Latino voters, data centers and Republican problems are giving Texas Democrats their highest hopes in 20 years

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

Harlingen, Texas (CNN) — “Now what?” Gina Hinojosa asked, looking at the half-done house across the lot where the crew hadn’t shown up that morning.

Had the workers been pulled over? Would they come tomorrow? Were they just running late?

“Your guess,” said Ronnie Cavazos, the chairman of the South Texas Builders Alliance, as he led the Democratic nominee for governor on a brief tour of a neighborhood that had been in demand for new workers at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, “is as good as mine.”

Cavazos has a long list of problems his industry faces. Tariffs have driven up the price of timber and other materials. Immigration enforcement raids on work sites sent a much wider chill through a workforce worried about being indefinitely detained if they left their homes. Inflation drove up all costs, as did higher interest rates on lots that were left unfinished much longer. Then, there is the historic spike in diesel.

Standing on a foundation that hasn’t been built on since the concrete was poured 60 days earlier, Cavazos said he didn’t vote for President Donald Trump himself, but knows many who did two years ago, especially in these towns along the US-Mexico border where Latinos swung hard for the president in what many saw at the time as a sign of how lost the community was for Democrats.

The GOP has controlled all statewide offices in Texas for almost two decades. But a mix of economic factors, the national backlash to immigration raids and the growth of artificial intelligence, and the GOP nominating baggage-laden candidates who could offend moderate voters make this fall perhaps the likeliest chance for Democrats to break one-party control of the nation’s second-largest state.

“The difference is that we thought in the past we could win just based on how bad the other side was and the charisma of our side. And that’s not enough,” Hinojosa said, later that afternoon, sitting in the small café of an independent bookstore in Brownsville. “We have been given gifts in this campaign cycle in a perfect storm of things coming together. We have a strong coordinated effort in a way that we haven’t had in modern history, where we’re all working together seamlessly to make sure we get out the vote in the state.”

That coordination means Hinojosa occasionally appears with her colleague in the Texas House, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who is in a tight Senate race with the scandal-plagued state attorney general, Ken Paxton. But mostly, they split up to cover more ground in the massive state, the first time in the 21st century that there has been more than one strong Democrat running statewide.

Barack Obama already made a surprise joint appearance at Taco Joint in Austin with both of them, and they in turn have both been featuring candidates for state legislature and other local offices at their own events, and Talarico is redirecting $600,000 of the massive national fundraising he’s been raking into local campaigns. For the first time since at least 1972 — that’s as far as the Texas Democratic Party’s records go back — Democrats are fielding candidates for every state legislature seat, many recruited in part by Beto O’Rourke’s Powered by People group, which has also already collected nearly 100,000 cellphone numbers as they’ve been registering and organizing primarily on college campuses.

“It’s nuts that this is happening in Texas,” O’Rourke told CNN while driving between stops. “But it’s happening for a reason.”

Then, just last week, the GOP candidate for state railroad commissioner posted a photo of brown-skinned students at a University of Texas football game and said the replacement of Americans by foreigners is “everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.” That post was seen as so racist by many Republicans that the famed GOP operative Karl Rove declared in an opinion piece, “This November, I’ll vote for only the second Democrat in my life.” (The first was former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, the last Democrat to win a statewide race.)

But even the most enthusiastic Democrats working in the state admit that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s massive campaign account, combined with huge spending by groups allied with Trump and Musk, will make a breakthrough tough.

Every conversation about liberals getting their hopes up is haunted by memories of when those hopes were dashed, from Wendy Davis to O’Rourke to Colin Allred. But they also think that this year, they may have stumbled into actually making it happen.

The Latino vote shifts again

Abbott last year backed Trump’s demands to redraw US House maps in part based on the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost section of the state. Republicans bet that Latinos who helped deliver big wins for the president in all four of the region’s counties were voters they could count on when he wasn’t on the ballot.

A recent poll from the Texas Politics Project/University of Texas finds Latino voters in the state breaking negative on Trump, with 51% seeing him unfavorably to 41% favorably, after finding they evenly split on him at 48% each in October 2024. Those numbers reflect a larger national shift among Latinos against Trump and the GOP.

Voters here saw the surges of unauthorized migrant crossings that became an albatross first for former President Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris when the then-vice president took over his campaign. Those crossings have plummeted during Trump’s second term. But Democrats see opportunity to win this region back amid the economic headwinds and the sharp rise in immigrants without criminal records being arrested and deported.

Hinojosa’s campaign argues that if she and Talarico win the same percentage of the Latino vote that O’Rourke did in 2018 (and stays steady among other voters), that would be enough to win, given population growth and shifts.

