Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday, ending three decades of Republican control of the governor's mansion and becoming the first Latina elected to lead the nation's second-most-populous state. The Associated Press called the race at 10:17 p.m. Central time, and CBS News' tally showed Hinojosa with about 53% of the vote to Abbott's 46%.
"Here's what Texas said today, loud and clear: Your government belongs to you," Hinojosa told supporters. "As your governor, I will never forget it." She also had a message for the state's establishment: "I want to say something to the powerful people who have gotten very comfortable running this state," she said. "The voters have delivered a mandate for change, and it is change they will get."
Abbott: "Mathematically, we are not going to be able to win"
Abbott, who first took office in January 2015 and was seeking an unprecedented fourth consecutive term, called Hinojosa to concede. "It has been the joy of my life to have the opportunity to be the governor of the great state of Texas," he told his supporters. "There are still votes to be counted, but mathematically, we are not going to be able to win this election."
Hinojosa, a state representative from Austin, grew up in McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley and worked as a civil rights and labor lawyer before winning a seat in the Texas House in 2016. A former president of the Austin school board, she built her campaign around public education, opposing Abbott's private-school voucher program and calling for more school funding, higher teacher pay and an overhaul of standardized testing. She also proposed one-time $1,500 payments to households from the state's Rainy Day Fund and cutting corporate subsidies to pay for property tax relief.
Trump blames a "RINO" turn
President Donald Trump, whose party also lost Texas' U.S. Senate race on the same night, was quick to pin the governor's defeat on Abbott himself. "If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn't become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn't have lost," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "He went back to his original formula, and it wasn't pretty!"
Abbott's campaign outspent Hinojosa's by tens of millions of dollars, NBC News reported, but he was weighed down by a worsening national environment for Republicans, friction with rural voters over his past support for data centers, and Hinojosa's outreach to Latino voters through bilingual ads and Spanish-language town halls. When she takes office in January 2027, Hinojosa will be the first Democratic governor since Ann Richards left office in 1995 and only the third woman to hold the job, after Richards and Miriam A. Ferguson.
On the same night, Democrat James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate race, giving Democrats their first statewide wins in Texas in more than 30 years.
Photos: Getty Images via ABC News, Truth Social, file
