Gina Hinojosa Wins Texas Governor’s Race in Political Earthquake

Gina Hinojosa at an election rally in Plano, Texas, October 2026. Laura Brett/Sipa USA/AP Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Gina Hinojosa wasn’t given much of a shot at unseating Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott when she launched her campaign last year. On Tuesday, she became the first Democrat to win a governor’s race in the Lone Star State since since 1990. Abbott began his quest for a fourth term with $100 million in the bank and a record of outperforming other Republicans on the ticket. But the Democratic state representative from Austin made a difficult race competitive with a relentless focus on the “corruption” of one the state’s most powerful elected officials and the data centers and voucher programs he’d pushed on the state. To Hinojosa, there was a straight line between the affordability crunch facing voters and the donors who filled Abbott’s campaign accounts. She even gave a name to the higher costs, higher taxes, and declining services voters experienced: “the Greg Abbott corruption tax.” From Trump to Epstein to data centers, Gina Hinojosa and other Democrats have seized on a rigged system as the unifying message of the midterms. Reported by Tim Murphy, Produced by Peter Berger The great shining (or humming) symbol of Abbott’s corporate dealings was data centers. She talked about them all the time. As I reported in a recent profile, Hinojosa traveled to communities where residents had begun to organize against their construction. She demanded a full moratorium on their construction until the legislature could convene—next year—and hash out a new set of regulations. Abbott’s announcement that he was pausing new permits while the state took stock of what was going on, was a weak gesture, she said. But if Greg Abbott was back-pedaling so dramatically on something that had been at the center of his entire economic program, something was very clearly up. By the end, Abbott was a figure of desperation, running to the conservative media weirdo Benny Johnson to warn that Hinojosa “would destroy white men and their jobs in our state.” Republicans don’t only make these kinds of noises when they’re very distressed, but in Abbott’s case, it offered a glimpse of a flailing candidate with no new cards left to play. Texans weren’t voting on a culture war this year. Hinojosa, for one, had no intention of fighting one. She told me, and anyone who would listen, that the culture war “wasn’t winnable”: “You can’t win the culture war issues because the culture wars are about our differences. They’re about our lived experiences, and in Texas, we’re such a diverse community in all sorts of ways, right? Not just racially, and ethnically, but regionally… We’re like a country. So, if we know there’s no winning the culture wars, why do we keep arguing about them? I’m tired of arguing culture wars for 10 years, and most people are.” Her focus, instead, was on a populist fight that could unite rural conservatives mad about vouchers and big-city Democrats fed-up with school takeovers. She wanted Texans who were fed up with what they were getting out of government to blame Abbott, and “the 15 billionaire tech dudes” who were increasingly “controlling our land, our lives, our future.” Like James Talarico in the race for US Senate, it was a distinctly populist message that met voters where they are. The results speak for themselves.