Ninety percent of the residents in Texas’s Hidalgo County are Latino. The majority of its voters backed Joe Biden in 2020. Four years later, Donald Trump narrowly won the county with 51percent of the vote. 

On Tuesday, there was a 40-point swing to Democrats in Hidalgo County. Seventy-one percent of its voters chose Gina Hinojosa for governor. 

Of the many surprising results in Tuesday’s historic midterm elections, none is more consequential for the future of American politics than the kind of thing that happened in Hidalgo County. And no single win matters more than Hinojosa’s.

While most of the national attention money went to the US Senate race, where state Rep. James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton, the governor’s race was the more seismic result. In a state where Latinos outnumber whites (despite the popular image of Texans as white men in cowboy hats), Hinojosa will be the first Latina governor in the state’s history. 

Here’s why Hinojosa’s victory is so important.

Texas was always the next Georgia

Nearly six years ago, just after Georgia flipped control of the Senate to Democrats in January 2021,  I wrote a column trying to show that “Texas is the next Georgia.” The Georgia model was succinctly summarized by Stacey Abrams in 2012 when she said to me and my late wife Susan Sandler, “There are 1 million people of color in Georgia who are unregistered. I’m going to register them to vote.” Eight years later Jon Ossoff, who worked for Civil Rights Movement icon John Lewis, and Raphael Warnock, who preaches from the literal church pulpit where Martin Luther King once stood, became United States senators. 

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There was no reason Texas couldn’t do something similar. The ingredients were all there – a state that was even more racially diverse than Georgia, a large non-voting population of people of color, and talented and dedicated community-based leaders and organizations working to turn demographic majorities into voting majorities. 

In 2020, Joe Biden lost Texas by 631,221 votes, while 4.5 million eligible Texans of color did not vote. In 2026, more Texans than ever before registered to vote, and the state, along with the country, entered a new era.

How Hinojosa won

While many in the media have focused on Talarico’s appeal to white voters, much less attention has been paid to the more promising and enduring development in Lone Star state politics – the emergence of a compelling statewide Latina leader with progressive politics and deep roots in the Rio Grande Valley—the region where Trump had made meaningful incursions in 2024, including winning border counties like Hidalgo and Webb where more than 90 percent of the residents are Latino. Hinojosa brought her people out and brought them home, winning each of the two counties by 40 percentage points. 

That should not be surprising. For more than a half century, Democrats have been caught in a dilemma of their own making: they have been reluctant to fight openly for justice and equality for Latinos and other people of color, for fear of alienating white voters who are uncomfortable with the demographic revolution (a fear near-comically articulated by one of Trump’s Latino supporters a decade ago as the spectre of “taco trucks on every corner.”). In the context of anti-immigrant hysteria, Democrats have tried to show that they, too, are tough on the border while ignoring gargantuan racial wealth gap that gives the average white family 400% more assets than the typical Latino family. 

That ambivalence and timidity left the door open for Republicans to say, “We care about the issues you care about.” That is how a meaningful share of Latino voters became susceptible to MAGA in 2024. But there is no confusion among Latinos about where Gina Hinojosa stands, and that clarity and enthusiasm helped turn Texas blue. 

A true rainbow coalition

Latinos now outnumber white Texans, and people of color comprise 51 percent of the state’s population. The historic obstacle to translating this into political power has been turnout. In the past, Latino turnout has trailed white turnout by roughly 20 percentage points in Texas—whether because of economic pressure, the wealth gap, voter suppression, or the simple lack of free time that comes with working multiple jobs. But as Hinojosa showed, when a candidate inspires, and civic engagement groups do the work of registering and mobilizing, that gap narrows, and the electoral math of Texas changes.

Latinos were the cornerstone of Hinojosa’s win, but they were not alone. Black voters delivered Democrats landslide margins in Dallas, Harris, and Fort Bend counties, and Asian voters, who make up five percent of the Texas population, showed up in large numbers. A perfect storm of economic pain, from affordability to gas prices in a state where everybody drives, also pulled moderate voters toward her, and the suburbs around Dallas, Houston and Austin swung hard. 

There is another dimension that has gone largely unexamined: gender. Sexism and misogyny remain among the most underanalyzed forces in American politics. It took 250 years, and the trailblazing work of Stacey Abrams, before a Black woman was elected governor of any state, with Keisha Lance Bottoms’s victory in Georgia on Tuesday. Donald Trump has run for president three times, and his two victories came when running against a woman. Every community is susceptible to sexism, just as every community is susceptible to racism and homophobia, and some part of the 2024 decline in Democratic support likely reflected resistance to a woman in the highest office. 

Yet amid all the talk about the “manosphere” and a crisis of male loneliness, and with many people asking whether a woman can win the presidency, a Latina just won the governorship of one of the most famously macho states in the country.

What comes next

The most important consequence comes first: more than 31 million Texans now have a governor – and, importantly, a state house – with a mandate to lead in the interests of the majority, and with significant say over the resources, reach and power of one of the largest economies on Earth.

The political consequences are enormous as well. Texas has 40 electoral votes. If Democrats can compete there in 2028, the Republican path to the White House narrows dramatically, if not disappearing altogether. Georgia showed what flipping a Southern state makes possible: the 2021 runoffs delivered control of the Senate and, with it, far-reaching public policy changes (albeit not far enough). A Texas that elects Democrats statewide reshapes the balance of power in Congress for a generation. 

All of this shows that Gina Hinojosa’s election is the most consequential result of this midterm, and the clearest signal yet of where American politics is headed.