You can usually tell who a politician is scared of. Not by what they say about them, but by who they bother mentioning at all.
So watch what Greg Abbott has been doing. The governor is running for a fourth term against Gina Hinojosa, the Austin state representative who won the Democratic nomination back in the spring. And for the better part of two months now, he has acted like she isn’t there.
The name he keeps repeating belongs to someone else entirely: James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate, not the governor’s mansion.
He came to fight the wrong race
Look at what happened at the Texas Democratic Convention in Corpus Christi in June. Abbott’s campaign showed up with a whole circus outside, a longhorn and a bull among the props, and rolled out an attack site calling the party radical on taxes, schools, immigration and crime. The Texas Tribune covered the stunt as it unfolded.
Guess whose quotes got top billing on that site. Talarico’s. There was an old line of his about treating the southern border like a front porch with a welcome mat, which Republicans have been passing around ever since, minus the part where he also said the door should stay locked.
And Hinojosa? Barely a mention. His actual opponent, and the campaign basically skipped past her.
That is a choice, not an accident. Abbott has kept it up through July too, hitting Talarico on Fox and on social media, painting him as one of the most left-wing members of the Legislature. Think about that for a second. A sitting governor sitting on more than sixty million dollars is spending his time on a Senate candidate instead of the woman trying to take his job.
What the silence is really saying
There is a generous way to read this. Talarico is the bigger name right now, he’s in a genuine toss-up against Ken Paxton, and going after the star at the top of the ticket makes a certain kind of sense.
The less generous read is probably the true one. Abbott doesn’t rate Hinojosa as a real threat, and attacking her would only hand her the attention she’s been struggling to get. Leave her alone and she stays where he likes her, which is out of the spotlight.
The money backs him up. In the second quarter of 2026, per campaign-finance figures reported by Spectrum News, Abbott pulled in around $25.5 million and had roughly $67 million banked. Hinojosa raised about $6 million and had maybe $3 million left to spend. That is not a gap. That is a canyon. The polls haven’t budged much either, with Abbott sitting on a six or seven point lead across most surveys since late June.
People close to the race have started using the word anemic, and it fits. The problem for Hinojosa was never that Texans took a look and disliked her. It’s that most of them still have no idea who she is.
The strange part
Now here’s the twist that makes Democrats squirm. The man Abbott won’t stop attacking might be the only thing keeping Hinojosa’s campaign alive.
Talarico has already written her a check, reportedly a hundred grand, and the smart money in Austin figures that whatever oxygen her campaign gets may end up coming through him. Which puts Democrats in an awkward spot. Their candidate for governor is partly riding on a Senate candidate’s fundraising, and that Senate candidate has his own brutal race to win first. If Talarico’s cash and attention get stretched, you can guess which campaign feels it.
Hinojosa has leaned all the way into that bet. On the trail she talks up Talarico constantly, frames the two of them as a package deal out to clean up Texas government. Maybe his momentum carries her. But the fact that her best shot runs through somebody else’s race tells you a lot about where her own one stands.
To be fair to her
Her people would fight the anemic label, and they’d have a case. She’s running on small-dollar money, no corporate PACs, mostly modest checks from Texans, and she’ll tell you that’s the whole point against a governor floating on billionaire cash. Her message hasn’t wandered either: schools, health costs, the price of everyday life. That stuff can travel further than a summer poll suggests. Earlier this year her campaign was even pushing numbers that had Abbott looking shakier than a three-term incumbent should. In a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1990, seven points isn’t nothing.
So there’s a real argument to be had. Is Abbott ignoring Hinojosa because he’s confident, or because he’d simply rather spend the fall fighting the race he knows he can win?
Where this leaves things
For now he’s the one setting the terms. He’s decided the scariest Democrat in Texas is the one on a completely different ballot, and he’s built his whole summer around that call. Whether that’s smart or whether it’s the kind of thing that looks foolish in November, we’ll find out over the next hundred days.
But the nervousness among Texas Democrats is real, and honestly, it’s earned. When the other guy won’t even bring up your candidate by name, that tends to tell you something.
Analysis reflecting the author’s read of publicly reported events. Polling and fundraising figures are current as of late July 2026 and will keep shifting.
Sources: The Texas Tribune (Texas Democratic Convention coverage), Spectrum News (Q2 2026 campaign-finance reporting), and July 2026 Texas campaign reporting. Original reporting belongs to those outlets; keep source links when republishing.