Sen. Ruben Gallego, who campaigned with Hinojosa in the spring, said he sees similar possibilities among Latinos in Texas as when he won his Arizona seat in 2024 even as Trump also won his state.

“Don’t let preconceived notions and past performance make you think that will predict future performance. I really think that things are moving very fast in Texas,” Gallego said, adding that he’d tell skeptical Democratic leaders, “You’re mad about what happened with Latinos in 2024. A way to actually change that environment is to actually you know get good candidates, and we got you good candidates.”

Hinojosa never actively talks about possibly being the first Latina governor, even when pushed — but she regularly refers to what it would mean to be the first governor from the Valley, where she grew up and went to high school. Asked after her rally in Brownsville by a reporter what it was like being back home, she talked about how everywhere she went, people introduced themselves as lost cousins–and then switched into Spanish to answer the next question.

Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, the House Democrat trying to hold one of the seats that Republicans targeted in redistricting, has an ad in heavy rotation on local TV complaining about medications costing half as much as they do on the other side of the border. That ad targets people who regularly wait in traffic on the border bridges to get their prescriptions filled in towns like Matamoros or Progreso.

Bobby Pulido, the Tejano music star who entered politics to run against Republican Rep. Mónica de la Cruz, told CNN he is talking up shared conservative values and addressing the lowest per capita income region in the state. He joined forces early with Talarico and started doing more with Hinojosa as her campaign strengthened, including at a 2,500-person rally last month featuring all three in Beeville, located in a county where the population is 64% Latino and went 70% for Trump in the last election.

Appeals to Latinos won’t just shape 2026 in Texas and beyond, but the 2028 presidential election and even more so the 2032 race as population trends push the Electoral College further south.

“Latinos,” Pulido said, “are the enigma that neither Republicans or Democrats have been able to figure out.”

Still, this is a state Trump won by 14 points just two years ago, the largest margin for Republicans in the state since a few Obama aides came off his 2012 re-election promising to turn the state blue with a group called Battleground Texas — that soon all but disappeared — and where Abbott beat O’Rourke by 11 points four years ago.

With nearly $70 million in cash on hand reported earlier this summer, Abbott’s campaign is ramping up to knock on millions of doors and spend millions of dollars on ads.

Eduardo Leal, Abbott’s press secretary, did not make the governor available for an interview and declined to answer several questions about whether Abbott will debate Hinojosa or if he believes support for Trump is as the same levels as in 2024.

Abbott “has spent his time in office cutting taxes, controlling spending, and keeping more money in Texans’ pockets—helping make Texas one of the most affordable states in the country,” Leal said. “And he’s focused on doing even more to lower property taxes and the cost of housing, insurance, healthcare, electricity, and college. Gina Hinojosa offers the opposite: higher taxes and higher costs. She can use whatever campaign slogan she wants.”

Aiming to turn Trump’s “rigged system” against Republicans

In McAllen, at an outdoor bar called The Gremlin, Hinojosa asked the crowd to raise hands if they trusted government. No one did.

At a phone bank set up in a bike shop/coffee shop in Brownsville, she held her hand to her forehead as a woman at the end of the line told her about having to help pay her mother’s electricity bills while being so behind on interest payments for her property tax that she’s going to move into a trailer.

“You are not alone,” Hinojosa told her.

That evening, under the fake flowers and chandeliers of a quinceañera and wedding hall a windy 10-minute drive from the border, she leaned on another favorite line: “Is this going to be by and for the people, or is it the billionaires’ world and we just live here?”

“People voted for Trump because he said the system’s rigged. And people know that’s right. I know that that’s correct. Democrats have not been saying that. Democrats have been defending a system that is totally indefensible, a system that is working against us,” Hinojosa said. “Republicans have been in power, and so they are primarily to blame here, but there is blame to go around. To be able to acknowledge that, to see it and say it — this campaign, I realized just a couple of weeks ago, that’s what we’re about.”

It’s not just traditional supporters the campaign is counting on.

Lynn Davenport was at the Ellipse in Washington on January 6, 2021, until she left in the middle of Trump’s speech to get a hot dog and take a nap at her hotel, because, she said, she felt “he wasn’t saying anything.” By then, she’d gotten to know Hinojosa from seeing her fight school vouchers while on the state house education committee. Now she’s one of a contingent of MAHA and MAGA moms who have been drawn into Hinojosa’s campaign.

“I’m not switching to the Democratic Party,” Davenport told CNN. “I’ll probably just undervote from now on and go with the person.”

Clarissa Quintanilla, who’s 37 and in graduate school for civil engineering, came to see Hinojosa in McAllen and noted how many signs she’s seen both for Hinojosa and Talarico.

She acknowledged that the last few election cycles have been marked by Democratic hopes getting up and then getting dashed.

“Every time this happens,” she said. “This feels a little closer.”

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