A call on election night
The Associated Press called the Texas governor’s race for Democrat Gina Hinojosa at 11:19 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, ending Greg Abbott’s bid for a fourth term and ending more than three decades of Republican control of the governor’s office in Austin. Abbott, the three-term Republican incumbent, called Hinojosa on Tuesday night to congratulate her.
“After looking at all the details of every county in the entire state, I made the decision to go ahead and call Gina Hinojosa and congratulate her on winning this race for governor of the state of Texas,” Abbott said. “There are still those to be counted, but mathematically, we’re not going to be able to win this election.”
On the Associated Press results dashboard, Hinojosa led with 4,689,223 votes to Abbott’s 4,071,528, roughly 53.5 percent to 46.5 percent, with 85.72 percent of precincts reporting. The margin will move as counting finishes, and the result stays unofficial until Texas certifies it. The outcome itself, with the incumbent conceding, will not.
Who Hinojosa is — and the campaign she ran
Hinojosa, 52, is a five-term state representative from Austin. She built her campaign around public education and household costs, arguing that Texas families were being squeezed on everyday bills while the state’s Republican leadership looked elsewhere. It was, on paper, a longshot bid: the nonpartisan Cook Political Report still rated the race as leaning Republican as of October 1, and Abbott, who had never won re-election by fewer than 11 points, spent about $100 million defending the office, according to Reuters.
Abbott, 68, has held the governor’s office since January 2015. He is one of the most durable figures in Texas politics, a governor who steered the state through the pandemic, a standoff with Washington over border enforcement, and a rewrite of the state’s power grid after its deadly 2021 freeze. A fourth term would have carried him to 2031. Instead, voters handed the office to a Democrat for the first time since Ann Richards, who served from 1991 to 1995.
A night of firsts in Texas
When Hinojosa takes office in January 2027, she will be the first Latina governor in Texas history and the first woman to lead the state since Richards. She will also be the first Democrat to win any statewide office in Texas since 1994, ending the longest such drought in the country.
Her win came on the same night Texas voters sent Democrat James Talarico to the U.S. Senate, ousting Republican Ken Paxton in a race that ended the Democrats’ own decades-long Senate drought in the state. Read our report on that result here: Talarico Flips Texas: First Democratic Senate Win Since 1988. Nationally, the night also delivered Democrats control of the Senate, sealed when Susan Collins conceded her Maine seat to Troy Jackson — a result covered here: A Logger From Allagash Ends a 30-Year Senate Career: Troy Jackson Beats Susan Collins in Maine.
Why this matters beyond Texas
Texas is the second-largest state in America by population, and its governor holds real power over school funding, the border, energy policy and the rules for doing business in an economy larger than most countries’. A Democratic governor in Austin changes the direction of all of those fights at once, and it changes the national map: the party that could not win statewide in Texas for 32 years now holds both a Senate seat and the governor’s mansion.
Reuters described Hinojosa’s win as part of a broader Democratic rout in Republican strongholds, driven by voters rejecting President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy and the war with Iran. That framing fits the night’s pattern — from Georgia to Ohio to Maine, incumbents and Trump-backed candidates fell in places where they had long looked safe. But Texas is the sharpest version of it, because the state was supposed to be the exception: big, red, and immovable. On Tuesday night, it moved.
What comes next is governing, and it will not be simple. Hinojosa takes office with a legislature still dominated by Republicans, and the education and affordability promises at the center of her campaign will have to survive that chamber. Her victory, though, already resets the question Texas politics has asked for a generation — not whether a Democrat can win statewide there, but what a Democratic governor does with the office once she has it.
