Gina Hinojosa’s Populism for Democrats
Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, doesn’t have much in common with Steve Bannon, but she likes to quote one of his maxims: “As goes Tarrant County, so goes Texas, and so goes the world.” Tarrant, one of the largest counties in Texas, is traditionally a Republican bastion. In the past year, though, Democrats have secured some major victories there, including flipping a Senate seat that the G.O.P. had held for more than three decades. Hinojosa is hoping that these wins spread across the state on November 3rd—taking advantage of a “perfect storm of opportunity.”
Until a year ago, Hinojosa was little known outside the Texas House of Representatives. A fifty-two-year-old labor lawyer, she got her start in politics in 2012, after running for a school-board position in Austin. Her fight for public education led her to the state House, where she served five terms, becoming one of Governor Greg Abbott’s most vocal opponents. As this year’s midterms approached, Hinojosa tried to persuade several colleagues to enter the race for governor. “I couldn’t find a taker, because Abbott had a hundred million dollars,” she told me. “Then I just realized, ‘Look, I’ve been fighting this man for years. I can do this, and I have to do this.’ ” Republicans have held the governorship since 1995. If Hinojosa wins, she’ll be the first Latina governor in the history of the state.
Her candidacy drew little attention for months, while Abbott campaigned as if he were running unopposed, barely mentioning Hinojosa in public. But, over the summer, polls began to show his lead narrowing, and in mid-September Hinojosa pulled ahead. In Texas, where Democratic candidates often generate national excitement and then fizzle, Hinojosa has tried to build a post-partisan campaign. She believes that voters have grown tired of “fighting each other in pitched emotional battles,” and that Democrats have lost time engaging in ideological debates. “There’s just no winning the culture war,” she said. “My agenda is not a Democratic agenda. It’s a populist agenda.”
For Hinojosa, that means setting aside such concerns as transgender rights to focus on pocketbook issues. Texas has the country’s highest proportion of uninsured residents. One in six households can’t afford to reliably put food on their table, and Texans have had their electricity shut off at one of the highest rates in the United States. Hinojosa speaks of seeing long lines outside plasma centers—a reliable source of income for many.
Education has been central to her campaign. “Abbott has declared war on Texas public schools,” she told me, repeating a favorite talking point. “They’re often the largest employer in our rural counties, and they’re barely holding on.” In the state House, Hinojosa fought against one of Abbott’s most controversial proposals: a voucher bill designed to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money into private schools. Critics argued that it would draw students away from public institutions and further gut their budgets—a view that many Republican members shared. With support from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania hedge-fund billionaire who is committed to school vouchers, Abbott got detractors voted out of office. The bill passed last year.
Republicans in rural areas staunchly opposed vouchers, and Hinojosa saw a point of commonality. She noted that children in more than a hundred and eighty Texan school districts were attending class only four days a week. Schools across the state were struggling to retain teachers, while programs led by A.I. were making inroads. To reach disgruntled Republicans, Hinojosa often talks about her fight to protect her son’s elementary school, which was threatened with closure by state budget cuts. “What I want is what MAGA moms want,” she said. “They want a great teacher in the classroom, they want smaller class sizes, they want a good school in the neighborhood.”
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic consultant who is working for both Hinojosa and James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate, said that he kept running into the same questions from voters: “If we’ve got enough money to drop bombs in other countries, why don’t we have money for our schools? If we have enough money to make Donald Trump a billion more dollars, then why don’t we have money to bring down the cost of carne asada?” He added, “I’ve never seen folks this angry.”
Yet Rocha, who has worked in Texas politics for nearly forty years, had a word of caution for Democrats. “These folks aren’t running to the Party and our nominees because they’re now in love with all things Democrat—they’re doing it because they’re mad at Republicans,” he said. “We still have two more years to make our case about why they should be with us in the Presidential, which we’re nowhere near. This is what I call an opportunity election: we have an opportunity for these folks to come back, but whether they stay is still left on us.”
Recently, I sat in on two focus groups with Latino voters led by the polling firm Equis. Its co-founder, Stephanie Valencia, was seeing signs of defection from Trump in Texas, which is home to the country’s second-largest number of registered Latino voters. In 2024, Trump carried the state with a fourteen-point lead, winning more than fifty per cent of the Latino vote. Now, Valencia said, Hinojosa was leading Abbott 56-40 among Latinos who are likely to vote.
