2026-09-20T09:00:29.295Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/20/politics/texas-democrats-republicans-hinojosa-talarico
得克萨斯州哈林根——
“现在该怎么办？”吉娜·伊诺霍萨问道，目光投向地块对面那栋半完工的房子，那天早上施工队还没露面。
工人们是不是被拦下来了？他们明天会来吗？还是只是迟到了？
“你跟我一样没底，”南得克萨斯州建筑联盟主席罗尼·卡瓦佐斯说道，他正带领得克萨斯州州长候选人进行一次简短的社区走访。这个社区因埃隆·马斯克的太空探索技术公司（SpaceX）急需新工人而需求旺盛。
卡瓦佐斯列出了行业面临的一长串问题。关税推高了木材和其他建材的价格。移民执法突袭工地，让担心离家就会被无限期拘留的劳动力群体普遍人心惶惶。通货膨胀推高了所有成本，而未完工地块的高利率也推高了成本。再加上柴油价格历史性飙升。
站在60天前浇筑完混凝土就再也没动工的地基上，卡瓦佐斯说他本人并未投票给总统唐纳德·特朗普，但他认识很多两年前投了特朗普的人，尤其是在美墨边境沿线的这些城镇。当时很多人认为，拉美裔选民当时坚定支持特朗普是该社区对民主党失望的标志。
共和党已经控制了得克萨斯州所有全州性公职近二十年。但种种经济因素、全国范围内对移民突袭的反弹、人工智能的发展，以及共和党提名背负争议缠身的候选人冒犯温和派选民，都让今年秋季成为民主党打破这个美国第二大州一党独大局面的最佳时机。
“不同之处在于，我们过去以为只要对方有多糟糕、己方候选人有多有魅力，就能赢得选举，但这已经不够了，”伊诺霍萨当天晚些时候在布朗斯维尔一家独立书店的小咖啡馆里说道。“我们在本届竞选周期中得到了天赐良机，各种因素汇聚成完美风暴。我们开展了现代史上前所未有的强有力协调行动，所有人都在无缝协作，确保全州范围内的选民投票率。”
这种协调意味着伊诺霍萨偶尔会和她在得克萨斯州众议院的同事、民主党参议员候选人詹姆斯·塔拉rico一同亮相。塔拉rico正与丑闻缠身的州总检察长肯·帕克斯顿展开激烈的参议院竞选。但多数时候，他们会分头行动，以覆盖这个幅员辽阔的州。这是21世纪以来首次有不止一位强势民主党候选人在全州范围内参选。
巴拉克·奥巴马已经意外地与两人一同在奥斯汀的塔可联合餐厅亮相，而他们也都在各自的活动中邀请州议会和其他地方公职的候选人。塔拉rico还将他募集到的巨额全国竞选资金中的60万美元转投地方竞选活动。自至少1972年——这是得克萨斯州民主党记录可追溯的最早年份——以来，民主党首次推出所有州议会席位的候选人，其中许多候选人是由贝托·奥罗克的“以人民为动力组织招募的。该组织主要在大学校园开展登记和组织活动，目前已收集了近10万个手机号码。
“得克萨斯州出现这种情况简直不可思议，”奥罗克在赶往下一个行程途中告诉CNN。“但这一切的发生是有原因的。”
就在上周，州铁路委员会共和党候选人发布了一张德克萨斯大学橄榄球比赛中棕色皮肤学生的照片，并声称“外国人取代美国人的现象无处不在，远比我们任何人想象的都要严重”。许多共和党人认为这条帖子极具种族主义色彩，著名共和党政治策划人卡尔·罗夫甚至在一篇专栏文章中宣称：“今年11月，我将为有生以来第二位民主党人投票。”（第一位是前副州长鲍勃·布拉多克，最后一位赢得全州性公职的民主党人。）
但即使是该州最热情的民主党人也承认，共和党州长格雷格·阿博特庞大的竞选资金，加上特朗普和马斯克盟友的巨额支出，将让民主党实现突破难如登天。
每一次关于左翼人士燃起希望的谈话，都萦绕着过往希望破灭的记忆：从温迪·戴维斯、奥罗克到科林·阿雷德。但他们也认为，今年他们或许真的迎来了实现突破的机会。
去年，阿博特支持特朗普要求根据里奥格兰德河谷——该河谷是该州最南端的地区——重新划分美国国会选区地图。共和党人押注，在该地区四个县都为特朗普赢得大胜的拉美裔选民，在特朗普不在选票上时依然可以争取。
得克萨斯州政治项目/德克萨斯大学最近的一项民调显示，该州拉美裔选民对特朗普的看法转为负面，51%的人对他持负面看法，41%的人持正面看法。2024年10月的民调中，他们对特朗普的支持率和反对率均为48%。这些数字反映了拉美裔选民在全国范围内转向反对特朗普和共和党的更大趋势。
