When I met Gina Hinojosa in September, her race to become Texas’ first Democratic governor since Ann Richards seemed like a wildly long shot. At the time, Hinojosa told me that a fifth of the state still didn’t know her name, and she was being outspent 6 to 1. Given how often Texas has broken Democratic hearts, I asked her why we should believe that the state could really flip. Hinojosa said it was because Texas Democrats finally had a team.
When Beto O’Rourke ran for Senate in 2018, he was on his own, without a strong slate of statewide candidates. But this year, Hinojosa was running alongside James Talarico, the young, dynamic Senate candidate, and, for the first time in Texas history, Democratic candidates in every statehouse and congressional district. “We’re ready,” she said.
So was Texas. If Talarico alone won on Tuesday night, it would have been an earthquake. Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. In 2024, Donald Trump won the state by nearly 14 points. But now that Talarico and Hinojosa have both won, along with other Texas Democrats up and down the ballot, it’s hard to overstate the scale of the psychological blow to Republicans. Texas, after all, has long been a dependable political anchor for Republicans, much as California is for Democrats. “Texas is the foundation of the Republican Party in America,” the state’s right-wing comptroller, Don Huffines, warned in a post on X last week, amid an early vote showing Democratic strength. “When the foundation breaks, it ALL falls apart.”
Huffines didn’t know how right he was. On Tuesday, the foundation of the Republican Party dropped out all over the country, leading to victories in contests Democrats barely dreamed of winning — not just Kansas and Ohio, but South Carolina. Still, that shouldn’t overshadow what brilliant races both Talarico and Hinojosa won.
Talarico waged one of the best campaigns in the country, trying to inspire cynical voters with a politics of loving thy neighbor. Both he and Hinojosa, in their different ways, promised to bring together deeply divided communities to wrest back power from predatory billionaires. Kicking off his Senate campaign in Round Rock, Texas, last year, Talarico said, “The people at the top — the Elon Musks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — they spend so much time and energy keeping us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power.” On the trail, Hinojosa often said that the race turned on a single question: “Does Texas belong to the people, or is this the billionaires’ world and we just live here?”
The Republican campaigns had their own answer. Talarico’s opponent, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, is almost comically corrupt, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent more than $160 million trying to drag him across the finish line. Republicans ran gross A.I.-generated ads meant to demean Talarico and terrify voters. One depicted him wearing a dress and singing about trans kids. Another showed him defacing a Bible with crayons.
While Musk gave much less to Greg Abbott, he was still the governor’s single biggest donor this cycle. And part of the reason Abbott was vulnerable was because he’d enthusiastically welcomed tech companies to build data centers in the state. In Texas, Hinojosa told me that A.I. is one of the forces making people feel as if their lives are out of control, and data centers are the physical manifestation of that. They are a “demonstration of the governor doing the bidding of moneyed interests and leaving the people to fend for themselves.”
It will take some time to fully digest the lessons and consequences of the staggering rout Republicans suffered on Tuesday. But in addition to being a repudiation of Trump, it was also an overwhelming rejection of the tech barons he’s allied himself with. Talarico and Hinojosa’s campaigns were leaps of faith, premised on the conviction that Texans wanted something more than billionaire bootlicking and hatreds amplified by social media algorithms. “We have a lot more work to do if we’re going to defeat the billionaire megadonors who have taken over this country,” Talarico said back in Round Rock in September of 2025, when his underdog campaign had just begun. “But this is an incredible start.”
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