AUSTIN, Texas — Six months ago, hardly anyone treated this fall's governor's race as a real contest. That's no longer true. A wave of late-summer polling shows Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa cutting into Gov. Greg Abbott's advantage.
The shift shows up most clearly in a single pollster's own tracking. A Texas A&M Bush School survey conducted with ReconMR had Abbott up by six points in early June. By late July, the same operation found the race down to a single point, 46% to 45%, with Democrats slightly underrepresented in the sample relative to Republicans. A Fox News survey fielded almost the identical week — late July, more than 1,000 registered voters — landed in nearly the same spot: Abbott ahead by a single point, 50% to 49%, a margin The Texan's roundup of major surveys noted sat well inside that poll's error range.
Texas A&M political scientist Kirby Goidel, who worked on the Bush School survey, put it this way: "the Governor's race looks much more competitive than it did in June." He also cautioned that a large share of the electorate simply hasn't formed an opinion of Hinojosa yet — in his poll, nearly a third of likely voters said they didn't know enough about her to say whether they liked her.
The tightening story gets murkier once other surveys enter the picture. A poll from the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research Center at Texas Southern University, fielded that same late-July window, put Abbott ahead by six — not one. And the newest data available, an Emerson College Polling survey conducted with Nexstar Media on August 9 and 10, showed Abbott back out to a four-point edge, 49% to 45%. Rather than a steady glide toward a dead heat, the fuller picture looks more like a race oscillating between a genuine toss-up and a mid-single-digit Republican advantage, with the answer shifting depending on which firm is doing the counting.
Affordability, not immigration, is what's moving voters
Whatever the topline gap, pollsters largely agree on what's driving the electorate. In Emerson's early-August survey, the economy ranked as the top concern for 30% of respondents, well clear of immigration at 19%. A separate poll from Texas Public Opinion Research — conducted in mid-July and led by Luke Warford, a Democrat who previously ran for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission — found affordability topping voters' concerns as well, while giving Hinojosa a six-point favorability edge over Abbott. Hinojosa has leaned into that anxiety with a proposal to draw roughly $17 billion from the state's Economic Stabilization Fund — the so-called rainy day fund — to send a one-time payment to every Texas household. She has branded the plan a way to "end the Greg Abbott Corruption Tax."
The Hispanic vote could be the deciding factor
Few voting blocs matter more to the outcome than Latino Texans. Texas holds the nation's second-largest Hispanic population, trailing only California, and Hinojosa — born in McAllen and raised in Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley — is counting on turning that advantage into votes. Emerson's early-August poll put her lead among Hispanic respondents at 17 points; the firm's executive director, Spencer Kimball, noted that "majorities of Texas Hispanic voters are dissatisfied with their federal and state executives," citing disapproval numbers for both Abbott and President Trump among that group. A separate, independently conducted survey from Texas Public Opinion Research put Hinojosa's Hispanic advantage far higher, at 38 points — a figure her campaign has since promoted widely on its own website, though it's worth noting that survey came from a third-party pollster rather than the campaign itself, and other polls in the same window found smaller Latino gaps. That spread between pollsters is large enough that it should be read with real caution until more surveys confirm one number or the other.
Abbott's financial edge remains enormous
No single poll changes the fact that Abbott is vastly better funded. This report's review of Texas Ethics Commission filings, cited in a recent Latin Times profile of the race, put Abbott's cash on hand at roughly $67 million against about $3 million for Hinojosa. His campaign has cast her candidacy as far outside the Texas mainstream; when she launched her run, campaign manager Kim Snyder accused her of choosing "extreme ideologies over the safety and security of Texas families."
What history says — and what comes next
No Democrat has won the Texas governorship since Ann Richards left office in 1995, and the party hasn't captured any statewide office in the state in more than three decades. Early voting opens Oct. 19, with Election Day landing on Nov. 3 — leaving both campaigns roughly eleven weeks to turn a genuinely unsettled polling environment into a decisive result.
