Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic state representative running against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, went on Face the Nation on Sunday and argued that her campaign doesn’t really belong to a party. “Right now nobody wants politics as usual. Most of us see that it is broken,” she said, as CBS News reported. She described “deep disappointment in both political parties” in Texas, and said the result is a path forward that is “post-partisan in some ways.” Her agenda, she said, “is not a Democratic agenda”. She called it a populist one.

That is the obvious move for a Democrat in Texas, and the arithmetic explains why. Republicans outnumber Democrats there, and no Democrat has won the governorship since Ann Richards in 1990. Hinojosa, 52, is a civil rights and labor lawyer who has represented parts of Austin in the Texas House since 2017. She would be the state’s first Democratic governor in three decades, and its first woman governor in that time too. She can’t win with Democrats alone, so she has to describe a coalition in which a meaningful number of Republicans are angry enough at Abbott to vote for someone with a D next to her name. Calling the platform “post-partisan” is a way of telling those voters the D is a technicality.

How many is “a meaningful number”? Not that many. A CBS News/YouGov poll had Abbott ahead 52% to 48%. Those two numbers add up to 100, so on that poll a tie needs only 2 of every 100 voters to switch from Abbott to Hinojosa. RealClearPolling lists the poll’s margin of error at 3.5 points, with its polling average at Abbott +3.3 and the race rated a toss-up. In the same poll, the Houston Chronicle reported, 51% disapproved of Abbott’s performance as governor, and Democrat James Talarico led Ken Paxton 51% to 49% in the Senate race, one of the contests that has stretched the national Senate map. Abbott’s view, given to CBS Texas, is that “Polls don’t win elections, and polls are often wrong.” Sure. Both of those things are true.

The issues that cross the aisle

So what is the cross-party pitch, exactly? Public schools come first. “There is bipartisan anger about what Greg Abbott has done to our public schools,” Hinojosa said, adding that “Saving Texas public schools is a key part of my agenda.” She also listed healthcare access for children and high insurance premiums.

The most interesting one is data centers, because this is where her coalition math stops being abstract. “Nobody’s pushing back against the data centers harder than MAGA because these data centers are mostly moving into our rural communities that are unincorporated,” she said. She went on: “There are big water concerns, there are big electricity cost concerns, property rights concerns, and so we need to visit all of it and make sure Texans are protected, and first and foremost have a seat at the table.”

The mechanism is worth spelling out. Unincorporated land has no city government, which means no city council, no municipal zoning fight and fewer local officials for residents to yell at. For a company that needs a lot of land, water and power, that is part of the appeal. For the people who live nearby, it can mean a huge new neighbor that drives up demand on the grid and the aquifer before anyone asked them. Those people are mostly rural, and rural Texas mostly votes Republican. When a Democrat says “property rights” and “rural communities” in one sentence, she is trying to recruit them. Abbott has evidently noticed, too: that CBS Texas piece ran under a headline saying he is taking new steps to stop data centers.

The emails

The other thread is Elon Musk, the CEO of Texas-based Tesla and SpaceX, who has given millions to Abbott’s campaign. “We need to know what exactly is going on,” Hinojosa said of the two men’s relationship. On Oct. 19, the first day of early voting, she sued Abbott in Travis County’s 126th District Court under the Texas Public Information Act, according to the Houston Chronicle and other coverage, to inspect unredacted emails between the governor’s office and Musk and his companies.

The backstory is a classic of the public-records genre. The emails were originally compiled for a 2025 public records request by the Texas Newsroom. Abbott’s office tried to withhold them, citing “intimate and embarrassing” information, and lawyers for Abbott and Musk argued that releasing them would expose trade secrets and confidential legal and policymaking discussions. Attorney General Ken Paxton later ordered some of the records released, and Democracy Now described what came out as 1,200 pages of heavily redacted emails. If your defense of a government record is that it is embarrassing, you have more or less guaranteed that everyone will want to read it.

Hinojosa’s angle is that she isn’t asking as a member of the public. She is a sitting legislator, and according to her campaign’s announcement and the coverage, she asked on Sept. 29 to see the unredacted versions “for legislative purposes” and offered to sign a confidentiality agreement. The governor’s office said on Oct. 13 that it had located the documents and still refused. She also noted that state law would bar her from publicly releasing whatever is under the redactions.

Think about what that means for a campaign. If she wins the suit, she gets to read emails that she then can’t tell voters about. The suit’s electoral value comes mostly from existing: it was filed on the first day of early voting, and it lets her talk about Musk and “intimate and embarrassing” emails in the same breath. At a press conference she called the relationship “in-our-face corruption,” pointing to $1.6 billion in tax breaks for Musk’s planned Terafab semiconductor project in Grimes County (on Sunday she put the figure at $1.7 billion), along with grant money for SpaceX and a broadband contract worth more than $100 million awarded to Starlink.

Abbott’s side has answered in kind. His press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, said, “The lawsuit is baseless and nothing more than an act of desperation,” and Newsweek reported that Abbott called it a “lazy political stunt.” No ruling had been reported as of this writing.

The election is Nov. 3. “Turnout is high, enthusiasm is high on our side, so we feel really good about where we are,” Hinojosa said. That may be true. What we know for certain is that a Democrat in Texas has found an issue where she and MAGA voters agree: neither of them wants a data center built next door, and neither has been allowed to read the governor’s email.