Will a Coalition of ‘MAGA Moms’ Rally Behind Gina Hinojosa’s Bid for Texas Governor?

Last Sunday at a venue in the Austin suburb of Kyle, Merideth Keller delivered a speech to local attendees that took square aim at a man she once voted for back in 2014: Governor Greg Abbott. Over the course of her 12 years on the school board of Hays Consolidated Independent School District, a position she left in 2022, Keller began to lean more to the left as she watched a crisis unfold in Texas’ public education system. She’s not buying what Abbott’s selling with his latest education initiatives, and she hopes voters of various stripes will follow her lead.

“Greg Abbott set the fire, watched it blaze, and now wants to put it out to get the glory,” said Keller, who now considers herself more of a moderate, helping to elect both Democrats and Republicans down the ballot. She was there to kick off the first stop of the Save Our Schools tour, a statewide effort by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa to turn growing education issues in Texas into an effective electoral cudgel in November.

“I have to say, I voted for Greg Abbott, and I had to learn that that was the wrong choice, so that other people can admit it too,” Keller said.

Public school closures, private school vouchers, and state takeovers have driven a wedge between many lifelong conservatives and the Texas GOP they once trusted. For some, public education is the top issue driving their embrace of a Democrat at the top of the ticket. The Latina legislator from Austin has arisen as a guardian of public education by promising to end state takeovers, eliminate standardized STAAR testing, and to “DOGE” the Texas Education Agency (TEA). 

Her growing anti-incumbent base includes conservative mothers, educators, and school board trustees, which has, at least according to recent polls from Fox News and Texas A&M, helped put her neck and neck with the powerful Republican governor who’s seeking an unprecedented fourth term at the helm of the state government. Abbott has handily won each of his three prior contests for governor by double-digit margins; Texas has not elected a Democrat as governor since Ann Richards won in 1990. 

“I found myself in alliance with conservative MAGA moms who’ve been pushing back on the privatization of our public schools,” Hinojosa said in an interview with the Texas Observer this week. “The whole system is broken and needs to be redone.”

The Hinojosa campaign has gone all in to mobilize voters around public education with an initiative it launched back in June called Team Texas Public Schools, branded with school bus-yellow signs, swirly red pen, and a simple math formula for success: “Commit Today + Vote Early = Day 1 Change.” In weekly Zoom huddles, the team connects with parents, teachers, and school staff on organizing tactics to protect neighborhood schools and elect Hinojosa to office. Now, the Save Our Schools tour is training volunteers to take that message door-to-door throughout the state.

Some are looking at the Democratic special election upset in Texas Senate District 9 in January as a bellwether for what’s to come in November. Taylor Rehmet, a local union leader, handily flipped the deep red legislative district over a right-wing ideologue, after Abbott appointed incumbent state Senator Kelly Hancock to be acting comptroller. Rehmet’s platform emphasized raising teacher pay and repealing school vouchers.

“My theory is what happened in that SD 9 race could happen in rural Texas if you could truly mobilize people around education,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, a lifelong Republican from Spearman who operates two rural newspapers. Bellsnyder joked that she was part of the “Republican revolution” in the 1990s, when she worked for conservative politicians in the state Capitol. “Now, I’m watching it all sort of fall apart,” she laughed. In recent years, she has become a vocal critic of Abbott on social media and on her Substack page, Texas Rural Reporter.

Disillusioned conservatives like Bellsnyder have a shared feeling that the Republican Party and its leaders who run the state have not only betrayed public schools but also the principles of fiscal responsibility and small government. They believe the A-F accountability ratings have created a top-down culture of education that undermines local control, paving the way for school closures, takeovers, and a mass exodus of teachers. The state’s rainy day fund has surpassed $24 billion while 170 public schools have been confirmed to shutter since 2023.

“Why aren’t people going after Greg Abbott for hoarding our tax money and for utilizing it the wrong way?” Ruth Beasley, a grandmother from Arlington who said she’s always voted for Republicans, wondered in an interview with the Observer. 

Beasley first discovered Hinojosa on Facebook, and although she still has policy qualms about the border and abortion, she admired how the state representative stood up for public education and said she plans to vote for her in November. Hinojosa’s advocacy began in 2012 when her son’s school, Pease Elementary, was under threat of closure. She ran for school board on the Austin Independent School District (ISD) and rallied with locals to keep the campus open. She succeeded and went on to become board president. In 2016, Hinojosa ran for Texas House District 49, which covers the heart of Austin, to carry on her battle at the state capitol. 

