ICYMI: Hinojosa’s “Populist Message – Everyday Texans v. Billionaires” Gives “Democrats Their Highest Hopes in 20 Years”

September 23, 2026

CNN, Houston Chronicle, and CNBC outline how Hinojosa’s focus on bringing back Latino voters, ending the data center madness, and putting money in Texans’ pockets have made her “the most serious electoral challenger that Greg Abbott has ever faced”

Austin, TX – Democratic nominee for Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa is at the center of a changing political landscape in Texas, according to new reporting, as economic pressures and growing frustration with Greg Abbott’s failed leadership create “the likeliest chance for Democrats to break one-party control” of the state in nearly three decades.

According to the Houston Chronicle, “Hinojosa has honed [a] populist message – everyday Texans v. billionaires – over the last year as she has gone from a virtual unknown Austin state representative to perhaps the most serious electoral challenger that Greg Abbott, the state’s three-term Republican governor, has ever faced.”

To do this, Hinojosa has worked to connect with Texans across the political spectrum. As a result, she’s found herself “in a series of unusual rooms,” wrote CNBC. After sit-downs with MAGA voters in deep-red rural Red Oak and fraternity brothers in Austin, she told CNBC, “It was people who typically don’t give someone like me a chance. And they were very curious about my campaign.”

Throughout her campaign, Hinojosa has also led the effort to win back Latino voters from border communities – including her hometown of Brownsville – who voted for Trump in 2024 by focusing on the economy and dissatisfaction with the political system. “People voted for Trump because he said the system’s rigged. Republicans have been in power, and so they are primarily to blame here, but there is blame to go around. To be able to acknowledge that, to see it and say it — that’s what we’re about,” she told CNN.

Read more below.

CNN: “Latino voters, data centers and Republican problems are giving Texas Democrats their highest hopes in 20 years”

“Now what?” Gina Hinojosa asked, looking at the half-done house across the lot where the crew hadn’t shown up that morning.
Had the workers been pulled over? Would they come tomorrow? Were they just running late?
“Your guess,” said Ronnie Cavazos, the chairman of the South Texas Builders Alliance, as he led the Democratic nominee for governor on a brief tour of a neighborhood that had been in demand for new workers at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, “is as good as mine.”
Cavazos has a long list of problems his industry faces. Tariffs have driven up the price of timber and other materials. Immigration enforcement raids on work sites sent a much wider chill through a workforce worried about being indefinitely detained if they left their homes. Inflation drove up all costs, as did higher interest rates on lots that were left unfinished much longer. Then, there is the historic spike in diesel.
“[Democrats] thought in the past we could win just based on how bad the other side was and the charisma of our side. And that’s not enough,” Hinojosa said, later that afternoon, sitting in the small café of an independent bookstore in Brownsville. “We have a strong coordinated effort in a way that we haven’t had in modern history, where we’re all working together seamlessly to make sure we get out the vote in the state.”
That coordination means Hinojosa occasionally appears with her colleague in the Texas House, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who is in a tight Senate race with the scandal-plagued state attorney general, Ken Paxton. But mostly, they split up to cover more ground in the massive state, the first time in the 21st century that there has been more than one strong Democrat running statewide.
Hinojosa’s campaign argues that if she and Talarico win the same percentage of the Latino vote that O’Rourke did in 2018 (and stays steady among other voters), that would be enough to win, given population growth and shifts.
Hinojosa never actively talks about possibly being the first Latina governor, even when pushed — but she regularly refers to what it would mean to be the first governor from the Valley, where she grew up and went to high school. Asked after her rally in Brownsville by a reporter what it was like being back home, she talked about how everywhere she went, people introduced themselves as lost cousins–and then switched into Spanish to answer the next question.
In McAllen, at an outdoor bar called The Gremlin, Hinojosa asked the crowd to raise hands if they trusted government. No one did.
At a phone bank set up in a bike shop/coffee shop in Brownsville, she held her hand to her forehead as a woman at the end of the line told her about having to help pay her mother’s electricity bills while being so behind on interest payments for her property tax that she’s going to move into a trailer.
“You are not alone,” Hinojosa told her.
That evening, under the fake flowers and chandeliers of a quinceañera and wedding hall a windy 10-minute drive from the border, she leaned on another favorite line: “Is this going to be by and for the people, or is it the billionaires’ world and we just live here?”
“People voted for Trump because he said the system’s rigged. And people know that’s right. I know that that’s correct. Democrats have not been saying that. Democrats have been defending a system that is totally indefensible, a system that is working against us,” Hinojosa said. “Republicans have been in power, and so they are primarily to blame here, but there is blame to go around. To be able to acknowledge that, to see it and say it — this campaign, that’s what we’re about.”

