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For all the conjecture that Abbott is eyeing the White House, numbers from this week’s conservative conference suggest there’s little excitement about him running.

Well, that’s gotta sting.

Despite that Gov. Greg Abbott covets the nation’s highest office, a at last week’s in Dallas shows just 1% of attendees would back a 2028 presidential candidacy by the Texas Republican.

That puts Abbott on par with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who scored the same percentage. Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who had a in the 2024 GOP primary — and Donald Trump Jr., who’s never held public office in his life, both placed ahead of Abbott with 2%.

Vice President JD Vance led the pack with 53%, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio pulled 35%. A total of 3% of attendees said they were undecided.

All in all, that adds up to an anemic showing for Abbott from a right-wing, Texas-skewing audience.

Still, the outcome isn’t surprising to Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson. Abbott usually fails to rank better than seventh or eighth in polls showing who Republican voters would next like to see run for president, the professor points out.

Indeed, other Texas governors, John Connally and Rick Perry among them, also had a hard time leveraging popularity in the Lone Star State to the national stage, Jillson said.

“The aspirational message you deliver in Texas is, ‘I’m your governor and I cut your taxes and fought these regulations,’ but if you’re going to run at the national level, it has to go beyond that,” Jillson said. “You have to have a plan on education, you have to be able to say something about healthcare. There has to be more.”

Given Texas’ apparent race to the bottom on education — it states in per-student funding — and healthcare — it has the nation’s — it seems unlikely Abbott’s on a quick path to broadening his appeal.

Indeed, for all the conjecture about White House aspirations, Jillson said he doubts the governor ever plans to put his neck out for such a contest. Abbott is notoriously cautious and poll-driven, and as the CPAC survey suggests, even a purportedly friendly crowd isn’t clamoring for him to run.

“I don’t think Abbott’s ever been convinced a presidential run is something he needs to pursue,” Jillson said.

Judge rules that HUD effort to change criteria for homeless funding is unlawful

A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s effort to dramatically change the criteria to get tens of millions of dollars in funding to aid homeless people was unlawful.

Several nonprofits filed a lawsuit last year accusing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development of changing the rules for receiving $75 million to build housing for homeless families and individuals. The plaintiffs accused the Trump administration of issuing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, for the Continuum of Care Builds program to better align with its social policies.

U.S District Judge Mary McElroy, nominated by President Donald Trump, said the department’s “slapdash imposition of political whims” was unlawful and she ordered it to scrap the new policy.

“Once again, this Court is faced with a case in which an executive agency has made a last-minute decision to make major, disruptive changes to grants within its purview, all for the express purpose of accomplishing the current administration’s policy objectives,” McElroy said in her ruling that the NOFO violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

A spokesperson for HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Advocates for plaintiffs welcomed the ruling.

“For more than three decades, the federal government has supported housing providers and communities through HUD’s programs to help people experiencing homelessness move into stable housing,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We are pleased that the court has stopped the Trump-Vance administration from holding life-saving funding hostage to a political agenda.”

Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the ruling was “a victory for people across this nation who have overcome homelessness and stabilized in HUD’s permanent housing programs.”

“Today’s news reinforces a fundamental truth: that the work to end homelessness is not partisan, and never should be interfered with for political means,” Oliva said in a statement.

Plaintiffs argued the Trump administration was aiming to upend polices in place for decades to satisfy its political considerations, including whether jurisdictions “support sanctuary protections, harm reduction practices, or inclusive policies for transgender people.”

The Alliance and the Women’s Development Corporation argued that HUD lacked the authority to make the changes, adding that the new award process was “shockingly unlawful” and would “irreparably injure qualified applicants for these funds and the communities they serve.”

In its court filings, HUD argued the new criteria was an effort “to ensure the availability of funding to protect our Nation’s most vulnerable individuals and families from the trauma of homelessness while simultaneously promoting self-sufficiency.”

“Defendants acted reasonably and prudently because the NOFO conditions, focusing on public safety, cooperation with law enforcement and prohibitions on illegal drug use, are sufficiently related to the funding goals of self-sufficiency and reduction of trauma,” HUD wrote.

Heading into last week’s state legislative special election in Florida, Republicans had reason to be cautiously optimistic. The race was in a Palm Beach district that Donald Trump won by 11 points in 2024 — it’s the same district that houses Mar-a-Lago — and it has been represented by Republicans for years.

Ahead of the special election, the president tried to rally support for the GOP candidate, but it didn’t matter. Democrat Emily Gregory narrowly won anyway, flipping the seat from red to blue.

On the same day, roughly 200 miles away, there was a state Senate special election in the Tampa area, in a district Trump won by 7 points. It took a while to nail down the results, but as this week got underway, the final outcome delivered yet another round of bad news to Republican officials. The New York Times reported:

Democrats on Monday officially claimed a second upset in Florida’s recent special elections when The Associated Press declared an electrical workers union leader to be the winner of a tight state senate contest in reliably Republican West Tampa.

Brian Nathan, a Navy veteran and member of a new cadre of working class Democrats, will join Emily Gregory, a small-business owner with a public-health background, as upstart Democrats in Tallahassee.

In a Fox News interview last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about the special elections and whether he sees them as “a canary in the coal mine” ahead of the midterm elections in the fall. “These special elections are a one-off,” the Louisiana Republican replied. “They’re anomalies.”

To be sure, that might make GOP leaders feel better. Some of them might even believe it. But when the same thing keeps happening, it becomes a lot tougher to see them as one-off anomalies.

Consider what we’ve seen so far this year. In January, two Democratic candidates won lopsided victories in special elections in Minnesota and restored the state House to an even partisan split.

Soon after, in Texas, Republicans invested a considerable amount of resources to keep a state Senate seat in the suburbs of Fort Worth. They failed, as Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a union leader and Air Force veteran, won a double-digit victory in a district Trump won by 17 points in 2024. (The president personally tried to rally support for the GOP candidate, but then pretended he didn’t after she lost badly.)

In early February, Republicans in Louisiana saw a unique opportunity to flip a state legislative seat from blue to red — in a district Trump won by 13 points — but when voters had their say, the Democratic candidate prevailed by 24 points.

In early March, a Democratic state legislative candidate flipped a seat in Arkansas. A week later, a Democratic state legislative candidate flipped a seat in New Hampshire, in an outcome that The New Hampshire Union Leader called “stunning” and a “big upset” given the Republican advantage in the district.

With the Tampa results in mind, The Downballot noted in its latest analysis that Democrats have now flipped 30 seats from red to blue in special elections since Trump returned to the White House. Over that same period, the number of seats flipped from blue to red remains zero.

Some will no doubt argue that it’s best not to read too much into a special election held in the winter, several months before November’s races. It’s a fair point. But what matters is how the results fit into the broader political landscape. Republicans are tied to an unpopular president, a growing number of their congressional members are retiring, key elements of the GOP agenda are facing an intensifying public backlash, and they keep losing special elections, including in contests they expected to win.

If party insiders aren’t concerned about their standing ahead of this year’s midterm elections, they’re not paying close enough attention.