IN THE NEWS: Hinojosa Education Platform Resonates with Lifelong Conservatives

August 27, 2026

The Texas Observer: “Several conservative moms said they see themselves in Hinojosa; they feel like they’re all in the same fight for their kids’ future. Despite Abbott’s latest efforts, they don’t think he can be trusted with another four years in power.”

Austin, TX – New reporting from The Texas Observer and The New Republic highlights how Democratic nominee for Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa’s vision for Texas public schools is bringing together parents, educators, and lifelong conservatives ready for change after years of Greg Abbott’s failed leadership.

One former Abbott voter “began to lean more to the left as she watched a crisis unfold in Texas’ public education system,” according to The Texas Observer. “She’s not buying what Abbott’s selling with his latest education initiatives, and she hopes voters of various stripes will follow her lead.”

Meanwhile, Hinojosa’s “growing anti-incumbent base includes conservative mothers, educators, and school board trustees, which has, at least according to recent polls from Fox News and Texas A&M, helped put her neck and neck with the powerful Republican governor who’s seeking an unprecedented fourth term at the helm of the state government,” wrote The Texas Observer.

“I’m as red a Republican as they come, but I have to do something different,” a three-time Trump voter told The New Republic.

Bridging the gap to lifelong conservatives looking to break rank, “The Hinojosa campaign has gone all in to mobilize voters around public education with an initiative it launched back in June called Team Texas Public Schools,” added The Observer. “The team connects with parents, teachers, and school staff on organizing tactics to protect neighborhood schools and elect Hinojosa to office. Now, the Save Our Schools tour is training volunteers to take that message door-to-door throughout the state.”

“For Texans, public schools are crucial to our identity,” Hinojosa told The New Republic. “They’re in our state constitution, they’re the largest employers in our rural communities, they represent ‘Friday Night Lights.’ That they are in crisis is a big deal.”

Read more below.

The Texas Observer: Will a Coalition of ‘MAGA Moms’ Rally Behind Gina Hinojosa’s Bid for Texas Governor?

