Lynn Davenport, a lifelong conservative, met Donald Trump backstage at a Texas rally in 2016. On Jan. 6, 2021, she was at his Stop the Steal rally in Washington, though she left before the Capitol was sacked. In 2024, she was a delegate to Texas’ Republican convention and a Republican precinct chair.
And in May, she filmed an ad for Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running a surprisingly competitive race to become governor of Texas.
The two women have been friends for years, since Hinojosa, a state representative from Austin, helped lead opposition to a crusade by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to privatize Texas’ public school system. Abbott’s agenda was bitterly opposed by some conservative Texans, particularly rural ones in places where public schools are the center of the community. (Think “Friday Night Lights.”) Davenport was impressed by Hinojosa’s willingness to listen to her, and by her mastery of education policy. Still, as a committed Republican, she didn’t think she’d ever vote for her.
But Davenport has grown increasingly disgusted with Abbott, over both schools and the data centers he invited into Texas. The governor, she said, is a “globalist. Which to me is scarier than a communist, a socialist or a Marxist, because what Abbott is imposing is technocracy. He’s giving the tech giants carte blanche in Texas.” So she decided not just to support Hinojosa’s bid for governor, but to do it publicly. “Gina is someone that I can work with, whereas Abbott doesn’t care what I think,” she told me.
The premise of Hinojosa’s surprisingly competitive campaign is that there’s a critical mass of voters like Davenport in Texas. The opportunity for Democrats, Hinojosa believes, lies not with moderate, affluent Republicans put off by Trump’s norm-smashing vulgarity, but with disappointed MAGA populists. “The conventional political wisdom is that it is those country club Republicans who will swing over,” she told me before I traveled to Texas. “I think it’s always been MAGA.”
I was skeptical of this analysis then, and after seeing her campaign last week, I’m still not wholly convinced. Trump’s appeal has never been only or even primarily economic; he taps into fear and rage about a country growing less white, less Christian and less deferential to male authority. And Hinojosa seems, at least on paper, ill suited to appeal to Trump’s base. A Latina and a former labor lawyer, she comes from the heart of Texas’ Democratic establishment: Her father led the state Democratic Party from 2012 until 2025. Though she now calls herself a “populist” rather than a “progressive,” she’s one of the more liberal members of the Texas House.
Still, Hinojosa has a group of supporters like Davenport, people furious at Abbott over school privatization and data centers. Mary Lowe, an education activist and a self-described “fundamental Christian,” told me that Abbott is “a globalist. He’s a tyrant. He’s a great deceiver.” And though she’s voted Republican in almost every primary and every general election since 1979, she’s voting for Hinojosa in November. “She’s a good human,” said Lowe. “She’s one of us.”
Several polls still show Hinojosa trailing by a couple of points, but three recent ones, including a New York Times/Siena poll released on Saturday, have her ahead. The polling aggregator Real Clear Politics now rates the race as a tossup, and last week Cook Political Report moved it from “likely” to “lean” Republican. Over the past week, national Democrats have started investing more heavily in the race: Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and the Democratic Governors Association each gave Hinojosa $1 million.
“She certainly has a much better chance than I did in ’22,” said Beto O’Rourke, who challenged Abbott four years ago and lost by more than 10 points.
Part of that chance derives from Trump’s unpopularity and the country’s economic misery, which is particularly stark in Texas. Campaigning, Hinojosa talks about how the state has more people without health insurance than any other, and some of the nation’s highest rates of small-business bankruptcies. She describes blood plasma centers popping up in middle-class areas — she visited one next to a Sephora — as more people seek to sell their plasma to make ends meet. Hinojosa told me about meeting a lobbyist for the plasma center industry who was excited about all the opportunity in the state. “That’s, I think, a shocking example of where we are in Texas in 2026,” she said.
But her surge can’t be attributed entirely to the economic environment: Hinojosa seems to be hitting her stride as a politician. She’s long had a talent for making people feel heard, but O’Rourke said she’s become dramatically better on the stump. “I campaigned with her in El Paso a few weeks ago, and I’ve never seen her speak so well,” he said.
