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. . . . 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.” . . . “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’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. . . . 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.
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.
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.
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. . . . the governor doing the bidding of moneyed interests and leaving the people to fend for themselves,” Hinojosa told me.
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.
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.
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.
[H]e 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.
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.
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