Almost all the women in the focus groups had voted for Abbott in the last election. They said that Texas had thrived for years under his leadership: the economy boomed, and gas rarely cost more than two dollars a gallon. What changed, in their view, was the Governor’s alliance with Trump. Vast sums of money had gone into projects the state didn’t need, such as the border wall. Meanwhile, Abbott had opposed the expansion of key programs, such as Medicaid. When participants were asked if they felt the country was headed in the wrong direction, all the women raised their hands.
At one point, the groups’ moderator played an ad from Hinojosa’s campaign: in it, the Democratic candidate talks about her decision, more than twenty years ago, to carry a pregnancy to term, despite being given a diagnosis of a deadly fetal anomaly. “My husband and I were overjoyed expecting our first,” Hinojosa says, as photos of their wedding appear onscreen. “The doctor said, ‘I need you to understand she’s not gonna live.’ ” Fighting back tears, Hinojosa adds, “I did understand, but I was making that choice. I chose her.”
The women found the ad persuasive. “The people in power are governing from a position of opulence,” one said. “They have no idea what low-income folks are going through.” Not everyone was familiar with Hinojosa’s trajectory, but they all agreed that Texas needed a change. “She has a purpose—and knows what she wants to achieve,” another participant said.
I raised the ad when I spoke with Hinojosa. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, pregnant women faced with difficult situations like Hinojosa’s no longer have a choice in Texas; the state has one of the country’s highest maternal-mortality rates. I asked where she drew the line between political pragmatism and women’s rights. “We can only work in reality, right?” she said. “The reality is that I will likely be operating in a space where Republicans still hold substantial power, and we are in a deep hole when it comes to this extreme abortion ban, and it is not something that we’re going to be able to fix overnight.” She added, “I’m not going to pretend that my election is going to get us out of that hole.”
Hinojosa’s goal was to prioritize issues that Texans could agree on—including the need to regulate data centers, which has become an unexpectedly popular concern among voters of both parties. Hinojosa previously supported some measures to attract data centers, but less aggressively than Abbott did. In her description, the Governor had turned Texas into the “Wild West of data centers.” He had offered developers tax exemptions worth about a billion dollars a year and imposed few limits on the usage of water or energy. (In turn, his campaign had received lavish contributions from donors linked to the industry.) “The most important thing in any data-center policy is for local communities to have a say on if—and how—those data centers come into their communities,” she said. “Because there are no rules protecting Texans.”
As Hinojosa gained in the polls this summer, Abbott reversed his position on data centers, announcing a moratorium on new developments and an audit on the use of water and energy. The audit is expected to conclude a month after the election. “Hinojosa’s argument that wealthy donors have captured state government taps into a broader frustration with the influence of money in politics,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, told me. “Her path to victory requires not simply mobilizing Democrats but winning over suburban Independents and persuading some traditionally Republican voters that it is time for a change. Hinojosa needs to make the election a referendum on Abbott’s record in Texas rather than simply a referendum on national Republican politics.”
This was still an uphill battle for her, Rottinghaus argued: Abbott has significant advantages in fund-raising and name recognition, as well as a party infrastructure that has dominated Texas politics for decades. The Governor is currently outspending her ten to one, and recent polls show him with a modest lead. “She’s been begging, borrowing, and stealing every dollar she could get in this race—and just now is starting to raise major money,” Rocha, the Democratic consultant, said. “It’s all happened late.”
In recent weeks, dozens of Latino leaders urged the Democratic Governors Association to commit ten million dollars to Hinojosa’s campaign. The D.G.A. offered a million dollars instead. “National Democrats are used to playing it safe,” Hinojosa said. “2026 is not the time to play it safe.” Less than two weeks before the election, an estimated twenty per cent of voters in Texas had yet to hear from her campaign. “Texas is a high roller’s table: you have to pay big to play, but that’s because the payout is so big and the stakes are big nationally.”
Hinojosa had just had a phone call with the D.G.A.’s chair, Andy Beshear. I asked if she had made that case to him.
“Yes,” she replied.
What was Beshear’s response?
“His response was that they were going to commit a million,” she said. ♦