Texas Democrats won the two biggest races on the ballot Tuesday, with state Rep. James Talarico taking the U.S. Senate seat and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa unseating Gov. Greg Abbott. Both races were called on election night, and Abbott conceded before the networks even projected Hinojosa the winner.
Talarico defeated Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race to replace outgoing Sen. John Cornyn, whom Paxton had beaten in a Republican primary runoff in May. The win makes Talarico the first Democrat to win any statewide office in Texas since 1994, and the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race there since 1988. He did it while being buried in outside spending meant to keep the seat red.
Talarico, 37, is a former teacher and a Presbyterian seminarian who built a national following by talking about faith from a progressive point of view, pushing back on the idea that Christianity belongs to one party. His win in a state Trump carried comfortably in 2024 is one of the reasons Democrats now control the Senate.
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The governor’s race was the bigger shock. Hinojosa beat Abbott with about 53 percent of the vote to his 46 percent. Abbott was running for a fourth term after 12 years in office and went into Election Day ahead in the polling averages. Texas Democrats had not won the governor’s office since Ann Richards, who left in 1995.
When Hinojosa, 52, takes office in January 2027, she will be the first Latina governor in Texas history and the state’s first Hispanic governor. She will also be only the third woman to hold the job, after Richards and Miriam Ferguson.
Hinojosa represents Austin in the Texas House and ran on affordability and public schools. Her biggest fight with Abbott was over school vouchers, a program that uses tax money to help families pay private school tuition. Abbott championed the program, which launched in 2026 with $1 billion in public funds for students attending private schools. Hinojosa opposed it and promised to replace the state’s education commissioner, Mike Morath, a software developer and investor, with an actual educator.
Voters never saw the two candidates debate. Hinojosa accepted four televised debate invitations, and Abbott, who had debated in all three of his earlier governor’s races, never agreed to one. In October, Hinojosa staged a debate outside the Governor’s Mansion anyway while Abbott campaigned in East Texas.
On election night, she introduced herself to the crowd with a line that spread quickly online: “My pronouns are mom, Texan and soon to be governor.” She said Abbott called to congratulate her, and she described the results as a mandate for change.
The blue wave reached further down the ballot, too. Democrat Vikki Goodwin was leading Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick as of Wednesday morning, though that race has not been called. In Texas, the lieutenant governor runs the state Senate and controls which bills get a vote, which makes the position one of the most powerful in state government.
Texas Democrats also flipped U.S. House seats. Bobby Pulido, a Latin Grammy winning Tejano singer, flipped the 15th Congressional District in South Texas, and attorney and former teacher Katy Padilla Stout flipped the 23rd District, beating Republican Brandon Herrera.
For decades, national Democrats talked about turning Texas blue and kept coming up short, including Beto O’Rourke’s close loss to Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. This time, Texas Democrats won the Senate seat and the governor’s mansion on the same night, and the lieutenant governor’s race is still too close to call.
