Democratic Texas State Rep. Gina Hinojosa ripped former President Joe Biden’s approach to his immigration policy in an interview this week, saying his policies on illegal immigration hurt Democrats in the 2024 election cycle. “Biden’s problem is he didn’t lead on immigration,”
Page A3From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 26 September 2026
Texas Democrat wins primary vowing to flip the state blue, then swings right three times in a month.
As it ran on the front
On September 22, Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa won her Democratic primary for governor with almost twice the votes Beto O'Rourke pulled in the same race in 2018. "We flip Texas, and it's over," she told The Nation, the kind of line a party prints on a bumper sticker before it means anything.
Twenty days before that win, on September 2, Hinojosa was already hedging what the mandate would look like: asked about Gov. Greg Abbott's pause on new data-center approvals, she told CBS she doubted he'd stick to it, calling it an attempt to protect his own reelection chances. Eight days after that, on September 10, she went further and backed Trump's $5,000 dividend outright — with one carve-out, that it not be conditioned on the midterms the way Trump proposed it. She still took the dividend. Three days after the primary that made her the nominee, on September 25, she turned on Biden, blaming his record on immigration for hurting Democrats in the 2024 cycle. "He was silent mostly," she told Politico. "He hid from it."…
…(cont) Line them up in the order they happened and it stops looking like three separate news cycles and starts looking like a memo: skepticism of a Republican governor's regulation, an endorsement of a Republican president's cash payment, a rebuke of the last Democratic president's silence — inside one month, before and after the win that was supposed to prove the progressive math worked. The primary produced twice the votes. It did not produce three positions of a party moving left.
None of this costs Hinojosa anything with the base she needed to clear a primary; it's the general electorate, the one that hasn't flipped Texas since Democrats started promising it would, that these three moves are aimed at.
The dividend detail is the one worth sitting with: Hinojosa's own objection to the current system wasn't the size of the check, it was what she called the billions already going to "grift." She wants a bigger check with a shorter memo attached. That's not a rejection of the sales pitch. That's a request for better terms on it.
“You don't win a primary by promising to flip the state blue and then spend the next three weeks running right of the guy she's replacing — that's not a coincidence, that's a strategy memo with the dates filed off. Trump's check, Abbott's data centers, Biden's silence: she's not fighting Republicans, she's auditioning for a general electorate that's never once flipped for her party. Watch the gaps between the moves get shorter — twenty days, eight days, three — that's not conviction settling in, that's a candidate finding out how fast she can move before somebody notices.”
“This is just a candidate meeting voters where they are — Texans want a bigger check and a governor who's honest that Abbott's playing politics with a pause, that's not triangulation, that's listening. And sure, she's also going after Biden now, but every Democrat's doing that this cycle, so it's not really — wait, three separate rightward moves in one month, is that the pattern? That doesn't sound like the messaging I was given.”
The receipts
Lajward Zahra Talking to Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa about what redistricting could mean and how a new generation of Democrats is speaking more directly to voters. The post Gina Hinojosa: “We Flip Texas, and It’s Over” appeared first on The Nation .
· Gina Hinojosa calls Abbott's Texas data center pause "an attempt to protect his reelection chances" from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Texas Democrat Gina Hinojosa backs Trump’s $5,000 dividend but rejects conditional payout from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.