Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) couldn’t believe what he was about to do.
Less than three months out from the midterms, Kennedy was leaving for a trip to Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. States that, as the Louisiana senator colorfully put it, “ought to be fat-guy layups for us.” His travel was a response to a very real and deeply uncomfortable situation facing the Republican Party: the looming prospect of electoral catastrophe, even in states once solidly red.
Here, too, in Texas, some Republicans are sweating: U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton, of course, whom most pollsters now put behind his Democratic rival James Talarico. But also, interestingly enough, three-term Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Abbott has beaten back insurgent Democratic challengers before, and he’ll probably do it again come November. But it will be far from easy.
Abbott has outraised and outlasted everyone the Democrats have thrown at him since 2014, and if you squint at the polling averages, this year’s vote has looked likely to produce a broadly similar outcome. But Gina Hinojosa, a soft-spoken Austin state rep with a school-board pedigree and the support of small-dollar Texans instead of oil executives, has been putting Abbott through his paces in a way no previous Democratic challenger has. She’s made him spend money defending a race he was supposed to win in his sleep.
And after months of polling showing Hinojosa behind, a new poll released Thursday shows Hinojosa with a 4-point lead over Abbott. It’s just one poll, of course, and the difference lies within the margin of error, but it’s obviously bad news for Abbott. While still the favorite, he’s seen his advantage (which was 7 points as recently as July) erode, making the race a nail-biter by Texas standards.
Hinojosa isn’t a national name, and that’s part of her appeal. A 52-year-old Latina attorney and five-term Democratic state representative from Austin, Hinojosa was first elected to the Texas House in 2017. She previously served as president of the Austin school board, and she built her profile as a legislator by being one of the state’s most persistent critics of Abbott’s school voucher program. She hails from the Rio Grande Valley—specifically, the southern border town of Brownsville. It’s a place where Democrats have struggled to hold Latino voters in recent cycles, and the place Hinojosa chose to launch her campaign.
She has attacked Abbott over roughly $10 million in donations from the pro-voucher Pennsylvania megadonor Jeff Yass. She’s making a kitchen-table pitch, not a culture-war one, framing the race as a fight against “billionaires and corporations” driving up costs and closing neighborhood schools. Her campaign centers on health care costs and day-to-day affordability as well as public schols, and she’s tried to position herself as the Democrat best equipped to actually challenge Abbott, backing that argument up with polling and endorsements rather than viral moments.
Hinojosa won the March Democratic primary outright with 58.5 percent of the vote, clearing a nine-candidate field that included the 2006 nominee Chris Bell and the Houston businessman Andrew White, son of a former governor. She had entered that primary already polling at 36 percent, 30 points ahead of her closest rival, according to the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. It was a clean win with room to spare, the kind that usually signals a candidate with a solid and enduring base of support.
Abbott entered 2026 with $105.7 million on hand, a figure built on nine-figure fundraising and more than a million individual contributions over four gubernatorial campaigns. His donor list reads like a directory of Texan wealth. The Midland oil executive Javaid Anwar, the casino magnate Miriam Adelson, the Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and Roku’s founder Anthony Wood are among the six- and seven-figure names. Abbott has said explicitly that he intends to spend heavily to turn Harris County, a Democratic stronghold, “dark red,” precinct by precinct.
Hinojosa, by comparison, is running on fumes. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, Abbott outraised her by $19 million ($25.5 million to $6 million). That left the incumbent governor with $67 million on hand against her $3 million. Her money comes overwhelmingly in small donations from Texans, which is a good story to tell but a hard way to compete against a war chest of Abbott’s size.
Despite the money gap, the polling has been genuinely unsettled. A June survey from Reconnaissance Market Research (ReconMR), the Siena Research Institute, and Texas A&M had Abbott at 49 percent and Hinojosa at 44, with half of respondents saying they still had no opinion of Hinojosa at all, a sign her lower name recognition is both a weakness and, potentially, untapped room to grow.
Hinojosa has done the two things a Texas Democrat has to do just to make a usually uncompetitive race competitive. First, she consolidated the base decisively in the primary and secondly, according to the polling, she appears capable of holding Abbott under the 50 percent threshold, a number that could make Libertarian candidate Pat Dixon’s 2 percent polling average a real headache for Republicans.
What Hinojosa hasn’t done is solve the money problem. In a state as geographically large as Texas, that gap tends to matter more in October than it does in June. If she pulls this off, it would be the first statewide win for the Democrats in Texas since 1994. The smarter bet, and the one the models still back, is that Abbott’s cash advantage and Texas’s structural lean carry him to a fourth term. But not by the margin anyone expected a year ago.
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