Houston Chronicle: Gina Hinojosa is betting that voters are tired of culture wars — and Greg Abbott

Gina Hinojosa had a plea for the crowd that came to hear her stump in McAllen last week during a swing through the Rio Grande Valley: set aside the culture wars.
People are struggling to make ends meet, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate said. Some teachers have told her they started donating blood to earn extra money to pay their bills. One left the profession to drive for Uber because they said the pay and insurance were better.
“Nobody has the luxury of the culture wars anymore,” Hinojosa told the couple hundred spectators, adding: “The only winner in those wars is like 15 billionaire tech dudes who have amassed money, who have amassed power, and who have amassed, it turns out, all of our data in the last 10 years, and they are about to blow up the world if we don’t come together fast to save ourselves.”
Hinojosa has honed that populist message – everyday Texans v. billionaires – over the last year as she has gone from a virtual unknown Austin state representative to perhaps the most serious electoral challenger that Greg Abbott, the state’s three-term Republican governor, has ever faced.
She has been buoyed by political winds that are shaping the midterms into a potentially disastrous election cycle for Republicans in Texas as voters fume over rising prices and seemingly unchecked growth of big tech. Hinojosa has pinned the fault squarely on Abbott, who has held the highest office in the state for 12 years.
From opposition to private school vouchers to data centers and Flock cameras, Hinojosa’s central message is that Abbott has “sold out” Texas to his donors.
“That’s what this election is about,” she told an energetic crowd of hundreds in her hometown of Brownsville. “Who does Texas belong to?”
Abbott has sailed to double-digit victories over every one of his past Democratic challengers. But several recent polls have shown a closer race and at least one tracker, Real Clear Politics, has deemed it a “toss up.”
A September survey, by the Emerson College Polling Center, showed Hinojosa trailing by 3 points among likely voters but narrowing the governor’s lead from August. It also showed her up with key voting blocs, including independents and Latinos, that Abbott was winning at the same point in his 2022 bid against Beto O’Rourke.
The fact that the governor’s campaign is even mentioning Hinojosa by name may be notable. For most of this year, Abbott has instead been laser-focused on James Talarico, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate at the top of the ticket, who had much higher name recognition coming out of a competitive primary.
But in recent weeks, Abbott has gone after Hinojosa directly, labeling her as a radical leftist and rolling out nicknames like “Gender Bender Gina” and “High Tax Hinojosa.”
The campaign decided to split the state into regions and run mini campaigns in each to get a better feel for where voters were on the ground, helping craft localized messages around school takeovers, data centers and Flock cameras.
The data center debate that erupted this summer, both in Texas and nationally, played right into her campaign themes. In July, she called on Abbott to halt construction and bring lawmakers back to Austin for a special session to set rules on where they can be built.
Her first broadcast TV ad focused on the issue and ran exclusively in rural markets, part of an effort to win over Republicans and independents — or at least discourage them from voting for Abbott.
To win in November, Hinojosa will likely need to drive up turnout among Latino voters, especially in her home region of South Texas.
The Gremlin, a small bar and concert venue in McAllen, was packed on a Monday night as hundreds showed up to hear her pitch.
Others were relatively new to political events, hearing for the first time her pledge to freeze electric rates and push lawmakers to use a portion of the state’s rainy day fund for $1,500 checks to every Texas household — an idea she joked President Donald Trump “stole” from her with his $5,000 promise if the GOP wins the midterms.
Guillermo Guzman, 65, said he had never attended a rally before. Guzman described himself as a swing voter and said he voted for Trump in 2024 — part of a wave of Latino support for Trump that helped turn border counties red for the first time. Guzman said he has also voted for Abbott, but now sees the governor as “a puppet to Trump.”
“We need change for the people, because they’re forgetting about not only the minorities, but people at the bottom,” Guzman said. “It takes us back to the kings and queens time, where you have the poor people there, you know, farming the land and doing all the horrible, ugly, dirty jobs. And the kings, what are they doing? Living off the money.”
Marina Elizondo, 60, was also attending her first rally. Like Guzman, she said she has voted for candidates from both parties, including for Abbott during his first gubernatorial run in 2014. But her views of the governor have soured since.
“There’s just so much hate and so much division. It’s like somebody needs to do something, and these guys are not doing it,” Elizondo said. “I don’t do politics. But we need a change. So I’m hoping she’s like Ann Richards, Jr. and she’s going to bring that change.”