这里的选民见证了非法移民越境人数激增，这首先成为前总统乔·拜登以及后来接过拜登竞选团队的副总统卡玛拉·哈里斯背上沉重的负担。特朗普第二任期期间，越境人数大幅下降。但民主党人认为，在经济逆风以及无犯罪记录移民被逮捕和驱逐的急剧增加的背景下，他们有机会夺回该地区的支持。
伊诺霍萨的竞选团队认为，如果她和塔拉rico能获得奥罗克2018年获得的拉美裔选民支持比例（并在其他选民中保持稳定），考虑到人口增长和选民结构变化，这足以赢得选举。
今年春季与伊诺霍萨一同竞选的众议员鲁文·加列戈表示，他在得克萨斯州拉美裔选民中看到了与2024年自己赢得亚利桑那州席位时类似的可能性，尽管特朗普也赢得了该州。
“不要让先入为主的观念和过去的表现让你认为这可以预测未来的表现。我真的认为得克萨斯州的局势变化非常快，”加列戈说道。他还补充道，他会对持怀疑态度的民主党领导人：“你们对2024年拉美裔选民的情况感到愤怒。真正改变这种环境的方法是推出优秀的候选人，而我们已经为你们找到了优秀的候选人。”
伊诺霍萨从未主动提及自己有可能成为该州首位拉美裔州长，即便被问到这个问题时也是如此——但她经常提到自己作为河谷本地人竞选州长的意义，这里是她成长和就读高中的地方。在布朗斯维尔的集会结束后，当被记者问及回到家乡的感受时，她谈到无论走到哪里，人们都会介绍自己是失散的表亲——然后切换到西班牙语回答下一个问题。
众议员维森特·冈萨雷斯是众议院民主党人，他试图保住共和党在重新划分选区时瞄准的席位之一。他的广告在当地电视台反复播出，抱怨药品价格比亚美边境另一侧便宜一半。这则广告针对的是经常在边境桥梁上排队等候在马塔莫罗斯或普罗格雷索等城镇买药的选民。
特哈诺音乐明星鲍比·普利多投身政治，挑战共和党众议员莫妮卡·德拉·克鲁兹。他告诉CNN，他正在宣扬共同的保守价值观，并致力于解决该州人均收入最低地区的问题。他很早就与塔拉rico合作，并随着伊诺霍萨的竞选活动加强而与她开展更多合作，包括上个月在比维尔举行的有2500人参加的集会，三人一同亮相。比维尔县人口64%为拉美裔，上次选举中70%的选民支持特朗普。
对拉美裔选民的呼吁不仅将塑造得克萨斯州乃至全国2026年的选举，还将影响2028年总统大选，更会对2032年大选产生更大影响，因为人口趋势将推动选举团进一步向南转移。
“拉美裔选民是共和党和民主党都无法捉摸的谜团，”普利多说。
尽管如此，这个州两年前特朗普以14个百分点的优势获胜，是奥巴马2012年连任后，几名奥巴马助手成立“战场得克萨斯”团队承诺将该州变成蓝色阵营，该团队很快几乎销声匿迹以来，共和党人在该州取得的最大优势。四年前，阿博特以11个百分点的优势击败奥罗克。
今年夏天早些时候公布的数据显示，阿博特的竞选活动手握近7000万美元现金，正加紧开展挨家挨户敲门拉票，并斥巨资投放广告。
阿博特的新闻秘书爱德华多·利阿尔没有安排州长接受采访，并拒绝回答多个问题，包括阿博特是否会与伊诺霍萨进行辩论，以及他是否认为特朗普的支持率与2024年持平。
利阿尔表示：“阿博特在任期间一直在减税、控制开支，让更多钱留在得克萨斯州民众手中——这让得克萨斯州成为美国生活成本最低的州之一。”“他还专注于进一步降低财产税以及住房、保险、医疗、电力和大学学费。吉娜·伊诺霍萨的政策恰恰相反：提高税收和成本。她可以使用任何她想用的竞选口号。”
在麦卡伦一家名为“小妖精”的户外酒吧，伊诺霍萨邀请观众举手表示是否信任政府。没有人举手。
在布朗斯维尔一家自行车店兼咖啡馆设立的电话银行现场，一名女性告诉她，她不得不帮忙支付母亲的电费，而自己的房产税利息欠款如此之高，以至于她打算搬进拖车房。伊诺霍萨把手放在额头上。
“你并不孤单，”伊诺霍萨对她说。
当天晚上，在距离边境车程10分钟、装饰着假花和吊灯的成人礼和婚礼大厅里，伊诺霍萨又说出了她最喜欢的一句话：“这个国家是为人民所有、为人民服务，还是亿万富翁的世界，而我们只是生活在这里？”
“人们投票给特朗普，是因为他说体制被操纵了。人们知道这是对的。我知道这是正确的。民主党人一直没有这么说。民主党人一直在为一个完全站不住脚的体制辩护，一个与我们作对的体制，”伊诺霍萨说。“共和党人一直掌权，所以他们主要应该为此负责，但责任也不能全在他们身上。能够承认这一点，看到这一点并说出来——就在几周前我才意识到，这就是我们这场竞选的核心所在。”
这场竞选不仅仅依靠的不仅仅是传统支持者。
林恩·达文波特2021年1月6日就在华盛顿椭圆广场，直到特朗普演讲中途她才离开，去买热狗并回酒店睡觉。她说，因为她觉得“他什么都没说”。那时，她已经在州众议院教育委员会看到伊诺霍萨反对学校教育券的活动中认识了她。现在，她是一群MAHA和MAGA妈妈中的一员，被吸引到伊诺霍萨的竞选活动中。
