically, is a bad place to try this

Most states debating voter ID are arguing about DMV lines. New Mexico's debate is about something else, and the state has already worked through it.

In 2023 New Mexico passed House Bill 4, the New Mexico Voting Rights Act. Inside it was the first Native American Voting Rights Act written into any state's election code. It exists because of a specific, documented problem: in rural New Mexico, many Native residents have what the law calls noncity-style mailing addresses — a highway number, a P.O. box, or a description of where a house sits. Those addresses get rejected by systems built for a street address and a ZIP code.

So HB 4 let government buildings serve as mailing addresses for voter registration, let tribes designate alternate registration locations on tribal land, and protected polling places on tribal lands from being eliminated or consolidated without the written agreement of the nation, tribe, or pueblo.

That is the state legislature identifying an ID-and-address barrier and legislating around it — three years ago.

New Mexico's existing rules already accommodate this. When ID is required — for a first-time voter who registered by mail without providing one — the acceptable list is broad: a photo ID, or a utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, student ID, or a government document including a tribal ID showing name and address.

A "uniform" statewide photo ID requirement doesn't add a safeguard to that system. It removes the flexibility that was built into it on purpose.

The problem it solves

Hull's page frames voter ID as being about confidence: election laws that "strengthen confidence in the process."

Notice what's not in there. There's no claim of fraud in New Mexico, no case, no number. The argument is that people feel uncertain, and that the fix for that feeling is a new requirement on every voter in the state.

That's the same argument being made everywhere. We've traced where it leads. The SAVE Act — the national push to require documentary proof of citizenship in person just to register — could block tens of millions of eligible Americans, starting with the 84% of women who marry and change their surname, leaving it no longer matching their birth certificate. It's the same structure: a documentation requirement sold as reassurance, paid for by whoever can't produce the document.

He wouldn't answer the direct question

Here's the part that makes this worth writing about.

When iVoterGuide sent Hull a 34-question candidate survey, one of the questions was: "People should be able to vote without photo identification."

He declined to answer it — along with all 33 others, covering abortion, health care, immigration, education, guns, and more. His answer to every single one is recorded as "Did not answer."

So the position is on his website, where his supporters will find it, and absent from the questionnaire where a skeptical voter might. That's not an oversight. That's a choice about who gets to know what.

It fits a pattern we've already documented on his page: when he entered the race, the Santa Fe New Mexican noted that his campaign website "makes no mention he is a Republican."

"Local control" cuts both ways

There's one more thing worth pointing out, because Hull makes an argument on his own page that undercuts his conclusion.

He defends Rio Rancho's photo ID rule on local control grounds: "Communities should not have their voter-approved election safeguards stripped away by state overreach... state policy should respect the will of those voters instead of forcing one-size-fits-all changes."

That's a coherent principle. It's just the exact opposite of "uniform enforcement of voter identification requirements... statewide."

If Rio Rancho's voters get to decide their own election rules, so do the voters of every other community in New Mexico — including the pueblos and nations whose polling places HB 4 specifically protects from being changed without their written consent. You can have local control or you can have a statewide mandate. Hull's page asks for both, one paragraph apart.

New Mexico built its election law around the people hardest to reach, and it did that on purpose. Gregg Hull wants to standardize that away, and he'd rather you read it on his website than hear him say it. We deserve better.

Sources

Gregg Hull for Governor — Election Integrity — his own campaign's stated position
Voting FAQs — New Mexico Secretary of State, on current ID requirements
The New Mexico Voting Rights Act Unpacked — Caroline Sullivan, Democracy Docket, March 22, 2023. Photo: Source New Mexico.

Medicaid Covers 42% of New Mexicans, More Than Any State. Gregg Hull Won't Rule Out 'Scaling Back.'

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:20:00 +0000

New Mexico is the most Medicaid-dependent state in America. That isn't an opinion — Medicaid covers about 42% of New Mexicans, the highest per capita enrollment in the country. About a third of New Mexico's children are on it. And roughly 70% of New Mexico adults on Medicaid work full- or part-time.

