{"id":4718,"date":"2025-10-15T11:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T11:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/4718\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T11:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T11:40:08","slug":"texas-rep-gina-hinojosa-joins-democratic-race-to-challenge-gov-greg-abbott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/4718\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa joins Democratic race to challenge Gov. Greg Abbott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for The Brief<\/a>, The Texas Tribune\u2019s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.\n<\/p>\n

Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa<\/a> on Wednesday announced she is running for governor in 2026, setting up a potential clash between Republican Gov. Greg Abbott<\/a> and one of the Legislature\u2019s most strident critics of his school voucher program.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur fight right now is against the billionaires and corporations who are driving up prices, closing our neighborhood schools and cheating Texans out of basic health care,\u201d Hinojosa, a five-term Democratic lawmaker from Austin, said in her campaign launch video. \u201cThat\u2019s who Greg Abbott works for. I\u2019m running for governor to work for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinojosa\u2019s entry expands a Democratic primary field that includes Andrew White<\/a>, a Houston businessman and son of former Gov. Mark White, Bobby Cole, a rancher and retired firefighter, and Bay City Council member Benjamin Flores. Whoever wins the nomination will be a decided underdog against Abbott, who had more than $87 million in his campaign account at the end of June and has won all three of his gubernatorial races by double digits.<\/p>\n

Hinojosa, a civil rights and union lawyer who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, was scheduled to formally launch her campaign at a rally in Brownsville Wednesday evening.<\/p>\n

In her campaign launch video, Hinojosa said she first decided to run for office when her son\u2019s elementary school faced possible closure due to state budget cuts. She was elected to the Austin ISD school board in 2012, where she later served as board president before winning election to the Texas House in 2016.<\/p>\n

Through nearly a decade in the Legislature, Hinojosa made defending public education her calling card, becoming a primary foil to Abbott on private school vouchers. In her launch video, she contrasted her efforts to bolster public school funding with Abbott\u2019s pursuit of vouchers, which she argued would \u201cdevastate our schools.\u201d She also criticized the governor for accepting $10 million in campaign donations<\/a> from Pennsylvania GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, one of the nation\u2019s leading voucher proponents.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbbott\u2019s corruption runs deep. The billionaires he works for will not stop until they get what they want,\u201d Hinojosa said. \u201cAs long as we have a governor that can be bought, we won\u2019t have the Texas we deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinojosa\u2019s campaign also touted legislation she passed<\/a> to bring in almost $1 billion in federal funding for indigent health care in Travis County and to reduce standardized testing and increase teacher pay.<\/p>\n

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TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune\u2019s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2137,3496,5053,392,287,1564,27,29,1862,293,28],"class_list":["post-4718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-2026-elections","tag-gina-hinojosa","tag-governors-office","tag-greg-abbott","tag-politics","tag-state-government","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-house-of-representatives","tag-texas-legislature","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}