Will ‘Gina’ Break Texas’s Corporate Welfare Consensus?

MISSOURI CITY, TEXAS – Her full name is Regina Inez Hinojosa, but almost nobody in Texas calls her that. From the people she met on the streets during the final stretch of her campaign to her own staff, Hinojosa is simply “Gina.” Her hope, and that of the Democratic Party, is that her nickname will soon become “Governor Gina,” as volunteers and supporters chanted while welcoming her to Fort Bend County ahead of a canvassing event this weekend.

A civil rights lawyer by training and a former Austin school board president, Hinojosa challenged incumbent Greg Abbott for Texas governor with a message that goes beyond the usual Democratic arguments about Republican extremism. Unlike many of her predecessors, she has explicitly focused her campaign on reining in corporate welfare, while supporting public education and expanding the safety net for middle-class families.

“Texas has always been a pro-business state, but we need to first and foremost make sure it is a pro-Texan state, and so that’s what needs to be rightsized,” Hinojosa told the Prospect after kicking off the door-knocking event in Missouri City, a major Houston suburb, on Saturday morning. “I’m running to be the governor for the people of Texas, not the billionaire CEOs. And that’s the difference between me and Greg Abbott. People see it, people know it, and people are voting for change.”

Until recently, most advisers in Texas would likely have warned her against building a gubernatorial campaign around this economic message in a state where corporations benefit from a wide range of tax breaks and subsidies, including property-tax incentives for major industrial projects, sales-tax exemptions for data centers, and grants to major technology and energy companies.

Yet despite polls continuing to narrowly favor Abbott for a fourth term, Hinojosa’s economic message is picking up steam as wealth inequality and affordability become increasingly prime concerns among middle-class and independent voters.

Among her most significant proposals, Hinojosa promised to end sales tax exemptions for large data centers and review incentives awarded to companies such as Elon Musk’s, including the property tax savings tied to his Terafab project, which are estimated at $1.6 billion. She also wants to audit government contracts, scrutinize privatization deals, and make sure companies meet job-creation commitments before receiving public incentives.

“We are at a time in history where the crony capitalism and the corruption are in our face, it is blatant, right?” Hinojosa told the Prospect. “We know that wealth is built on the backs of our government with our taxpayer dollars, and so there is anger and frustration about that. It is out of hand. It is so imbalanced.”

The volunteers who welcomed her on Saturday knocked on doors in Fort Bend County, one of the fastest-growing and most diverse parts of the state, where roughly 70 percent of the population is non-white. Democrats are still fighting to regain Latino voters’ trust after many backed Donald Trump in 2024, hoping it would help defeat inflation. In Fort Bend County, Kamala Harris defeated Trump by less than two percentage points and lost Texas by roughly 14.

“People invoke their pocketbook—they’re concerned about the quality of life and how the families are faring, whether the next generation is going to be able to buy a home [and] have a decent quality of life,” said Grady Prestage, a longtime county commissioner for Precinct 2 on the Fort Bend County Commissioners Court. Hinojosa’s message about cutting corporate welfare is gaining popularity among young families, Prestage said, partly because workers increasingly feel they are not benefiting from the subsidies while still paying their own property taxes.

Meanwhile, more voters are realizing that Texas missed a major opportunity by continuing to reject the Biden-era health coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act, Prestage said. The GOP state legislature convinced “constituents that it was not in their best interest to do this, which is ridiculous,” he said. 

Uphill Battle

The latest polls show that Hinojosa’s path to becoming Texas’s first Democratic governor in more than three decades remains complicated. A Texas Politics Project tracker showed Abbott ahead by two to five percentage points in several surveys conducted in the second half of October, while RealClearPolitics’ polling average placed his lead at 3.7 points.

However, the state’s electoral history over the past 30 years helps explain why Hinojosa’s message appears more promising today.

The last Democrat to win a gubernatorial race in Texas was Ann Richards in 1991, a charismatic and popular former state treasurer who championed public education and economic renovation. Richards is also remembered for appointing unprecedented numbers of women and minorities to state leadership positions at a time when Texas politics was heavily dominated by white men, even more so than today. Democratic gubernatorial candidates have suffered heavy defeats in every election ever since, sometimes struggling to reach even 30 percent of the vote.

