Texas has not elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards in 1990. But a Texas A&M Bush School poll released in August shows Abbott leading Hinojosa by just one percentage point—46% to 45% among likely voters—has made the race genuinely competitive for the first time in a generation. Abbott is seeking a historic fourth term. Hinojosa is trying to do something no Texas Democrat has done in over three decades.
The Republican: Greg Abbott
Greg Abbott, 68, has governed Texas since 2015—longer than any sitting Texas governor in modern history save Rick Perry. A former Texas Supreme Court justice and attorney general, Abbott has built his brand on business-friendly policy, low taxes, and an increasingly combative relationship with the federal government under Democratic presidents. By the narrow measure he prefers, his record is strong: Texas ranks second in the nation for business climate.
It ranks second-to-last in quality of life.
As Courier Texas has reported, the gulf between those two data points is the defining story of Abbott’s governorship. Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country at 16.6%—nearly five million residents with no health coverage—and ranks dead last in health system performance. For more than a decade, Abbott has refused to expand Medicaid, a decision that would have extended coverage to hundreds of thousands of Texans at minimal cost to the state.
Texas’ public schools have deteriorated on his watch. The state ranks 38th in fourth-grade reading and 44th in eighth-grade reading, spends roughly $5,000 less per student than the national average, and pays teachers $11,000 below the national average salary. Abbott held education funding hostage—refusing to release billions in new school money unless the Legislature passed a voucher program that has siphoned funding away from public schools as they faced funding shortfalls. Houston Independent School District faced a $528 million shortfall, Dallas Independent School District was $186 million in the red, and Austin Independent School District cut teachers to address its $181 million deficit. During Abbott’s tenure, nearly 140 public schools in Texas have closed in the last three years alone.
Sixty-six Texas billionaires hold more combined wealth than 70% of all Texans. Nearly 40% of Texas households struggle to afford basic expenses. Texas leads the nation in food insecurity. When the state’s electrical grid collapsed during the February 2021 winter storm, 246 Texans died and the state absorbed an estimated $200 billion in economic damage. Over five years later, the grid has not been fully winterized.
On redistricting, Abbott initially resisted Trump’s demand to redraw Texas’ congressional maps mid-decade. Then Trump called. Abbott agreed, and the resulting maps—which a Trump-appointed federal judge found were drawn to intentionally dilute Black and Latino voting power—were allowed to stand by the Supreme Court.
Abbott has threatened to pull $150 million in public safety grants from Houston, Dallas, and Austin unless they fully cooperated with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—a move that effectively forced Houston to gut its ordinance limiting police cooperation with federal immigration agents, accelerating the conditions that led to the ICE killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Magnolia Park on July 7.
See where he stands on the issues here.
The Democrat: Gina Hinojosa
Gina Hinojosa, 52, is a civil rights attorney, former Austin ISD school board president, and five-term state representative who won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in March. Born in McAllen and raised in Brownsville, she is the daughter of former Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a law degree from George Washington University, then built her career representing workers and families as a civil rights and union attorney.
She says she never planned to run for office. But in 2012, when state budget cuts threatened to close her son’s elementary school in Austin, she organized parents, ran for the Austin ISD school board, and won. She later became the board’s president. When neighborhood schools kept closing across the state, she ran for the Texas House in 2016—and has represented her central Austin district ever since. She’s made public education a cornerstone of her campaign.
In the Legislature, Hinojosa helped deliver more than $11 billion in new school funding, reduced standardized testing requirements, and secured teacher pay raises. She participated in two quorum breaks—once in 2021 to oppose voting restriction bills, and again in 2025 to delay new congressional redistricting maps—and faced a lawsuit from Ken Paxton attempting to remove her from office after the 2025 action.
On redistricting: Recently on the trail, Hinojosa has expressed the importance of the Texas governor’s race and the consequences it carries beyond Austin. Because Texas controls roughly 10% of all US House seats, and state Republicans have signaled plans to redraw congressional maps again in the next legislative session, a Democratic governor can veto those maps. A fourth Abbott term would clear the path to eliminating up to five more Democratic congressional seats and potentially locking Republicans into House majority control for a generation.
Hinojosa has made public education, healthcare access, reproductive rights, utility affordability, and data center accountability the center of her campaign. She has called for a moratorium on data center construction until the Legislature can pass binding protections—a direct challenge to Abbott’s “epicenter of AI” brand. She accepted an invitation to a televised debate, scheduled for Oct. 15 in Fort Worth, broadcast statewide in English and Spanish. Abbott has not yet committed to appearing. In 2005, she was part of the legal team that sued Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on money laundering charges—a signal, her campaign argues, of her long record of holding corrupt politicians accountable.
See where she stands on the issues here.
What to watch
The race is tighter than anyone expected. Abbott has governed Texas for 11 years and has the full weight of the state Republican apparatus and Trump’s political operation behind him. But his approval ratings have fallen, his record on schools, healthcare, and the grid has become a liability, and Hinojosa—a South Texas native who speaks to voters in English and Spanish—is running a campaign that has attracted national attention.
