Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Gov. Greg Abbott Tuesday, denying the Republican a record fourth term and triggering a political earthquake in a state that has not seen a Democrat sit in the governor’s mansion this century.
“We did it. Everything is bigger, including the shock of this win. We shocked the world tonight,” said Hinojosa, in her victory speech before 11 p.m. where supporters could be heard sobbing. “It never bothered me that they doubted me. It bothered me that they doubted us. Hundreds and millions on attack ads, written off over and over again, but Texas, my faith in you never wavered.”
With a populist campaign promise to revitalize public schools and purge state government of undue corporate and billionaire influence, Hinojosa overcame a more than four-to-one spending disparity to topple the three-term Republican incumbent as part of a blue wave that washed over a long drought-ridden state for Democrats.
Though he launched his reelection bid with the power of incumbency, seemingly limitless fundraising and extensive party infrastructure in place, Abbott was ultimately unable to withstand the intense political headwinds facing the GOP this cycle.
With his wife Cecilia behind him, rubbing his shoulders and back, Abbott thanked supporters and then delivered the news few thought they would hear tonight. Abbott conceded at 10 p.m. He said he had just gotten off the phone with Hinojosa to congratulate her.
“I love our state. It has been an honor to serve it. And know that we are leaving Texas in far better shape than it’s ever been. Together, we’ve accomplished a lot,” he said.
In her speech, Hinojosa promised to deliver on the voters’ mandate for change, but she also said she was committed to working across party lines.
“We did not end one era of single party rule to usher in another,” she said.
Hinojosa, 52, will be Texas’ first Latina governor. The state’s last female chief executive — and the last Democrat to serve in the governor’s mansion — was Ann Richards, who lost reelection to George W. Bush in 1994.
Hinojosa’s bid was a long shot from the jump.
For much of the year, Abbott ignored her. Overshadowed by the U.S. Senate race and outraised by both her opponent and her party’s new standard-bearer in James Talarico, Hinojosa, a fifth-term Austin state representative, struggled for months to break through and establish her campaign as worth taking seriously. Talarico also defeated Republican nominee Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate
Few outside of Central Texas had ever heard of her when she launched her campaign in October 2025. Abbott, a cornerstone of the Texas Republican establishment, defeated all three of his previous gubernatorial opponents by double-digit percentage points. He entered this year with over $100 million in campaign cash on hand, a staggering amount Hinojosa never came close to matching. And, over the years, he had built up a robust turnout operation to get out his vote.
But Hinojosa — buoyed by a competitive U.S. Senate race on the ballot, discontent over data centers and a broadly favorable political atmosphere for Democrats — emerged late in the cycle as Abbott’s toughest competitor yet. The race tightened over the summer, with a handful of public polls putting the governor behind for the first time across any of his runs.
National Democrats invested millions in Hinojosa’s campaign, which became a proxy battle between widely anticipated 2028 presidential contenders over their courting of Latino voters. By the end of September, Abbott was pouring millions into attack ads against her on air. His total spending on advertising would reach nearly $118 million compared to her $26 million.
On the campaign trail, Hinojosa, a labor lawyer by trade, said she never intended to run for office, much less for governor. Spurred by the potential closure of her son’s elementary school in 2012, the Brownsville native ran for the Austin ISD school board and soon became board president. She was elected to the Texas House in 2016, where she took up public education as her primary policy focus and led fights against Abbott’s private school voucher program and for deeper investments in public schools.
Her win promises to shake up the makings of state government, though the extent to which she can effectuate legislative change will depend on downballot results in the lieutenant governor and Texas House races. Hinojosa has vowed to fire Mike Morath, the Abbott-appointed education commissioner, on day one, and to exercise her veto power including over any new gerrymandered electoral maps.
Abbott will leave the governor’s mansion having presided over an historic 12-year period in which Texas saw massive economic and population growth, in addition to tragedies including Hurricane Harvey, the deadly 2021 winter storm grid failure, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Uvalde school shooting and the Hill Country floods.
Though Texas maintains a constitutionally weak governor, Abbott consolidated executive control like no other Texas governor had before him. He wielded immense power through appointments in state government, executive orders and vetoes, and he pushed the limits of his constitutionally-defined authority using emergency actions and disaster declarations.