Hinojosa hasn’t quite soared as high as fellow Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate against Republican Ken Paxton. Recent polls have given Talarico a narrow lead, with most polling averages putting him ahead by a few points. However, an October 26–28 survey by Quantus Insights, a pollster with one of the most accurate records in forecasting the 2024 presidential elections, found Paxton slightly ahead, 48.7 percent to 47.6 percent.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, who introduced Hinojosa at a canvassing event in San Antonio over the weekend, said that Texans are “standing up and finally going to vote” after “thirty years of increasingly right-wing government.” 

“There’s no guarantee that we’ll win, but I think we’re right there,” he told the Prospect in an interview, adding that Hinojosa’s message can potentially resonate with “anybody who is feeling the pinch of money.” 

Young people and middle-class families are seeing “tax breaks going to corporations that are already very wealthy,” he said. “And so they ask themselves, ‘Well, wait a minute, why are these big, wealthy, profitable corporations getting free money and here I am struggling to pay for my groceries?’” 

Talarico and Hinojosa appeared side-by-side at rallies in Houston and San Antonio over the weekend. Hinojosa’s closing remarks onstage Saturday echoed the arguments she had made in Missouri City earlier that morning.

“Just this summer [Abbott] redirected a $100-million-dollar broadband contract to Elon Musk, an act so corrupt that even Republicans in Austin said, ‘This stinks,’ and shut the whole broadband program down,” she said, referring to the $108.8 million in federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment, or BEAD, funding allocated to Musk’s Starlink. The allegations of preferential treatment in the awarding process prompted Republican lawmakers to demand an audit of the broadband program, as reported by KUT Radio and the Texas Tribune.

“I will ensure every Texas child has quality health care [instead],” she said during the rally. “We are a wealthy state. We have enough to make sure our kids get the health care they need.”

Message Resonating

Early voting ended Friday with record turnout. Texas recorded more than 7.4 million early votes, the highest total ever for a midterm election, with roughly 39 percent of registered voters casting ballots. Participation was particularly strong in bluer urban counties, including Harris, Dallas, and Tarrant. But Republicans could still benefit from their base’s habit of showing up on Election Day.

Voters attending rallies and waiting in line to cast their ballots expressed that Talarico can win the Senate seat only if Hinojosa avoids losing to Abbott by more than five percentage points. The spotlight is now on Republican voters who may finally break with their party.

For his part, Abbott—whose campaign reportedly raised $26 million during this past month, including a $5 million contribution from Musk—made stops in El Paso, Lubbock, Amarillo and Laredo in the past few days, pitching his re-election bid as a choice between “common sense and chaos” and warning voters that Hinojosa would be “wrong for Texas.”

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In Laredo, Abbott focused on property taxes, telling supporters that “your property taxes should never go up without you having a vote on it,” while promoting proposals to expand homestead exemptions. In El Paso, he defended his administration’s approach to data centers, saying he had “put a total halt on any data centers” until the state completed an audit of their electricity and water use. 

Meanwhile, in Houston, drivers can hardly go thirty minutes without running into an Abbott radio ad warning that Hinojosa would “open the border” to undocumented immigrants and hurt the local economy. 

Emanuel, a 48-year-old conservative Latino voter who works as a handyman in Northeast Houston, said he couldn’t wait for Tuesday because he was tired of being bombarded by advertising. “I want to go to work and just listen to my music,” he joked right after voting.

Yet he picked both Abbott and Paxton because he believes the economy performs better in Texas than in most states run by Democrats. “I don’t want to make this place like New York, and I believe a majority agrees with me,” he said.

Not everyone, however, is so sure of the results.

Snacking on nachos at a karaoke event featuring local candidates at the Eldorado Ballroom, a historic venue opened in Houston by Black entrepreneurs Anna Johnson and Clarence Dupree in 1939, Xanté Wallace said Hinojosa’s message has everything it needs to “resonate with younger people” in today’s economy.

Unlike Manuel, Wallace, a 30-year-old firefighter born and raised in Houston, said it is impossible to predict whether the economic message alone will be enough to turn Hinojosa’s campaign into a winning one.

“A lot of corporations have interceded with politics and are not paying their fair share of taxes,” he says. “That is creating too much inequality and needs to be addressed.”