Copyright The Austin Chronicle
Austin’s education warrior in the Texas House of Representatives, Gina Hinojosa, traveled to the Rio Grande Valley last week to make it official: She’s running for governor. More than a hundred family and friends packed into a small room in downtown Brownsville to celebrate her decision, chanting the representative’s campaign slogan, “No te dejes!” “No te dejes” doesn’t have a literal translation in English. “It is a combination of ‘Fight back’ and ‘Don’t let yourself be pushed around,’” Hinojosa told the Chronicle. “It is something my grandmother always said to me, and it was like a tough-love statement, almost like a scold: ‘No te dejes!’ – ‘Know your worth, and defend it!’” In a video announcing her candidacy, and in press releases and personal appearances in the campaign’s first week, Hinojosa has hammered on a central message – that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is deeply corrupt. “He is the most corrupt governor in Texas history,” she repeated to us. “Time and time again, he will prioritize corporate interests, corporate greed, over the people of Texas. He’s got a record that speaks for itself, and I’ll be speaking about it a lot.” As rumors of her candidacy made the rounds this September, Hinojosa laid the groundwork for her corruption allegations, calling attention to a report by Public Citizen, the nonprofit consumer rights advocates. The report found that since 2020 Abbott has repeatedly declared state emergencies, allowing him to circumvent the state’s competitive bidding process and award no-bid contracts worth almost a billion dollars. According to the report, the companies receiving the contracts have contributed about $3 million to Abbott. “We identified eight companies that received non-competitive, emergency contracts from the state, most of which were tied to recent disasters such as COVID-19, hurricanes, or border security,” the report reads. “In each instance, a company, its owners, or its executives donated large amounts to Gov. Abbott through his Texans for Greg Abbott PAC.” The executives identified by Public Citizen did not include Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who gave Abbott a record-setting $12 million last year as the governor moved heaven and earth to win approval of a private school voucher program allowing families to spend public taxpayer money on private schools for their children. Hinojosa has criticized Abbott for accepting the donation. She is also criticizing Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock for providing a $50 million contract to Odyssey, a tech company that received a $500,000 prize from Yass in 2023, to oversee the voucher program. “It is a grift,” Hinojosa told a CBS reporter last week. “It is a way to pad the pockets of the well-connected.” Hinojosa said it is the cozy relationships detailed in the Public Citizen report that have helped Abbott collect his massive $87 million war chest. “We’re campaigning on that,” she said. “I mean, you don’t get that kind of campaign cash doing the bidding of the people. Abbott has that amount of campaign money because he is corrupt. So he can keep his dirty money, and we’ll get the people of Texas on our side.” Hinojosa has less than a thousandth of Abbott’s cash on hand – only $72,000. Hinojosa got started in politics in 2012, when she joined the campaign to save her son’s school, Allan Elementary, from being taken over by a charter school company. She won a seat on the Austin ISD school board, voted to stop the takeover, and helped inaugurate the current era of progressive representation on the board. Four years later, Austin voters sent Hinojosa to the Texas House, where she served on the public education committee, becoming, in the opinion of fellow Rep. Donna Howard and other colleagues, one of the Legislature’s premier fighters for local schools. “Her fierce advocacy provides a sharp contrast to Abbott’s legacy of shortchanging and privatizing our public education system,” Howard told us. Howard is one of many Democrats endorsing Hinojosa, who will first take on rancher Bobby Cole and businessman Andrew White, son of former governor Mark White, in the Democratic primary in the spring. The list includes U.S. Reps. Lloyd Doggett, Greg Casar, and Jasmine Crockett; Texas Sens. Sarah Eckhardt and Roland Gutierrez; House members John Bucy, Erin Zwiener, and Mihaela Plesa; and many local elected officials. “I have tremendous admiration for Gina’s bravery and tenacity,” Sen. Eckhardt told us. “From her time on the Austin school board through her tenure in the Legislature, she finds leverage and works it until she gets movement.” Abbott has not been seriously threatened in any of his three campaigns for governor. In the closest, in 2022, he flattened Beto O’Rourke by 11 percentage points. However, a poll taken this summer shows that the governor’s approval rating has faltered, with Texas voters saying that corruption is the top problem facing the state and country. And Democratic political insiders love the contrast that the charismatic Hinojosa presents with a governor who is often dour and lecturing “She’s Abbott’s worst nightmare,” Austin’s dean of political strategists, David Butts, told us. “She’s younger, she’s got more energy, she’s a woman, and she’s Hispanic. And that appeals to a cross-section of the electorate that probably feels somewhat dumped on by Greg Abbott and his authoritarian ways.” This article appears in October 24 • 2025.