Last Sunday at a venue in the Austin suburb of Kyle, Merideth Keller delivered a speech to local attendees that took square aim at a man she once voted for back in 2014: Governor Greg Abbott. Over the course of her 12 years on the school board of Hays Consolidated Independent School District, a position she left in 2022, Keller began to lean more to the left as she watched a crisis unfold in Texas’ public education system. She’s not buying what Abbott’s selling with his latest education initiatives, and she hopes voters of various stripes will follow her lead.
“Greg Abbott set the fire, watched it blaze, and now wants to put it out to get the glory,” said Keller, who now considers herself more of a moderate, helping to elect both Democrats and Republicans down the ballot. She was there to kick off the first stop of the Save Our Schools tour, a statewide effort by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa to turn growing education issues in Texas into an effective electoral cudgel in November.
“I have to say, I voted for Greg Abbott, and I had to learn that that was the wrong choice, so that other people can admit it too,” Keller said.
Public school closures, private school vouchers, and state takeovers have driven a wedge between many lifelong conservatives and the Texas GOP they once trusted. For some, public education is the top issue driving their embrace of a Democrat at the top of the ticket. The Latina legislator from Austin has arisen as a guardian of public education by promising to end state takeovers, eliminate standardized STAAR testing, and to “DOGE” the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
Her growing anti-incumbent base includes conservative mothers, educators, and school board trustees, which has, at least according to recent polls from Fox News and Texas A&M, helped put her neck and neck with the powerful Republican governor who’s seeking an unprecedented fourth term at the helm of the state government.
“I found myself in alliance with conservative MAGA moms who’ve been pushing back on the privatization of our public schools,” Hinojosa said in an interview with the Texas Observer this week. “The whole system is broken and needs to be redone.”
The Hinojosa campaign has gone all in to mobilize voters around public education with an initiative it launched back in June called Team Texas Public Schools, branded with school bus-yellow signs, swirly red pen, and a simple math formula for success: “Commit Today + Vote Early = Day 1 Change.” In weekly Zoom huddles, the team connects with parents, teachers, and school staff on organizing tactics to protect neighborhood schools and elect Hinojosa to office. Now, the Save Our Schools tour is training volunteers to take that message door-to-door throughout the state.
Some are looking at the Democratic special election upset in Texas Senate District 9 in January as a bellwether for what’s to come in November. Taylor Rehmet, a local union leader, handily flipped the deep red legislative district over a right-wing ideologue, after Abbott appointed incumbent state Senator Kelly Hancock to be acting comptroller. Rehmet’s platform emphasized raising teacher pay and repealing school vouchers.
“My theory is what happened in that SD 9 race could happen in rural Texas if you could truly mobilize people around education,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, a lifelong Republican from Spearman who operates two rural newspapers.
Disillusioned conservatives like Bellsnyder have a shared feeling that the Republican Party and its leaders who run the state have not only betrayed public schools but also the principles of fiscal responsibility and small government. They believe the A-F accountability ratings have created a top-down culture of education that undermines local control, paving the way for school closures, takeovers, and a mass exodus of teachers. The state’s rainy day fund has surpassed $24 billion while 170 public schools have been confirmed to shutter since 2023.
“Why aren’t people going after Greg Abbott for hoarding our tax money and for utilizing it the wrong way?” Ruth Beasley, a grandmother from Arlington who said she’s always voted for Republicans, wondered in an interview with the Observer.
Beasley first discovered Hinojosa on Facebook, and although she still has policy qualms about the border and abortion, she admired how the state representative stood up for public education and said she plans to vote for her in November.
In the 2023 session, Hinojosa fought alongside a band of rural Republicans in the Texas House to block controversial school voucher bills from passage. That December, Abbott took a $6 million donation from Jeff Yass, a billionaire backer of school choice from Pennsylvania—the largest-ever single campaign contribution to a candidate in Texas history. He received another $6 million from Yass over the next several months, a cash surplus that he used to finance an unrelenting push to enact vouchers. Abbott spent millions of dollars on attack ads targeting several anti-voucher Republican incumbents, most of whom were successfully ousted.
“It was the death of a Republican Party that I knew and loved,” said Bellsnyder.
Since the voucher battle, Bellsnyder continued to watch Hinojosa’s advocacy on the House public education committee and admired her ability to “ask the questions that were on my mind.” In March 2025, she was riding a tractor in her hometown of Spearman near the border of Oklahoma when Hinojosa reached out on social media. Hinojosa was introducing a bill to audit the TEA and requested the support of outspoken Republicans like Bellsnyder, who had grown to see the state agency as the epitome of Abbott’s wrongheaded education policy.
“Hell yeah!” said Bellsnyder. “I drove down to Austin that week, and then we stood with her in support of that bill that she was filing—which should have been a Republican bill, in my opinion because we were DOGE-ing everything else,” Bellsnyder recalled, referring to the acronym for Elon Musk’s short-lived and disastrous federal auditing effort called the Department of Government Efficiency.
The bill proposed to eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies and cut off costly vendor contracts to prioritize direct funding to public schools. Although it didn’t pass, Hinojosa has integrated these proposals into her campaign. On August 19, a newly released audit of the TEA found that the budget for management salaries rose nearly 64 percent from 2021 to 2025, with one manager for every 3.5 employees—a ratio that runs afoul of state budgeting requirements.
“It revealed what we already knew,” Hinojosa, who was born and raised in Brownsville, told the Observer. “More and more dollars are taken from the classroom and used to feed this bureaucracy in Austin.”
“He has had commission after commission on teacher pay and public schools, but he refuses to do the right thing,” said Hinojosa. “It is really an insult just to convene another commission when parents, teachers, and myself included have been yelling at him to do the right thing for years.”
On the stage of The Railhouse venue in Kyle, Keller called out what she says is Abbott’s blatant hypocrisy. She told the audience that his “endless” list of unfunded mandates has required more administrators and higher costs. “But don’t worry,” she quipped, “Greg Abbott is about to swoop in!”
“Greg Abbott is again scapegoating and punishing school districts because of their desperate efforts to try to have teachers in the classroom,” Hinojosa said.
Several conservative moms said they see themselves in Hinojosa; they feel like they’re all in the same fight for their kids’ future. Despite Abbott’s latest efforts, they don’t think he can be trusted with another four years in power.
“He’s deceptive and he lies,” said Beasley. “Gina has won me over on education, and he has so turned my stomach that I can’t vote for him. I just can’t do it.”

