How Gina Hinojosa went from progressive to populist, emerging as Greg Abbott’s most formidable challenger

People weren’t exactly knocking down Gina Hinojosa’s door to get her run for governor last year.

When Beto O’Rourke tried to assemble a slate of Texas’ Democratic stars to run for statewide office last year, he was talking with candidates like state Rep. James Talarico and former U.S. Senate nominee Colin Allred. Hinojosa, the five-term state representative from Austin, wasn’t part of the discussion.

Nor did Hinojosa initially envision herself running for the seat. She first considered running for state comptroller, the far-less glamorous post that oversees the state’s finances.

But no leading Democrats were volunteering to take on Gov. Greg Abbott, a monster fundraiser with an $86 million war chest at the time, who won all three of his previous elections by double digits.

So Hinojosa — a former school board president who was angry at Abbott over his aggressive push to create a $1 billion school voucher program — took the leap, launching her bid as something of a sacrificial lamb.

When she told state Rep. Lulu Flores her plan to run, the fellow Austin Democrat responded, “Of course I’m with you.” But she had to add: “You’re really going to put your head in the guillotine like that?”

“Somebody’s got to do it, and it’s got to be a Latina,” Hinojosa replied.

For much of the year, Hinojosa’s underdog campaign was overshadowed by the wildly competitive and high-profile U.S. Senate race atop the ticket. But over the last month, her bid has become a force of momentum of its own. Though Abbott has outspent her on advertising more than six-to-one, five public polls have him trailing — a first across his three gubernatorial campaigns.

From a fledgling candidate that struggled to shake loose the conventional political assumption that she had no chance, Hinojosa has transformed from an essentially unknown state lawmaker to perhaps Abbott’s most viable Democratic challenger yet — a surge that has dared Democrats to wonder if she could actually topple this mainstay of the Texas Republican establishment after decades of one-party rule, and become the first Latina governor of Texas.

“Everybody knew when she started, it was gonna be real hard to be taken seriously, be hard to raise any money,” said state Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas. But Hinojosa “could see the possibility, and I think was motivated by the absolute need for somebody to take the fight to Abbott.”

Hinojosa has had to introduce herself to voters and deliver her message with far fewer resources than Abbott, and also her party’s new standard-bearer Talarico, who took in more money this last quarter than any U.S. Senate candidate in history in his bid against Ken Paxton.

That’s bred a campaign observers and allies have described as scrappy, strategic, and, if the polls are to be believed, unusually competitive.

“I have helped David sling stones at every Goliath we could see, but normally our stories don’t end like the Bible ends,” said Chuck Rocha, a Hinojosa campaign consultant. “She starts with no money, no name ID, and has built a juggernaut of a campaign that now has an incumbent three-term governor on the ropes — which is unheard of in my business.”

Hinojosa’s rise has run parallel to her embrace of a populism against billionaire and corporate influence. Though she ranked among the most liberal members of the Texas House over her five terms, Hinojosa has worked to shake her progressive brand by avoiding the culture wars, jumping on bipartisan issues of the moment like data centers and focusing tightly on pocketbook issues and public education.

Her path to the governor’s mansion remains decidedly uphill.

According to Hinojosa’s advisers, her winning coalition hinges on Latino voters and “MAGA moms” — suburban women and otherwise more conservative voters who are upset over the state of public education in Texas. Polling has consistently found her up among Latino voters, and a Marist University survey released Wednesday showed her winning 49% of suburban women and a third of rural voters. The survey put Abbott up by four points overall.

Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, the year Ann Richards, the last Democratic governor, fell to George W. Bush. Though several have nudged the contest in Hinojosa’s favor, election forecasters still shade the race red.

Abbott’s campaign has homed in on Hinojosa’s record in the Texas House, casting her as a high-tax, far-left liberal whose policies, far from saving the American dream, would destroy the Texas miracle.

“In addition to voting for higher taxes 40 times and supporting the creation of a state income tax, Gina Hinojosa wants no police, violent criminals out of jail and terrorizing Texas streets, boys in girls’ sports and men in women’s private spaces,” Abbott campaign spokesperson Catherine Frazier said in a statement this week. “Gina was the most radical of her cohorts, and her votes offer an alarming preview of the socialist polices Gina plans to impose if elected governor.”