In the 2023 session, Hinojosa fought alongside a band of rural Republicans in the Texas House to block controversial school voucher bills from passage. That December, Abbott took a $6 million donation from Jeff Yass, a billionaire backer of school choice from Pennsylvania—the largest-ever single campaign contribution to a candidate in Texas history. He received another $6 million from Yass over the next several months, a cash surplus that he used to finance an unrelenting push to enact vouchers. Abbott spent millions of dollars on attack ads targeting several anti-voucher Republican incumbents, most of whom were successfully ousted.

“It was the death of a Republican Party that I knew and loved,” said Bellsnyder.

Since the voucher battle, Bellsnyder continued to watch Hinojosa’s advocacy on the House public education committee and admired her ability to “ask the questions that were on my mind.” In March 2025, she was riding a tractor in her hometown of Spearman near the border of Oklahoma when Hinojosa reached out on social media. Hinojosa was introducing a bill to audit the TEA and requested the support of outspoken Republicans like Bellsnyder, who had grown to see the state agency as the epitome of Abbott’s wrongheaded education policy. 

“Hell yeah!” said Bellsnyder. “I drove down to Austin that week, and then we stood with her in support of that bill that she was filing—which should have been a Republican bill, in my opinion because we were DOGE-ing everything else,” Bellsnyder recalled, referring to the acronym for Elon Musk’s short-lived and disastrous federal auditing effort called the Department of Government Efficiency. 

The bill proposed to eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies and cut off costly vendor contracts to prioritize direct funding to public schools. Although it didn’t pass, Hinojosa has integrated these proposals into her campaign. On August 19, a newly released audit of the TEA found that the budget for management salaries rose nearly 64 percent from 2021 to 2025, with one manager for every 3.5 employees—a ratio that runs afoul of state budgeting requirements.

“It revealed what we already knew,” Hinojosa, who was born and raised in Brownsville, told the Observer. “More and more dollars are taken from the classroom and used to feed this bureaucracy in Austin.”

Abbott has yet to mention his opponent by name on the campaign trail, but in recent months, the three-term incumbent has increased his efforts to shape the narrative around public education. On August 17, Abbott hosted a press conference with his new Texas Classroom Commission to announce the “Better Classrooms. Brighter Futures” initiative, which includes limiting screen time and prioritizing reading and math. The following day, he held a press conference to propose cracking down on foreign influence and predators in schools.

Hinojosa believes it’s nothing but a distraction motivated by fear.

“He has had commission after commission on teacher pay and public schools, but he refuses to do the right thing,” said Hinojosa. “It is really an insult just to convene another commission when parents, teachers, and myself included have been yelling at him to do the right thing for years.”

Abbott also called on the newly installed state comptroller Don Huffines to initiate an audit of school districts, pointing to Austin ISD and El Paso ISD for high administrative spending.

On the stage of The Railhouse venue in Kyle, Keller called out what she says is Abbott’s blatant hypocrisy. She told the audience that his “endless” list of unfunded mandates has required more administrators and higher costs. “But don’t worry,” she quipped, “Greg Abbott is about to swoop in!”

Abbott also proposed a ban on H-1B visa holders from working in public schools. Some school districts have come out and said that H-1B visa holders only make up 1 percent of all Texas teachers, yet they have been critical to fill shortages and avoid increasing class sizes. Dallas ISD employs the most visa holders as educators of any school district, at 171, according to the Texas Tribune, and said in a statement that it only does so when necessary to fill teaching shortages. 

“If the governor’s new expectation is to eliminate these teachers, then we’re going to need more Texans in the teaching pipeline,” the statement said, per the Tribune.

Hinojosa said her own son lost one of his elementary school teachers when their visa fell through, and his class was ultimately divided up and combined with others—causing a yearlong struggle for teachers and students. 

“Greg Abbott is again scapegoating and punishing school districts because of their desperate efforts to try to have teachers in the classroom,” Hinojosa said. 

Several conservative moms said they see themselves in Hinojosa; they feel like they’re all in the same fight for their kids’ future. Despite Abbott’s latest efforts, they don’t think he can be trusted with another four years in power.

“He’s deceptive and he lies,” said Beasley. “Gina has won me over on education, and he has so turned my stomach that I can’t vote for him. I just can’t do it.”