Gina Hinojosa is finding some new supporters with a tried and true issue.
Rep. Gina Hinojosa
Gina Hinojosa’s recent campaign swing felt more like a public vent session than a conventional political tour.
A teacher at her Richardson stop detailed his frustrations with his school district’s broken air conditioning and aging buildings. In Fort Worth, dozens of parents worried that the recent state takeover of the district would kickstart a staff exodus. Even in the wealthy suburbs, like Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, moms fretted about the recent closure of two elementary schools forcing larger class sizes.
It’s this frustration about the state of public schools that the Austin Democrat is hoping to tap into as she takes on Gov. Greg Abbott, betting that she can galvanize parents across the political spectrum to reject the Republican’s approach to education.
In stops through North Texas last week, Hinojosa roused loud cheers with her “day-one” promise to fire Mike Morath, Abbott’s education commissioner, who has overseen the adoption of controversial Christianity-infused textbooks and initiated the takeover of several large districts. She accused Abbott of diverting property taxes meant for public schools into his own “corruption schemes,” including his private school voucher program.
“I am counting on that anger and that love for our public schools, from parents, Democratic moms, Republican moms, to be the difference in this election,” Hinojosa said at a stop in Grapevine.
It’s the first time a candidate challenging Abbott has made education so central to the campaign, and Hinojosa may face an uphill climb.
Josh Blank, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Austin, said his polling shows only one in five Texas voters has school-aged children. Even fewer named schools a top issue compared to concerns about inflation and immigration, he said.
“There’s a certain limit to the salience of what is going on in schools,” Blank said. “For most voters, it’s just not of direct concern.”
Last election cycle, Texas Democrats running for the Legislature campaigned against Abbott’s private school voucher plan, arguing it would sap much-needed funds from public schools. The message didn’t seem to land, as the party failed to flip any of their targeted seats.
Still, Blank said the focus could help shore up hardcore supporters with direct ties to public education.
Ashleigh Johnson, a mom of two in Grapevine, said she has generally voted for Republicans who aligned with her traditional values and she wouldn’t have envisioned herself attending an event for a Democrat.
But Johnson said a plan to close her son’s neighborhood school led her to volunteer on successful campaigns to oust several far-right incumbents on the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD school board earlier this year. She now regrets her votes for Abbott in 2018 and 2022. She showed up at Hinojosa’s roundtable in the area last week, where a dozen other parents convened.
“It’s honestly been so eye-opening,” she said. “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t in Abbott for choking public schools.”
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In her stump speech, Hinojosa touts her history of forming an unlikely alliances with “MAGA Moms” to oppose the voucher program, which some conservatives see as a government handout. The state’s $1 billion voucher program took effect this year and offers families public funds to spend on private or homeschooling.
One of those moms, education activist and former Dallas County GOP precinct chair Lynn Davenport, is now a big booster of Hinojosa’s campaign.
In an interview, Davenport said she is disenchanted with Republican politics and is planning to cast a vote for Hinojosa while leaving the rest of her ballot blank. In coming months, she said she plans to work on convincing fellow conservatives to similarly base their votes around education, despite her big differences with Hinojosa on other issues like abortion, gun rights and immigration.
“I can’t see any other pathway other than voting for Gina, triggering the termination of Abbott and Morath,” she said in an interview. “I have to ignore all those other issues because this one is so urgent. I have to pick my battle.”
First, I appreciate that in an article about how Gina Hinojosa is using the issue of public education to persuade unhappy Republicans to vote for her, there are quotes from a couple of Republican voters who are planning to vote for her. The plural of “anecdote” may not be “data”, but it’s nice to at least get the anecdotes.
I understand the need to point out that a Democratic candidate running on the issue of better public education is hardly novel, and that the issue didn’t work well for them in the previous election, one in which the specific item of private school vouchers was on the agenda. I just hope we can also understand that 2024 was a different time and that election was held in a very different context, in terms of the national and state political environments. The salience of a particular issue matters, and how salient a given issue is varies over time and within that political context.
Why that matters this year is precisely because for the first time, at least in my memory, it’s not just poor and urban school districts that are feeling a financial pinch, it’s wealthy districts in high-growth suburbs, like Grapevine-Colleyville. People in general really don’t like to see schools close and programs get cut and teachers get laid off, but they especially don’t like it when their expectation is that their district and the schools their kids go to are bright and shiny and new and fully provisioned. In that context, it’s not a surprise that they might be mad at the guy in charge over that.