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Gina Hinojosa: “We Flip Texas, and It’s Over”

Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa is proposing a progressive agenda. In the primary, she got twice as many votes as Beto O’Rourke did in 2018.

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa speaks during the Texas Democratic Convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi.

When Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa told a Houston crowd that the state’s redistricting fight could shape control of Congress “likely for a generation,” I did not hear “generation” abstractly.

I am 22. People my age have been voting for only a few years. But Hinojosa was describing the battle to draw lines on a map that could determine the political landscape for our adult lives—and possibly the lives of our children. In Houston, where I live, the outcome of the conservative redistricting effort is already visible.

In 2025, after President Donald Trump pressed Texas leaders to produce five additional Republican seats in Congress, Republican lawmakers took the unusual step of redrawing the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade. The incumbent, Governor Abbott, signed the new map into law on August 29, and it is governing the 2026 elections. Houston’s East End, Second Ward, Denver Harbor, Magnolia Park, and other heavily Latino neighborhoods were carved out of the 29th Congressional District, cutting its Hispanic citizen voting age population from about 63 percent to 43 percent.

With Texas holding 38 seats in the US House, shifting even a handful from one party to the other can affect which party controls Congress.

But the generational stakes are not only about who controls Congress years from now. Many of the conditions Hinojosa returned to in our conversation—jobs, the cost of living, electricity costs, and health insurance—are already especially acute for younger Texans.

About 15 percent of Texans ages 18 to 34 live below the poverty line, and nearly 28 percent of Texans ages 19 to 25 lacked health insurance in 2024. For people just entering adulthood, the economic pressures Hinojosa is emphasizing are already determining whether they can afford basic stability in the state.

The governor does not draw congressional districts, but maps passed by the Legislature can be signed or vetoed by the chief executive. Hinojosa’s warning rests in part on what could happen next: Texas could gain another four or five congressional seats after the next Census, and Republicans have said they could return to redistricting. She argues that another redraw, combined with those additional seats, could ultimately put nine or 10 seats out of Democrats’ reach.

The focus on younger Texans is also taking Hinojosa straight to them. A few weeks after hearing Hinojosa make that generational case in Houston, I sat down with her. At the time, she was preparing to take her campaign to college campuses across Texas. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party was fielding a candidate in every state and federal race on the ballot for the first time in modern Texas history. We talked about what redistricting could mean beyond the next election, Texas’s economic discontent and populist history, and how a new generation of Democrats is trying to speak more directly to voters.

Lajward Zahra: At an event in Houston, you called this one of the most important gubernatorial races in the country. Why does the Texas governor’s race matter nationally?

Gina Hinojosa: Because Texas controls 10 percent of seats in Congress, and we know that Republicans in Texas, Republicans in Austin in particular, are coming back next year [with the intention] to redraw congressional maps. And we have every reason to believe—it is almost a guarantee—that when they say they’re going to come back next year to redraw maps, they will.

When they redraw maps, they will likely eliminate five Democrats in Congress. Two years later, with the new Census, we will gain another four to five seats in Texas from other states because we’re growing faster than other states—we’ll take their seats. When........

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