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Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa has defeated three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, according to a projection by the Fox News Decision Desk, ending a 36-year stretch in which Democrats lost every race for governor in the state.
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Shop NowFox News described the outcome as a shocking upset victory for the Austin state representative. With it, Hinojosa becomes the first Latina governor of Texas, the nation’s second most populous state.
“Everything is bigger in Texas including the shock of this win,” Hinojosa told a crowd of supporters. “We shocked the world tonight. With a Texas chip on our shoulder we show that anything is possible.”
Abbott, a conservative and a major ally of President Donald Trump, fell short in his bid to become the first person ever to win four elections as governor of Texas. He told his own supporters that he had conceded and congratulated Hinojosa on her win.
“It has been the joy of my life to be the governor of the state of Texas,” Abbott said.
Hinojosa, a civil rights lawyer whom Fox describes as a former president of the Austin public school system, built her campaign around public education funding, teacher pay, opposition to school vouchers, moratoriums on data centers and pocketbook relief.
She cast the race as a fight “against the billionaires and the corporations,” which she accused of driving up prices, closing neighborhood schools and “cheating Texans out of basic healthcare.”
A centerpiece of her campaign, according to Fox, was tying Abbott to Trump by portraying both men as participants in institutional corruption and in what she called anti-democratic “power grabs.”
Abbott’s record as governor includes tighter border security, strict abortion restrictions, school choice vouchers, expanded gun rights and lighter business regulation. In this race, however, he ran mainly on economic issues under a “Keep Texas Affordable” agenda.
He launched his campaign with a promise to cut rising property taxes in the next legislative session, and later unveiled a plan he said would also lower the cost of healthcare, housing, home and auto insurance, electricity and higher education.
He also framed his candidacy as a stand against the rising influence of socialism in American politics. And while Abbott is close to Trump, he broke with the president over the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers, a stance Fox described as walking a fine line.
This comes on the tail end of a Ken Paxton loss in the Senate as well, flipping Texas blue, something most people never thought they would see.