The New Republic: Why Democrats Must Embrace a “Mom Populist” Education Agenda

Pease Elementary in downtown Austin, Texas, has sat empty since 2020. Formerly the oldest continuously operating school in Texas, Pease was shuttered by the Austin Independent School District to save money. On a steamy day this summer, the hulking structure provided an appropriate backdrop for the political campaign of Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic state representative who is challenging incumbent GOP Governor Greg Abbott.
A district plan to close the school in 2012, while Hinojosa’s son was a student there, inspired her political career, sending her first to the school board and then, four years later, to the Statehouse just a few blocks away. But Pease is also symbolic of Texas’s surprisingly fierce attachment to public education. The school dates back to 1876, the same year that the current state constitution enshrined “a system of public free schools”—a factoid that Texas advocates drop with regularity. That Pease is no longer a school matters, too. Since late 2023, at least 135 Texas public schools either have closed or are slated to close due to budget crises brought on by state funding shortfalls.
Hinojosa believes her message that Texas public schools won’t survive another four years of Abbott can galvanize voters across the political spectrum. “For Texans, public schools are crucial to our identity,” Hinojosa told me. “They’re in our state constitution, they’re the largest employers in our rural communities, they represent ‘Friday night lights.’ That they are in crisis is a big deal.”
Hinojosa’s critique goes far beyond budget cuts and declining test scores. Schools are the centerpiece of what she argues has been an organized effort by Abbott and the GOP to rig the system against the state’s kids, especially those in working-class families like those she grew up with in Brownsville. Call it “mom populism”—an appeal that centers a full-throated rejection of school privatization and presents the GOP’s increasingly aggressive interventions into local school districts as “corruption schemes” intended to benefit big donors, especially the right-wing oilmen who hold such sway here. By systematically weakening public schools, Hinojosa argues, Abbott and his cronies are undermining the American Dream.
Michael Ryan is one of Abbott’s defectors. A retired educator, Ryan served on the school board in Fort Worth until the state took over the district last year, installing handpicked Beating a three-term GOP incumbent in a state like Texas remains a tall order, but there are signs that Hinojosa’s argument may just be breaking through. While Abbott, who is running for an unprecedented fourth term, comes to this fight with a massive war chest, Republicans in Texas are restive, and education is part of their discontent. The $1 billion school voucher program that Abbott muscled through the state legislature last year, after he orchestrated primary runs against rural Republicans who opposed it, remains deeply controversial among many conservatives, who view vouchers less as “education freedom” than as a state takeover of private and home schools.leaders. “I’m as red a Republican as they come, but I have to do something different,” said Ryan, a three-time Trump voter. Hinojosa’s pledge to fire Abbott’s top education official on day one won him over, along with her sharp critique of school vouchers and the big money that flooded into the state on their behalf. Ryan was particularly rankled by the $10 million Abbott received from Pennsylvania billionaire investor Jeff Yass. “In the old days, a bribe meant $100 on the floor of the Capitol,” said Ryan.
Recent elections indicate that defectors like Ryan are part of a trend. This January, Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a veteran and union machinist, handily defeated a conservative activist in a special election for a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, a seat Democrats last held in 1991. Despite being far outspent by his opponent, Rehmet won by a decisive 14-point margin in a district Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, alarming Republicans, not just in Texas, but across the country. “[A] swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed,” chimed in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on X. Rehmet used his background as a union leader at Lockheed Martin to win over working-class voters, but he also made public education central to his campaign, sounding many of the same themes that Hinojosa is running on now.
A recent analysis of this spring’s GOP primary turnout in Texas warned that the party’s historically reliable voters were dangerously disengaged, “either sitting out this cycle or, in some cases, shifting their partisan affiliation entirely.” The phenomenon was most pronounced in suburban districts, the pollsters concluded.
That finding comes as no surprise to Hinojosa. “People know who has been in charge,” she told me, “and they want change.”
That Democrats are running—and winning—at least in part on education may seem surprising, given the dire reporting on the state of the nation’s schools. In recent years, the headlines have been relentlessly bleak—sliding test scores in math and reading, a “learning recession,” high rates of chronic absenteeism.
And again and again, I heard the strains of an emergent “mom populism,” from male and female candidates alike, that makes an argument for public schools as a vehicle for collective economic uplift. Notably, these Democrats are not claiming that education alone can lift kids out of poverty, or that sending more kids to college is the way to address inequality—an argument that has proved to be a political trap for the party. Instead, candidates often pair their defense of public schools as institutions that benefit working-class kids with populist calls for higher wages and more worker power. When it comes to issues like school vouchers, the influence of teachers’ unions, and college-for-all, these mom populists are departing dramatically from the prescription offered by centrist Democrats, and they’re winning as a result.

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