“我不会转而加入民主党，”达文波特告诉CNN。“我现在可能只会投部分候选人的票，只支持具体的人。”
37岁、正在攻读土木工程硕士学位的克拉丽萨·金塔尼利亚来到麦卡伦听伊诺霍萨的活动，并指出她看到了多少伊诺霍萨和塔拉rico的竞选标语。
她承认，过去几届选举周期中，民主党人的希望屡屡燃起又屡屡破灭。
“每次都这样，”她说。“这次感觉离成功更近了一点。”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZxyR8HqjLg
Latino voters, data centers and Republican problems are giving Texas Democrats their highest hopes in 20 years
2026-09-20T09:00:29.295Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/20/politics/texas-democrats-republicans-hinojosa-talarico
Harlingen, Texas—
“Now what?” Gina Hinojosa asked, looking at the half-done house across the lot where the crew hadn’t shown up that morning.
Had the workers been pulled over? Would they come tomorrow? Were they just running late?
“Your guess,” said Ronnie Cavazos, the chairman of the South Texas Builders Alliance, as he led the Democratic nominee for governor on a brief tour of a neighborhood that had been in demand for new workers at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, “is as good as mine.”
Cavazos has a long list of problems his industry faces. Tariffs have driven up the price of timber and other materials. Immigration enforcement raids on work sites sent a much wider chill through a workforce worried about being indefinitely detained if they left their homes. Inflation drove up all costs, as did higher interest rates on lots that were left unfinished much longer. Then, there is the historic spike in diesel.
Standing on a foundation that hasn’t been built on since the concrete was poured 60 days earlier, Cavazos said he didn’t vote for President Donald Trump himself, but knows many who did two years ago, especially in these towns along the US-Mexico border where Latinos swung hard for the president in what many saw at the time as a sign of how lost the community was for Democrats.