As a politician, Abbott distinguished himself with his epic fundraising, and, particularly in more recent years, his ability to navigate the widening gulf between an ascendant populist MAGA wing of the GOP and the Bush-era tradition that had defined Texas Republican politics for decades.
He threw around his considerable political weight and campaign cash, too. One of his marquee policy achievements, a $1 billion private school voucher program, became law only after he ruthlessly targeted — and successfully ousted — rural Republican lawmakers who had voted against the proposal out of fear that it would sap funding from local public schools.
And until this year, the extensive political machine he built to turn out Republican voters year over year helped cement not only his victories each cycle, but wins for every other statewide Republican candidate, many of whom won their elections on his coattails.
That infrastructure, his electoral dominance and his ever-replenishing war chest made him the undisputed head of the Texas GOP, the heartbeat of the national Republican Party.
Before he was elected governor in 2014, Abbott was the longest-serving attorney general in Texas. He previously served as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court.
Beginning his political career as a business-oriented Republican, Abbott tacked to the right in recent years as he sought to appease his conservative flank and maintain his standing among the ever-rightward shifting base. Reflecting a party that grew increasingly concerned with partisan domination and red-meat issues, he came to embrace the culture wars, throwing his support behind mid-decade redistricting and restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights, voting, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and “Sharia law.”
His national profile rose during the Biden administration, when he launched the multi-billion dollar Operation Lone Star to crack down on unauthorized immigration, build parts of a southern border wall and bus migrants to blue cities around the country. His other signature policy achievements include a raft of tougher bail laws, a near-total ban on abortion, property tax cuts and numerous business-friendly policies.
In his concession speech, Abbott thanked his team and reflected on his personal journey of overcoming his disability to serving as governor.
“It’s an unbelievable path to have somebody who goes from a situation in life where they literally could no longer walk to becoming a productive lawyer and judge, then on the pathway to be governor of the great state of Texas,” said Abbott, who is in a wheelchair. “That would not have happened without my incredible campaign team over the years.”
His record played prominently in the race.
Hinojosa seized on his longevity — calling him “entrenched” — and blamed him for various issues roiling the state, including the explosive development of data centers and what she described as a Big Tech takeover of Texas land, resources and schools. She also capitalized on rural anger over his imposition of school vouchers, a program anathema to places lacking private education options, and where public schools were central to their communities.
Hinojosa framed the election around a defining question that echoed those central to other Democratic bids this cycle, and that ultimately helped propel her to victory: “Is this going to be a Texas that is by and for the people, or is this the billionaires’ world and we just live here?”
Abbott, meanwhile, cast the election as a choice between “common sense and crazy.” He touted his record of growing Texas’ economy, cutting property taxes and supporting both public education and school choice. He ran on an affordability agenda that promised to reduce Texans’ tax burden by ending school property taxes for homeowners, capping how much property values can rise and making it harder for local governments to raise taxes.
And perhaps most of all, especially in the final months of the race, Abbott attacked Hinojosa’s record in the Texas House, casting her as a high-tax liberal whose policies would tank Texas’ economy and transform this conservative haven into a bastion of California-style progressive politics. In ads and on the campaign trail, Abbott cited Hinojosa’s legislative record to repeatedly bash her as a “radical” who “supports boys in girls’ sports,” an income tax and higher property taxes.
“These aren’t average Democrats — these are the furthest left radical Democrats we see in the United States of America,” Abbott said as early voting kicked off. “We will not allow those radical leftist Democrats to destroy our economy, to make our communities unsafe and to put Texas a step backward. There’s too much on the line.”
But Hinojosa avoided the culture wars and campaigned relentlessly on public education, pocketbook issues and a “post-partisan” policy agenda. She called the attacks “lies” and said she would lower taxes by slashing government waste. And she vowed to return $1,500 to each Texas household out of the state savings account, end the school voucher program, overhaul the school accountability system and force lawmakers to regulate data centers.
“People are tired of fighting the culture wars,” Hinojosa said at The Texas Tribune Festival in September. “The future feels very scary for so many Texans, and so it’s just created this opportunity for us to come together. And I do feel like it is a watershed moment, almost a postpartisan moment, where 99% of us are in the same boat.”