Her message is simple: Life has gotten too hard for hard-working people in Texas. Schools are underfunded — hundreds have gone to four days a week — and new artificial intelligence initiatives are no substitute for a good teacher in the classroom. Data centers are both a blight and a symbol of Abbott’s misplaced priorities. “It’s impacting people’s homes and lives, and it is a demonstration of the governor doing the bidding of moneyed interests and leaving the people to fend for themselves,” Hinojosa told me. Taking a page from Trump, she’s promising $1,500 checks for every Texan from the state’s plush rainy-day fund — she calls it the “Greg Abbott Corruption Tax Refund” — and to “DOGE” the Department of Education’s dodgy vendor contracts.
It’s a platform, she insists, that can break through with those who in the past have felt alienated from the Democratic Party. “When I sit down with people who voted for Trump, with people who voted for Abbott, and hear them, and they hear me, there’s an opportunity for connection and alliance,” she said. Democrats have a chance, she insists, to move past the cultural battles that have kept them perennially on the defensive. “If we try to be post-culture wars, we can be post-culture wars,” she said. “I’ve experienced it. I’ve seen it.”
Of course, deep rifts over religion, race and gender can’t simply be wished away. But if Hinojosa can find a way to make them less salient, it could portend not just seismic change in Texas, but the beginning of a political realignment. If some fraction of socially conservative voters conclude that rapacious billionaires threaten them more than supercilious liberals, it would remake America’s political map. For decades now, we’ve lived in an era dominated by what scholars call post-material politics, in which values, identity and self-expression have often taken precedence over economic concerns. What if that era is coming to an end? What opportunities would that open up, and what ideological sacrifices would it require?
In May, speaking to my colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Tucker Carlson said that culture war issues — the issues on which he’d built much of his demagogic career — were becoming less important than matters of concentrated wealth and financial precarity. “Most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant long-term than debates about economics,” he said. Hinojosa’s campaign is a bet that he was right.
She is, of course, far from the only Democrat running as a populist and seeking to persuade disaffected Trump supporters. Zohran Mamdani started his mayoral campaign by interviewing working-class Trump voters in Queens and the Bronx, and he won over a small but meaningful chunk of them. A New York Times/Siena poll showed the populist Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, in Michigan — whom Carlson has all but endorsed — winning 8 percent of people who voted for Trump in 2024.
But it’s one thing to run as an economic progressive in places that regularly elect Democrats. It’s quite another to do it in Texas, in many ways the spiritual home of the modern right. Sure, Texas looks more promising for Democrats this year than it has in decades, with the party’s Senate candidate, James Talarico, maintaining a consistent lead over the Republican Ken Paxton. But Paxton is singularly sleazy and widely despised. As astonishing as a Talarico victory would be, Republicans could explain it away as the fault of a particularly bad candidate.
They won’t be able to do that if Hinojosa wins. Abbott has been elected governor of Texas three times by double-digit margins. If Hinojosa even comes close to beating him, it will be because the Republican coalition that Trump assembled is collapsing, and a new Democratic one is perhaps starting to take shape. “There are people who are responding to our message the same way they were responding to Trump’s message,” she said. “They want power. They want to feel like they’re in control of their lives again, and I think that they want to return to a time that feels like it makes sense again, where hard work pays off.”
A big part of the reason Hinojosa is pulling ahead is that Latinos, who swung toward Republicans in 2024, have soured on the party due in large part to Trump’s brutal mass deportation campaign. At a Spanish-language town hall last week, Hinojosa, whose mother is a Mexican immigrant, mentioned ICE’s fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who’d been in the country for 35 years. “They thought he was someone else, they killed him, and then they realized that he was only going to work,” she said. “When that’s happening, none of us are safe.”