The GOP has controlled all statewide offices in Texas for almost two decades. But a mix of economic factors, the national backlash to immigration raids and the growth of artificial intelligence, and the GOP nominating baggage-laden candidates who could offend moderate voters make this fall perhaps the likeliest chance for Democrats to break one-party control of the nation’s second-largest state.
“The difference is that we thought in the past we could win just based on how bad the other side was and the charisma of our side. And that’s not enough,” Hinojosa said, later that afternoon, sitting in the small café of an independent bookstore in Brownsville. “We have been given gifts in this campaign cycle in a perfect storm of things coming together. We have a strong coordinated effort in a way that we haven’t had in modern history, where we’re all working together seamlessly to make sure we get out the vote in the state.”
That coordination means Hinojosa occasionally appears with her colleague in the Texas House, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who is in a tight Senate race with the scandal-plagued state attorney general, Ken Paxton. But mostly, they split up to cover more ground in the massive state, the first time in the 21st century that there has been more than one strong Democrat running statewide.
Barack Obama already made a surprise joint appearance at Taco Joint in Austin with both of them, and they in turn have both been featuring candidates for state legislature and other local offices at their own events, and Talarico is redirecting $600,000 of the massive national fundraising he’s been raking into local campaigns. For the first time since at least 1972 — that’s as far as the Texas Democratic Party’s records go back — Democrats are fielding candidates for every state legislature seat, many recruited in part by Beto O’Rourke’s Powered by People group, which has also already collected nearly 100,000 cellphone numbers as they’ve been registering and organizing primarily on college campuses.
“It’s nuts that this is happening in Texas,” O’Rourke told CNN while driving between stops. “But it’s happening for a reason.”
Then, just last week, the GOP candidate for state railroad commissioner posted a photo of brown-skinned students at a University of Texas football game and said the replacement of Americans by foreigners is “everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.” That post was seen as so racist by many Republicans that the famed GOP operative Karl Rove declared in an opinion piece, “This November, I’ll vote for only the second Democrat in my life.” (The first was former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, the last Democrat to win a statewide race.)
But even the most enthusiastic Democrats working in the state admit that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s massive campaign account, combined with huge spending by groups allied with Trump and Musk, will make a breakthrough tough.
Every conversation about liberals getting their hopes up is haunted by memories of when those hopes were dashed, from Wendy Davis to O’Rourke to Colin Allred. But they also think that this year, they may have stumbled into actually making it happen.
Abbott last year backed Trump’s demands to redraw US House maps in part based on the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost section of the state. Republicans bet that Latinos who helped deliver big wins for the president in all four of the region’s counties were voters they could count on when he wasn’t on the ballot.
A recent poll from the Texas Politics Project/University of Texas finds Latino voters in the state breaking negative on Trump, with 51% seeing him unfavorably to 41% favorably, after finding they evenly split on him at 48% each in October 2024. Those numbers reflect a larger national shift among Latinos against Trump and the GOP.
Voters here saw the surges of unauthorized migrant crossings that became an albatross first for former President Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris when the then-vice president took over his campaign. Those crossings have plummeted during Trump’s second term. But Democrats see opportunity to win this region back amid the economic headwinds and the sharp rise in immigrants without criminal records being arrested and deported.
Hinojosa’s campaign argues that if she and Talarico win the same percentage of the Latino vote that O’Rourke did in 2018 (and stays steady among other voters), that would be enough to win, given population growth and shifts.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, who campaigned with Hinojosa in the spring, said he sees similar possibilities among Latinos in Texas as when he won his Arizona seat in 2024 even as Trump also won his state.
“Don’t let preconceived notions and past performance make you think that will predict future performance. I really think that things are moving very fast in Texas,” Gallego said, adding that he’d tell skeptical Democratic leaders, “You’re mad about what happened with Latinos in 2024. A way to actually change that environment is to actually you know get good candidates, and we got you good candidates.”
Hinojosa never actively talks about possibly being the first Latina governor, even when pushed — but she regularly refers to what it would mean to be the first governor from the Valley, where she grew up and went to high school. Asked after her rally in Brownsville by a reporter what it was like being back home, she talked about how everywhere she went, people introduced themselves as lost cousins–and then switched into Spanish to answer the next question.