So when someone runs for governor of New Mexico, how they'd handle Medicaid isn't one issue among many. For a huge share of the state, it is the issue.

Source New Mexico asked Gregg Hull exactly that. The question was how he'd govern through the rest of Trump's presidency, given that the current governor has called multiple special sessions to deal with the administration's budget cuts.

Here is his full answer, verbatim:

"We're going to have to figure out what we're going to need to do to deal with those budget cuts.

I'm going to be a big proponent for going in and looking at and making sure that the money we are spending on the Medicaid and Medicare programs are being appropriately spent. But also making sure that they're benefiting the rural communities the way that the programs are supposed to.

We're going to have to look at what resources we do have and manage those in a careful way. If that requires some scaling back, then we'll have to look at that. If you don't have the money, you don't have the money. But our goal would be to make sure that the most vulnerable in the state do get served."

"If you don't have the money, you don't have the money"

That sentence is doing a lot of work, so let's be clear about what it means and doesn't mean.

New Mexico's Medicaid squeeze is not a natural disaster. It was voted for. Trump's budget bill imposed work requirements of 80 hours a month for adults 19 to 64 and cut redetermination periods from 12 months to six — paperwork machinery that removes people who are eligible, not just people who aren't. Roughly 100,000 New Mexicans are expected to be affected.

So "if you don't have the money" is a passive way of describing an active decision made in Washington by Hull's own party. A governor's job when that happens is to decide what to do about it.

New Mexico's answer so far has been to backfill. The state's 2027 budget funds coverage for almost 47,000 New Mexicans and reduces health care costs for up to 122,000 people statewide — a direct effort to absorb the federal cuts rather than pass them along.

Hull's answer, asked the same question, was to talk about auditing whether the money is "appropriately spent" and to leave the door open to "some scaling back."

What his own website promises

Now compare that with what Hull's campaign says about health care.

His healthcare page opens with a line about fairness: "Access to a doctor, an emergency room, or a specialist should not depend on your ZIP code." He promises to "Protect and foster rural healthcare systems to ensure communities can keep hospitals, clinics, and emergency services close to home," to advocate for "competitive reimbursement rates that allow providers to keep their doors open," and to recruit providers to rural New Mexico.

Every one of those promises runs through Medicaid. Rural hospitals in New Mexico stay open because Medicaid pays them. "Competitive reimbursement rates" are Medicaid rates for a large share of rural patients. You cannot keep the emergency room open in a county where 42% of people are on Medicaid while scaling Medicaid back.

And here's the tell: his healthcare page contains no Medicaid proposals at all. Not a plan to protect it, not a plan to reform it — the program that covers four in ten New Mexicans simply isn't there.

The promise is on the website. The caveat is in the interview.

"Making sure the money is appropriately spent"

Hull's stated priority is auditing Medicaid and Medicare spending. It's worth knowing what New Mexico's own analysts found when they looked.

The Legislative Finance Committee examined why the state's Medicaid bill keeps rising and concluded it isn't enrollment — enrollment has been declining. It's the cost of health care itself. Per-member monthly costs went from $576 in 2020 to a projected $883 in the fiscal year just ended.

In other words, the money is going where you'd expect: to medical care that costs more than it used to. A governor can go looking for waste, and should. But an audit is not a plan, and "we'll look at it" is not a commitment to keep anyone covered.

What "the most vulnerable" leaves out

Hull's final line — "our goal would be to make sure that the most vulnerable in the state do get served" — sounds reassuring until you notice it's a narrowing.

Medicaid in New Mexico doesn't cover only the most vulnerable. It covers about 42% of the state, including working adults, a third of all children, and families who'd be uninsured without it. When a politician promises to protect "the most vulnerable" in a program that broad, the honest reading is that some people currently covered are going to be reclassified as not vulnerable enough.

Nobody should have to guess which group they're in.

Ask him now, not after

New Mexico's general election is in November. Hull has been evasive on other subjects — he declined to answer all 34 questions on a candidate questionnaire covering abortion, health care, immigration, education, elections and guns.