CNBC: Texas turning blue may hinge on Democrats harnessing data center opposition

Across Texas and the country, people have flooded local meetings to protest proposed projects, citing concerns about the use of water and other resources, noise and light pollution, rising utility costs and falling property values. Some towns and cities have moved to block their development, as anti-data center advocacy groups and social media pages proliferate.
Polling shows the economy and cost of living are top of mind for voters in the runup to the 2026 midterm elections. But some political strategists say data centers are a potent enough issue that they could shift the balance of power in Texas, potentially paving the way for Democrats to win statewide for the first time since 1994. Democrats have their sights set on the governor’s mansion, as well as an open U.S. Senate seat, and the outcome of the Senate race could determine control of Congress.
More than anything, the ordeal has made McCallister — who said he’s a lifelong Republican and voted for Trump three times — question his political leanings. The GOP, he said, has been too slow to react.
“I’m definitely frustrated with the Republican Party. I have gone literally out of my way to warn them, to tell them what’s happening,” he said. “Y’all should have picked up on this much earlier than y’all did.”
With Trump’s unyielding stance on the issue, Abbott and Paxton face a dilemma: Either they defy Trump, the de facto head of the Republican Party, and their donors with tech and data center-industry connections. Or they anger a sizable bloc of data center opponents that has emerged within their base.
Fifty-seven percent of Texas voters polled by the Texas Politics Project said they opposed a data center being built in their community, including 43% of Republicans, 54% of independents and 60% of rural voters.
The cross-partisan grassroots movement could threaten Republicans’ hopes of keeping Texas red in what is already expected to be a difficult year for the GOP, amid high consumer prices and Trump’s falling approval ratings.
Abbott — who is polling slightly ahead of Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa in a race the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter labels “likely R” — in 2015 signed legislation creating new sales tax exemptions for large data centers and as recently as November called Texas the “epicenter of AI development.”
Abbott has received millions of dollars in contributions from AI and data center interests, including $500,000 donations from xAI founder Elon Musk and from Bennett, the Black Mountain CEO. Paxton’s campaign and affiliated groups have received more than $400,000 from individuals and companies with data center ties, The Washington Sun reported.
Hinojosa has called for a moratorium until laws can be passed to protect people from potential impacts on the environment, local economies or the power grid.
On a Thursday night at the University of Texas at Austin, Hinojosa sat in an upstairs common room of a fraternity house.
Downstairs an hour earlier, more than 100 college students had skipped the local bars — or at least delayed their arrival — to hear Hinojosa speak about her campaign. They crammed into the musky parlor of the Tejas Club, where the only beverages that night were of the non-alcoholic variety.
It was the latest in a series of unusual rooms in which Hinojosa has found herself on the campaign trail.
Recently, that included a trip to a home in Red Oak, a suburb of Dallas, where she sat in the host’s living room with a group of data center opponents that she described as “all MAGA.”
“It was people who typically don’t give someone like me a chance. And they were very curious about my campaign. They were very curious about me,” Hinojosa told CNBC in the upstairs living room after the event. To her right, a concert poster for the band Geese hung on a door. Behind her, a shotski — a prop for communal shot-taking popular on college campuses — leaned against a wall in the corner.
There was not universal agreement on all issues in that room in Red Oak, Hinojosa recalled. But the first question the group asked her, she said, was about data centers, one of which is proposed nearby.
“It is a threat to their families, to their homes, to their communities, to their way of life, to their water that they drink,” she said. “So it is, for many Texans, a kind of existential threat. And I have met single-issue voters on it.”

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