Abbott has boosted that message, and promoted his own record and affordability agenda, with nearly $100 million so far in advertising, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.

Hinojosa has dismissed the attacks.

“As people get to know who I am, they’re with me,” she said at The Texas Tribune Festival last month. “People know who Greg Abbott is. They know what he’s about, and that is why he is losing.”

A run motivated by school vouchers

A Brownsville native and labor lawyer by trade, Hinojosa first ran for the Austin ISD school board in 2012, when state budget cuts threatened to close her son’s elementary school. She was appointed board president in 2015. But, as she tells it, neighborhood public schools kept closing, so she turned her eye to the Texas House. She won her seat in 2016 and promptly took up public education issues as her calling card.

In interviews, her Democratic colleagues described her as a strategic thinker and policy wonk who helped herd a sometimes unruly caucus and who, alongside Talarico, led the effort in past years to beat back Abbott’s private school voucher program.

During the fight over school vouchers in the 2023 legislative session, Bryant recalled, Hinojosa urged Democrats to sit quietly and let rural Republicans be the voice of opposition. A coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans, concerned that vouchers would sap funding from local public schools, had repeatedly defeated the proposal.

“The Republicans who were willing to vote against vouchers were under a lot of pressure,” said Bryant, who served on the public education committee with Hinojosa. “She made the point: It did not help them to have Democrats sit there speaking in the debate.”

When vouchers finally became law in 2025, Hinojosa said she felt her “best days in the Texas House were behind” her.

At first, she considered running for comptroller because the position would administer the program. But then she realized she needed to think bigger.

“This space where I love to work — space with Republicans, bipartisan space for public schools, for kids — was taken by Greg Abbott,” she said at TribFest. “In order to save public schools, in order to have a government that works for us, we had to reach for that brass ring of the governor’s mansion.”

From progressive to populist

Hinojosa’s gubernatorial campaign got off to a slow start.

When she first got in the race, her internal polling had her down nine percentage points to Abbott — “and I felt good about that,” she said. Her early appearances gave the impression of a campaign still finding its way and struggling to iron out its identity.

Abbott ignored her for months, refusing to say her name and training his fire instead on Talarico. When Barack Obama came to town in May and stopped by an Austin taco restaurant with Talarico and Hinojosa, Abbott’s campaign posted a photo of the Senate nominee and the former president — and cropped out Hinojosa entirely.

That all started changing over the summer.

The Texas Democratic Party convention in June served as a springboard for a fiery, refurbished stump speech, in which Hinojosa delivered a sharpened populist message that would carry her through the rest of her campaign.

“There is one fight that unites us all, and it is the only fight that matters in 2026,” Hinojosa said on stage in Corpus Christi. “Are we going to be a Texas by and for the people? Or is this great state the billionaires’ world and the rest of us just live here?”

That question is at the core of her “no nonsense” pitch, which calls for fully funding public schools, issuing $1,500 checks to all Texas families and slashing government waste.

“I’m running to be the next governor of Texas on an agenda that is back to basics: delivering for the people of Texas,” Hinojosa said recently alongside a pair of Austin parenting social media influencers, who opened the video telling viewers, “You don’t have to be a Democrat to vote for a Democrat.”

How she would actually deliver on those promises remains less clear. But by the end of July, a Fox News poll put Abbott just one point ahead.

Hinojosa seized on bubbling discontent over issues like data centers and Flock cameras. As rural anger over the rapid influx of data centers reached a fever pitch, Hinojosa visited those communities and cut ads that put what she described as a Big Tech takeover at the feet of the sitting governor. (Abbott has responded to voter anger on those issues with measures to rein in Flock deployment and data center development.)

“The data centers piece is the latest physical manifestation of a government and a governor who’s been working for the monied interests,” Hinojosa said at TribFest. “It has created a space where people see that they’ve been sold out by Greg Abbott, and they’re — I call them — Gina-curious.”

Hinojosa has made it a point to avoid culture war issues, arguing “that’s not what people care about in 2026,” and distancing herself from the “progressive” label she once donned proudly as vice chair of the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus.

