Hinojosa Takes a Stand Against the Culture War

“Take your culture-war agenda and shove it,” explained Texas Democratic hopeful Gina Hinojosa in an interview with Politico, laying out her stance toward Gov. Greg Abbott. The candidate has framed her challenge to the three-term Republican as a return to essentials, aiming to reflect voters’ worries about the economy rather than letting the culture-war quarrels that have long dominated her party steer the discussion.

“We’re not chasing culture wars. We’re talking about how we’ll deliver for Texans and how we’ll make life easier for working families,” Hinojosa told Politico. “So for Democrats, the path forward must be to prioritize economic issues and not take the bait on culture-war theatrics.”

Hinojosa even lightheartedly touched the pronouns issue—previously a fixation among many Democrats—in a recent ad, quipping that her pronouns are “mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.”

Her candidacy is quite noteworthy in its own right: she entered politics not out of a lifelong desire to hold office, but because her son’s Austin elementary school faced potential closure due to funding cuts. She organized fellow parents, and they managed to keep the school open. She subsequently won a seat on the school board, then a seat in the Texas House, again prioritizing education funding. For her, kitchen-table concerns are in her DNA. Yet she has approached abortion messaging in a distinctive way: she draws on her personal experience of receiving a life-limiting diagnosis during her first pregnancy and choosing to carry to term, while also maintaining that her decision to choose life reinforced a belief that each woman should decide what is right for her own circumstances.

“That issue, the personal experience of what happened to me and the broader questions of pregnancy and abortion, is fundamentally about humanity,” Hinojosa told Politico. “We have politicized it, but it is the struggle of countless women and families, women who have faced heartbreak because of a pregnancy that didn’t go as hoped.”

I’m not certain what to draw from all of this. She has not toppled Abbott yet. But the campaign is intriguing precisely for its pivot away from culture-war engagements toward economic concerns and careful handling of controversial social topics. Especially as our ongoing Massachusetts LGBTQ+ bar COVID-19 story continues to dominate online chatter, raising questions about public discourse. Which path should the Democratic Party take? Where will the left ultimately land?

Scenes from New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani appears to believe the city’s real priority isn’t safer streets or booting out troublemakers from the subway, but handing out free opera tickets. Classic Mamdani: hand out freebies and hope for a spike in approval ratings.

QUICK HITS

• “A growing number of private colleges are rethinking how much they charge families to attend,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “With tuition under scrutiny, campuses are rolling out new financial tactics to attract students—like significantly reducing tuition, offering ‘in-state’ pricing to compete with public schools, and promising loan-free aid to certain families.”
• “AI is making me a better physician,” writes Rachael Bedard for The New York Times. “And I worry it could be making residents less capable… I don’t require my trainees to memorize every diagnostic protocol, just as it’s no longer essential for me to remember every phone number. But I want them to learn to hear patient stories—narratives that reveal clues and trigger a chain of mental connections—and to cultivate the instincts that define good medical judgment: distinguishing when someone is sick, prioritizing competing patient priorities, and knowing how to seek information beyond what a patient directly shares.”
• “In an era of short, easily shared video clips, TV debates offer both opportunity and risk for candidates: a powerful moment can spread quickly, but so can a careless misstep,” notes Axios. “In ten closely watched governor races, there is no agreement on debates in half of them—Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas—according to Axios’s review of scheduled debates. Four years ago, only two of those races lacked a debate.”
• Very true:

We should be incredibly grateful that our critics on the left are the thinnest-skinned and most fragile people on Earth. (Historically, this hasn’t always been the case, with costly consequences.)

— Peter Meijer (@PeterMeijer) September 25, 2026