Gina Hinojosa unseats Greg Abbott, flipping Texas governor's mansion blue

Gina Hinojosa just pulled off the upset of the cycle. The Democratic state representative has defeated three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, NBC News projects, handing Democrats the Texas governor's mansion for the first time since 1995. The win makes Hinojosa the state's first Hispanic governor.

Abbott spent tens of millions more than Hinojosa and started the race looking like a lock in a state that has been ruby red for decades. But shifting demographics and a rough national environment for Republicans — compounded in Texas by GOP nominees for other offices fighting personal scandals — caught up with him. Had he won, Abbott would have become the longest-serving governor in Texas history.

Hinojosa is a Rio Grande Valley native who won a state House seat in 2016 after careers as a civil rights and labor lawyer. She has said the fight to keep her son's elementary school from closing under state budget cuts is what pushed her into politics. Education stayed central to her campaign: she pledged over the summer that one of her first acts as governor would be firing the state's education commissioner over declining student performance.

She also went hard at Abbott over data centers, a flashpoint across Texas, including rural areas. Texas hosts more than 500 of them — second-most in the nation — and Abbott ordered the state to stop approving new permits in September while an audit examined their strain on the electrical grid. Hinojosa ran ads accusing him of 'doing the bidding of his billionaire donors' and 'selling out Texas' on the issue, and it chipped at a rural voting bloc that had backed him reliably before.

Hinojosa, a fluent Spanish speaker, courted Latino voters — roughly a third of the state's electorate — with bilingual TV spots and town halls conducted in Spanish. Abbott swung back by branding her 'radical,' running ads that attacked her past support for transgender female athletes and gender-affirming care for minors and calling her 'Gender Bender Gina.' Her response ad flipped the script: 'They want to run an entire campaign saying that I'm too woke. I plan to spend an entire campaign focused on the fact that working people are too broke,' she said. 'My pronouns are mom, Texan and soon to be governor.'

Voters never got a debate. Abbott didn't respond to invitations, and Hinojosa eventually staged one outside the governor's mansion in mid-October.