On Medicaid, at least, he said something. It just wasn't a promise.

In the state where more people depend on Medicaid than anywhere in America, the Republican running for governor won't rule out cutting it. New Mexicans deserve a straight answer. We deserve better.

Source

New Mexico Primary 2026: GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull — Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico, April 10, 2026. Photo: Danielle Prokop / Source New Mexico.

New Mexico Is Running Out of Water. Gregg Hull Wants to Cool AI Data Centers With Fracking Waste.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:20:32 +0000

On July 7, 2026, the climate group Food and Water Watch published a report calling on New Mexico to stop approving giant AI data centers until the state figures out what they cost. Days earlier, Democratic state lawmakers had announced they'd push a statewide moratorium in next year's legislative session.

Source New Mexico asked both people running to be the next governor what they thought. Whoever wins will be sitting in the Governor's office when that bill comes up.

Gregg Hull said no.

"It would tell every business considering New Mexico that we're closed for economic diversification, and that sends the wrong signal at exactly the moment we should be competing for these investments," he wrote. "But I don't support a blank check either. Data centers need to be sited responsibly — with real accountability for water use, energy impact, and community input... As governor, I'd rather fix the guardrails than shut the door on an entire industry."

"Fix the guardrails" sounds reasonable. So let's look at which guardrails Hull actually wants to fix, and what he wants to fill these data centers with.

His plan is to cool them with oil field wastewater

Hull has now said this twice, in two different settings.

At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, 2026, he faced what Source New Mexico described as "a flurry of questions" from the audience about data center moratoriums. He said he wasn't opposed to data centers, but wanted them to be responsible about water. His idea: the state should explore requiring data center developers to use "brackish water or 'produced water' from oil and gas operations" to cool their servers.

"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries," he said.

He repeated it in writing. Asked by the Albuquerque Journal whether he'd support water use limits on data centers, or ban them outright, Hull answered: "I oppose a blanket ban on data centers — they bring jobs and investment. But location matters. Facilities should be sited where water and power resources can actually support them, like southeastern New Mexico where produced water is available."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up an oil well along with the oil. In the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico, the oil industry brings up an average of about four barrels of it per barrel of oil, and as much as 12. It is not a spare water supply sitting around waiting for a use. It is the industry's biggest and most expensive garbage problem, and Hull is proposing to solve that problem for them.

New Mexico's own scientists already studied this. They said no.

This isn't an open question in New Mexico. The state spent a year and a half on it.

The New Mexico Environment Department asked the Water Quality Control Commission in December 2023 to ban discharging produced water into the state's ground and surface water. It backed the request with testimony from five of its own scientists. The finding was blunt: produced water contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many toxic to people and the environment — some of them fracking chemicals the industry keeps secret as "trade secrets" — and the technology to treat it safely at scale does not exist. New Mexico doesn't even have surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it.

Even the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association fought the ban — and one of its own primary expert witnesses testified that discharging treated produced water at scale is premature.

In May 2025, after an 18-month process and hundreds of pages of expert testimony, the commission banned it — a full prohibition running through the end of 2030, with research pilot projects allowed but no discharge.

The Legislature reached the same conclusion the same year. When lawmakers wrote the Strategic Water Supply Act — New Mexico's big bet on finding new water — produced water was in the original bill. Objections from lawmakers and stakeholders got it stripped out, and the bill became brackish-only in February 2025. The law now defines "brackish water" to specifically exclude produced water.

New Mexico's environmental agency, its scientists, its water commission, and its Legislature all looked at this and said the same thing. Hull's platform says the opposite.

The guardrail he actually wants to "fix" is the one protecting the water

On his own campaign website, under Oil & Gas, Hull writes that "some current rules, especially around produced water handling, are overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules."

"Without clear safety benefits" is a direct contradiction of what the state's own review found.