When Abbott attacked her as “Gender Bender Gina,” citing her pro-LGBTQ+ rights positions in the Texas House, Hinojosa responded with an ad declaring her pronouns, “mom, Texan and soon to be governor.”

“They want to run an entire campaign saying that I’m too woke,” she says in the ad. “I plan to spend an entire campaign focused on the fact that working people are too broke. That’s the difference.”

At TribFest, Hinojosa said her values haven’t changed, but she was clear-eyed in that it didn’t serve the campaign to engage.

“The term progressive has become associated with more culture war issues,” she said. “I just think this moment in time is about populism.”

That shift has offered an opening to Republicans who’ve pointed to her 10-year voting record in the Texas House as contrary to her tune today.

“She pops up for governor and all of a sudden she’s this populist, when really she’s just a standard, rank-and-file, lockstep Democrat,” said John Thomas, a former Abbott strategist and a consultant for private equity and government affairs firm Nestpoint. “That’s going to be her Achilles’ heel.”

Abbott’s campaign has gone all in on her votes against certain property tax reforms and a constitutional amendment that prohibited Texas from adopting an income tax.

“Tax Hiker Hinojosa is so desperate to gain the support of Texans that she has resorted to gaslighting them,” Frazier, Abbott’s spokesperson, said. “She can try to rewrite her record, but she can’t erase it.”

Hinojosa has called the attacks “lies,” and said she would lower property taxes and increase state revenues by eliminating government “waste, fraud and abuse.”

At some point, Hinojosa turned to help from Fight Agency, a prominent Democratic consulting firm whose strategists have shaped high-profile, competitive campaigns from those of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman.

Her ads became clear appeals to right-leaning voters.

One featured Republican and eight-time state champion high school football coach Tim Buchanan; another showcased Lynn Davenport, an anti-voucher education activist who attended Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 rally in Washington.

Davenport, who voted for Abbott in 2014 and continues to identify as a Republican, first began engaging with Hinojosa during public education debates in the Legislature. In the Austin Democrat, Davenport said she found an ally in fights for teacher pay and public education funding, and against vouchers, the STAAR test, administrative bloat at the Texas Education Agency and unfunded mandates imposed by the Legislature on school districts.

“She has been able to rise above the culture war noise,” Davenport said in an interview. “What Gina’s interested in is bringing people together. We have problems to solve.”

“A pretty significant error”

The first public poll to show Hinojosa leading came in mid-September. By that point, Abbott had begun attacking her by name, putting money behind negative advertising against her for the first time later that month.

Rocha, Hinojosa’s consultant, argued Abbott went on air against Hinojosa too late in the cycle to make a difference.

“Folks have made up their minds,” he said. “And culture wars only work when your belly is full and gas is $2 a gallon.”

Thomas, the former Abbott strategist, called the governor’s delay in defining Hinojosa using his massive war chest “a pretty significant error.”

“I don’t think Greg’s team thought she’d be as competitive as she is, and it’s mostly I think because she’s caught tailwinds,” he said. “He lost that window to define her out of the gate.”

Still, Abbott remains a “steady player” whose spending advantage will carry him through November, Thomas contended.

The money disparity was on display in the lead up to early voting. Compared to Abbott’s almost $100 million in advertising, Hinojosa’s campaign had spent just over $16 million on the airwaves, according to AdImpact. As of last week, 20% of likely voters said they weren’t familiar enough with Hinojosa to have an opinion on her.

At a San Antonio taqueria last week, as Hinojosa ate carne asada and potato, egg and cheese tacos for an interview with a TikTok influencer, a couple ordering lunch a few tables over said they hadn’t heard of her before. Neither had another man at the restaurant, who said he planned to vote Republican.

Thirty-four-year-old Derrick Adame, on the other hand, who stepped in for a bite after walking his dog, recognized her immediately and said he was for “anybody but Abbott right now.”

When her campaign hit its one-year anniversary Thursday, four days before the start of early voting, Hinojosa posted a video marking the moment.

“One year ago today we launched this campaign, and everyone from the D.C. establishment to billionaire donors said we didn’t have a chance,” Hinojosa said. “I know who I’m fighting for, because I know who Texas belongs to. So in 2026, don’t let them tell you it can’t happen in Texas — because as I have seen throughout this year, it already is.”