But Hinojosa is also trying to chip away at Abbott’s — and Trump’s — white, rural base. No one thinks she’s going to win these voters outright; the goal is to lose them by less. “There’s definitely a backlash against Abbott over vouchers and over data centers in rural Texas,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, who writes a newsletter called Texas Rural Reporter. “The question is, does that anger against Abbott translate into a vote for Gina?”
Bellsnyder is trying to make sure it does. A former field director for Abbott, she’s now working for Hinojosa’s campaign. “If I didn’t think she had a chance, I promise you, I wouldn’t be putting my entire Republican credentials on the line,” she told me.
Like Davenport, Bellsnyder got to know Hinojosa during the fight against Abbott’s education agenda. The centerpiece of this battle was Abbott’s voucher bill, which gives most qualifying private school parents about $10,000, reducing funding that otherwise would have gone to public schools. When Abbott tried to pass the law in 2023, he was foiled by 21 Republican holdouts. Abbott then supported primary challenges, partly funded by the Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, against 15 of the Republicans who thwarted him. Most of them lost, and the law passed in 2025. The wounds among anti-voucher conservatives are still raw.
At an Hinojosa rally in Longview, a city in East Texas, last week, I met Steve Clugston, a 58-year-old school superintendent. Clugston told me he last voted for a Democrat back in the 1990s, when conservative local officials in his part of the state still belonged to the party. “They’re now probably Republicans,” he said.
Clugston voted for Donald Trump in 2024, believing he did a “pretty good job” in his first term. He is, he said, an “old school conservative,” which is reflected in his approach to education. “I still swing the paddle,” he said. (Texas is among a minority of states that allow corporal punishment in schools.) “I believe in kids acting right and learning how to work hard and how to show up and be dependable.”
But he was livid about Abbott’s relentless push for vouchers. “Our governor took billionaire money and then used it to beat Republicans that us Republicans elected,” he said. As he soured on Abbott, he’d also grown disillusioned with Trump and his flagrant, gluttonous corruption. “When you’ve lied to me enough,” said Clugston, “and sold us out for billionaires, I get to the point I’m done.”
Hinojosa’s inroads with the populist right might have been limited to those most committed to public schools, were it not for Abbott’s enthusiasm for data centers. The governor has aggressively sought tech investment in Texas; he’s offered billions in tax incentives to attract data centers and last year boasted that the state was “the epicenter of A.I. development.” Texas now has more in operation than any other state.
Many rural Texans who either live near these behemoths, or fear they will soon, detest them. Anger is so intense that Sid Miller, the state’s outgoing agriculture commissioner — he lost his primary after a series of scandals — told Rolling Stone that it could cost Abbott the election.
In June, Cheryl Shadden, who lives across from a sprawling bitcoin mine in Hood County, showed up at an Hinojosa event in Glen Rose, Texas, wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Break Rank.” She meant break ranks with the Republican Party, which has failed to protect her from the ugly, noisy facility that she said has upended her life.
“My community is blasted with horrific noise 24/7,” Shadden told me. “I mean, inside of our homes, outside of our homes. We’ve got health problems associated with it.” She says the value of her property — 10 acres and a barn — has plummeted. And the Republicans she’s reached out to for help have ignored her. “I hit everybody and their mother, and crickets, and then Gina Hinojosa’s staff is like, ‘Gina would like to speak to you.’”
Abbott has realized that fury over data centers is a political threat, and he recently issued a moratorium on new development, pending an audit of their energy and water usage. But the pause has loopholes, and the audit, conveniently, is due to be finished right after the election, which means he can restart his data center push once the political danger is gone. “It just stinks. It’s just not right,” said Michael Ellis, a 70-year-old Republican battling plans for a new data center in Texas’ Navarro County.
I met Ellis and his wife, Jennifer, in the town of Corsicana, about an hour southeast of Dallas, where Hinojosa stopped to meet with a small group of anti-data-center organizers. Ellis had come with a binder; he had blueprints of a proposed 80-acre facility slated to go up a mile from his home. He was worried about noise caused by generators, water usage and the danger of an industrial disaster in an area with only a volunteer fire department. He blamed Abbott for welcoming such projects in with virtually no oversight.
