The Rainbow Coalition, Counted: How a Black and Latino Ground Game Flipped Texas

Southern Black Organizers · Post-Election Series · The Sunbelt Spear, Part 1 of 4

For thirty-two years, Texas was the place where Democratic hopes went to die. On Tuesday night that changed. Gina Hinojosa defeated Gov. Greg Abbott, and James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate. It was the first Democratic Senate win in Texas since 1988 and the first Democratic governor since Ann Richards left office in 1995. Hinojosa becomes the first Latina governor in the state's history.

A Black-Brown Majority, Counted

Hinojosa won 5,230,929 votes to Abbott's 4,524,955, a margin of about 706,000 votes, or 7.1 points, with 99 percent of the expected vote counted. Talarico ran even stronger, with 5,445,156 votes to Paxton's 4,249,763. More than 7.4 million Texans voted early, a sign of the turnout surge organizers had built for months.

Black voters supplied the foundation. Exit polls show Black women backed Hinojosa 90 percent to 9 percent and Black men 87 percent to 11 percent. Black voters were roughly one in eight Texans who cast ballots, and nearly all of them moved in one direction.

Crockett's Voters Came Home

The story could have gone differently. In the March primary, Rep. Jasmine Crockett lost the Senate nomination to Talarico, 52.4 percent to 46.2 percent (1,216,412 votes to 1,071,900). Crockett carried Harris and Dallas counties, where Black voters are concentrated. Her campaign had given Black Texans an unapologetic voice against the state's voting restrictions and against the politics of fear. A Texas Southern University poll taken that summer found 77 percent of Black voters said the Democratic Party takes them "for granted."

Those same voters still showed up. In the same poll, 79 percent said they would back Talarico over Paxton, and on Tuesday they did. That is not loyalty to a party. It is discipline, built in churches, sororities and fraternities, and neighborhood networks, and it is the same discipline that carried Georgia and South Carolina. Black Texans did the work even after being told to wait their turn.

The lineage runs deep. Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South, built her career on Houston's Black neighborhoods and on a defense of the Constitution that the state's leaders later spent years undermining. Tuesday's vote finished part of what she started.

The Latino Ground Game

Alongside Black Texans, Latino organizers did the patient work of registration and turnout. The Workers Defense Action Fund organized low-wage and immigrant workers and knocked doors in Latino neighborhoods. MOVE Texas Action Fund and the Texas Youth Power Alliance's New Wave Texas registered young voters on campuses and in working-class neighborhoods. Texas Freedom Network and Texas Rising Action mobilized students and progressive voters around public schools and civil rights.

The results reached the border. In the Rio Grande Valley, where Republicans had claimed a permanent shift among Latino voters, Democrat Bobby Pulido defeated Rep. Monica De La Cruz in the 15th Congressional District. The "red wave" in South Texas turned out to be a gap in organizing, not a change of heart.

Hinojosa won with little help from outside. The Democratic Governors Association put in $1 million. Latino leaders had asked for $10 million. The coalition carried her anyway.

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Where the Latino Vote Came From

The size of the Latino turnout surprised even the organizers who built it. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) counted about 1.6 million Latino ballots in Texas, nearly double the roughly 900,000 cast in the 2022 midterm. About 400,000 were first-time Latino voters, and more than two-thirds of those were under 30. "What we're seeing is, for the first time, the Latino vote came out," said Domingo Garcia, president of the LULAC Adelante PAC. LULAC spent more than $3 million on digital ads, direct messaging and turnout drives.

Those voters broke hard for the Democratic ticket. A poll of 844 Latino voters by BSP Research for UnidosUS, taken through Election Day, found Talarico leading Paxton 65 percent to 31 percent among Latinos statewide and 74 percent to 24 percent in the Rio Grande Valley. In the summer, a bilingual Hart Research poll for TelevisaUnivision had already found Hinojosa ahead among Latino voters 58 percent to 39 percent, and 67 percent to 30 percent among those who follow Spanish-language news. Two years earlier, Latino Texans had backed Trump by about 10 points.

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The swing was sharpest on the border, where Republicans had claimed a realignment:

• Cameron County (Brownsville): Trump won 52 percent in 2024. This year Hinojosa took about 70 percent.
• Webb County (Laredo): Trump won 51 percent. Paxton won 25 percent, a 26-point drop.
• Maverick County (Eagle Pass): the center of Abbott's border buoys and razor wire. Trump won 59 percent; Paxton won 28 percent.
• Hidalgo County (McAllen): after leaning to Trump in 2024, it returned to the Democratic column by a wide margin.

The shift also reached the cities. In El Paso, Talarico won by 48 points and Hinojosa by 42, compared with Kamala Harris's 15-point margin in 2024. In Bexar County (San Antonio), Talarico won by 35 points and Hinojosa by 31, against Harris's 10. Jim Wells and Nueces counties on the Coastal Bend voted for Trump in 2024 and for both Democrats this year. Across the state's Latino-majority counties, about 72 percent of the vote went to the Democratic ticket.

Spanish-language outreach mattered. In the Cook Political Report and TelevisaUnivision survey, two-thirds of Hispanic likely voters said they wanted candidates to campaign in Spanish, and 69 percent said appearing on Spanish-language media showed a candidate "wants to earn my vote." On election night, Telemundo's cameras caught supporters celebrating with music and tears as Hinojosa repeated her grandmother's advice: "No te dejes." Don't let them push you around.

Schools as the Common Ground

Talarico, a former schoolteacher, and Hinojosa, a former Austin school board member, both ran against Abbott's private-school voucher program. Advocates say anger over the Republican education agenda fueled the sweep. Public schools are where Black and Latino families in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio meet the same budget cuts. Rural Republican leaders voiced concern too, over school funding, water rights and the rapid spread of data centers.

The Rainbow Coalition, Counted

Jackson's 1988 campaign was dismissed as a moment. Forty years later, a Latina governor and a white former teacher won Texas on the votes of Black women, Latino workers and young people of every background. That is the Rainbow Coalition, finally counted. The test now is governing: whether the organizers who built this majority get a seat at the table, or only a thank-you on election night.