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, the House Democrat trying to hold one of the seats that Republicans targeted in redistricting, has an ad in heavy rotation on local TV complaining about medications costing half as much as they do on the other side of the border. That ad targets people who regularly wait in traffic on the border bridges to get their prescriptions filled in towns like Matamoros or Progreso.
Bobby Pulido, the Tejano music star who entered politics to run against Republican Rep. Mónica de la Cruz, told CNN he is talking up shared conservative values and addressing the lowest per capita income region in the state. He joined forces early with Talarico and started doing more with Hinojosa as her campaign strengthened, including at a 2,500-person rally last month featuring all three in Beeville, located in a county where the population is 64% Latino and went 70% for Trump in the last election.
Appeals to Latinos won’t just shape 2026 in Texas and beyond, but the 2028 presidential election and even more so the 2032 race as population trends push the Electoral College further south.
“Latinos,” Pulido said, “are the enigma that neither Republicans or Democrats have been able to figure out.”
Still, this is a state Trump won by 14 points just two years ago, the largest margin for Republicans in the state since a few Obama aides came off his 2012 re-election promising to turn the state blue with a group called Battleground Texas — that soon all but disappeared — and where Abbott beat O’Rourke by 11 points four years ago.
With nearly $70 million in cash on hand reported earlier this summer, Abbott’s campaign is ramping up to knock on millions of doors and spend millions of dollars on ads.
Eduardo Leal, Abbott’s press secretary, did not make the governor available for an interview and declined to answer several questions about whether Abbott will debate Hinojosa or if he believes support for Trump is as the same levels as in 2024.
Abbott “has spent his time in office cutting taxes, controlling spending, and keeping more money in Texans’ pockets—helping make Texas one of the most affordable states in the country,” Leal said. “And he’s focused on doing even more to lower property taxes and the cost of housing, insurance, healthcare, electricity, and college. Gina Hinojosa offers the opposite: higher taxes and higher costs. She can use whatever campaign slogan she wants.”
In McAllen, at an outdoor bar called The Gremlin, Hinojosa asked the crowd to raise hands if they trusted government. No one did.
At a phone bank set up in a bike shop/coffee shop in Brownsville, she held her hand to her forehead as a woman at the end of the line told her about having to help pay her mother’s electricity bills while being so behind on interest payments for her property tax that she’s going to move into a trailer.
“You are not alone,” Hinojosa told her.
That evening, under the fake flowers and chandeliers of a quinceañera and wedding hall a windy 10-minute drive from the border, she leaned on another favorite line: “Is this going to be by and for the people, or is it the billionaires’ world and we just live here?”
“People voted for Trump because he said the system’s rigged. And people know that’s right. I know that that’s correct. Democrats have not been saying that. Democrats have been defending a system that is totally indefensible, a system that is working against us,” Hinojosa said. “Republicans have been in power, and so they are primarily to blame here, but there is blame to go around. To be able to acknowledge that, to see it and say it — this campaign, I realized just a couple of weeks ago, that’s what we’re about.”
It’s not just traditional supporters the campaign is counting on.
Lynn Davenport was at the Ellipse in Washington on January 6, 2021, until she left in the middle of Trump’s speech to get a hot dog and take a nap at her hotel, because, she said, she felt “he wasn’t saying anything.” By then, she’d gotten to know Hinojosa from seeing her fight school vouchers while on the state house education committee. Now she’s one of a contingent of MAHA and MAGA moms who have been drawn into Hinojosa’s campaign.
“I’m not switching to the Democratic Party,” Davenport told CNN. “I’ll probably just undervote from now on and go with the person.”
Clarissa Quintanilla, who’s 37 and in graduate school for civil engineering, came to see Hinojosa in McAllen and noted how many signs she’s seen both for Hinojosa and Talarico.
She acknowledged that the last few election cycles have been marked by Democratic hopes getting up and then getting dashed.
“Every time this happens,” she said. “This feels a little closer.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZxyR8HqjLg