Michael was still undecided about who he was voting for, but Jennifer was leaning toward Hinojosa. “Just to walk in and sit down with us and meet with us, to me, that goes a long way,” she said. “That’s massively impressive.”
Then I asked her about the Senate race. She said she’d probably vote for Paxton, despite his many scandals, because of trans issues. “I don’t do all the gender thing,” she said.
It was a reminder of the culture wars’ endurance. Hinojosa still isn’t terribly well known in Texas; in September, she told me that some 20 percent of the electorate wasn’t familiar with her. I wondered what voters like Ellis would think of her after Abbott, who is outspending Hinojosa around 6 to 1, blankets Texas with attack ads. One recent spot tried to brand her as “gender bender Gina,” a radical out to “trans your kids.”
Hinojosa has tried to pre-empt this caricature in her own advertising, seeking to distance herself from social liberalism without recanting her previous positions. In one ad, she declared, “My pronouns are ‘mom,’ ‘Texan’ and soon to be ‘governor.’” In another, she described deciding, 23 years ago, to carry a pregnancy to term even though her baby had no chance of survival. “I chose her,” she said. The spot doesn’t mention the law that now denies Texas women the choice that she had. If I saw it without knowing who Hinojosa was, I might have thought she was anti-abortion.
She’s not, but on the campaign trail, she doesn’t talk about abortion unless she’s asked. Even then, she says her priority in office will be fixing the law that prevents doctors from treating some women with doomed pregnancies until they’re near death. “Reproductive choice is just one of those issues that divide us,” she told me. “I’m running to be governor to work on an agenda that the vast majority of us agree on.”
I could probably write a whole column picking apart this strategy. Reproductive rights are popular, even in red states. It would be disastrous for Democrats to decide, at this moment of intense social backsliding, that women’s health and freedom should be subject to compromise. And abortion rights can’t really be separated from economics — being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy is financially calamitous.
But I have to be honest: When I try to flesh out this critique, my heart isn’t in it. In 2014, Wendy Davis ran a boldly pro-choice campaign for governor and lost by more than 20 points. In 2022, some predicted that the end of Roe v. Wade could endanger Abbott; it didn’t. It’s hard to blame Hinojosa for trying something new.
Besides, as she often says, even if she wins, she will almost certainly have a Republican legislature. The best that can be hoped for, probably, is legislation to make Texas’ abortion ban less deadly. If Hinojosa wants to escape the culture wars in Texas, maybe it makes sense to admit defeat, at least temporarily. “While we’ve been fighting those fights, we’ve lost economic power in this state and in this country, and we’re hurting,” she said. “We need to come together to take back that power.”
Whether Texans are ready to do that is anyone’s guess. Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, still thinks Abbott is favored. He points out that in the polls, Democratic voters are significantly more committed to voting for Hinojosa than Republicans are to voting for Abbott. On the surface, that looks like good news for her, but it means that Abbott has more room to improve his standing with his base. “Abbott still has time to consolidate some of the Republicans that are not yet committed,” said Henson.
Still, he said, something is changing in Texas. A few weeks ago, Henson thought an Hinojosa victory was nearly impossible. Now he just thinks it’s unlikely. If only Talarico were to win, as he’s increasingly favored to do, “it’s going to be an earthquake,” said Henson. If Talarico and Hinojosa win, it will be a whole other order of magnitude. “People are feeling the ground shaking,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how big it is going to be.”
If it’s big enough, we’ll feel the reverberations from coast to coast. Conservatives triumphed when they were able to brand the Democratic Party as the stronghold of elites. Hinojosa thinks she can turn that association around, showing voters that Republicans represent heedless, exploitative oligarchs. “It’s 99 percent of us against like 15 billionaire dudes and the weak leadership that allows them to get away with whatever they want,” she said. If that argument can prevail in Texas, it can probably prevail most anywhere.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post No One Was Paying Attention to Gina Hinojosa a Month Ago. Now Republicans Are Worried. appeared first on New York Times.