And this is not theoretical. On May 12, 2026 — the day after Hull's town hall — the Water Quality Control Commission voted 7–4 to open a new rulemaking on a petition from an oil-and-gas-industry-led group that would allow produced water to be discharged into New Mexico's surface and ground water and used in agriculture. As written, it would be one of the most permissive oil and gas wastewater rules in the country. It came less than a year after the ban took effect.

The governor appoints the people who run the Environment Department — the agency that proposed the ban, and that the Western Environmental Law Center says is now "sitting on the sidelines while industry proposes to undo the rule NMED proposed and its scientists supported." Whoever wins in November decides which side that agency is on.

So when Hull promises "real accountability for water use," the accountability rules already on the books for this exact water are the ones he has publicly committed to loosening.

Even the people who want to reuse produced water say it isn't ready

You don't have to take environmentalists' word for it. New Mexico Water Advocates, looking at the feasibility of treating produced water for beneficial reuse, notes that there are only a few full-scale treatment plants anywhere in the U.S. doing this — none in the Permian Basin — and that a number of them have shut down, "leaving legacy environmental issues."

There's also a problem that should stop Hull's pitch cold. Treating produced water at large scale would itself require an estimated 1 to 3 gigawatts of new power generation.

Read that next to the problem it's supposed to solve. Hull's answer to data centers using too much water and too much power is to hand them water that would take another power plant's worth of electricity to clean.

Meanwhile, the water is disappearing

New Mexico's own 50-year water plan projects the state will have approximately 25% less water in its rivers and aquifers within 50 years — a shortage of 750,000 acre-feet if nothing changes.

Into that, the AI industry is arriving at enormous scale. Food and Water Watch's report found that a hyperscale data center — the kind built to train AI models — can use as much energy as 100,000 to 2 million U.S. households, depending on size.

Project Jupiter, the Oracle and OpenAI campus under construction at Santa Teresa in southern New Mexico, is the test case. Its developers first planned to power it with two natural gas plants that would have emitted more greenhouse gases than Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined. A revised proposal swaps in Bloom Energy fuel cells — and documents filed with the New Mexico Environment Department show the emissions would still outpace those two cities combined.

Local officials can't get straight answers. In April 2026, Doña Ana County commissioners directed their own county manager to investigate the project's water use after conflicting statements in news reports.

Counties aren't waiting for the state. Socorro County adopted a yearlong pause on data centers in June 2026 after a proposal for a 10,000-acre site. Santa Fe County commissioners followed in early July, saying they wanted to be "proactive" before developers showed up.

Those are the local guardrails going up right now, put in place by the communities Hull says should have "community input." His position is that the state shouldn't do the same thing.

We've seen this playbook in other states

Hull is running the same argument other Republican candidates have run, and it lands the same way.

In Alabama, Tommy Tuberville called residents' data center objections "bull crap" and blamed Chinese propaganda — after at least nine communities pushed back over water, power, and noise. In Missouri, Eric Burlison wrote a letter supporting a data center that hundreds of his constituents opposed, telling voters that "what the business is doing doesn't matter." And in Texas, Greg Abbott spent years branding the state the "epicenter of AI development" and handing data centers a sales-tax exemption now projected to cost the state billions — then, in an election year, tried to take credit for slowing them down.

The through-line is that the industry gets the certainty and the neighbors get the study.

What this actually is

New Mexico is in the middle of a documented long-term decline in its water supply — a quarter of it, gone, on the state's own projection. And the single largest new industrial demand for water and power in a generation is arriving. Lawmakers want to pause and write rules first. Local governments already are.

Gregg Hull's answer is that pausing sends the wrong signal — and that the way to get the water is to take it from the fracking industry's waste stream, the one substance New Mexico's own scientists, water commission, and Legislature have all concluded can't be handled safely.

That isn't fixing the guardrails. That's removing two of them at once. We deserve better.

Source

Climate advocacy org urges New Mexico leaders to adopt data center moratorium — Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico, July 7, 2026. Photo: aerial view of the Project Jupiter construction site, June 26, 2026, courtesy of Alexa Reynaud / Food & Water Watch, with aerial support from LightHawk.