Ann Richards. She was the 45th governor of Texas, serving from January 15, 1991, to January 17, 1995, and until Tuesday night she was the last Democrat to hold the job. Democrat Gina Hinojosa's defeat of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, called by the Associated Press, makes her the first Democratic governor of Texas in more than three decades — and the search question so many Texans typed this week has a one-name answer.
Richards won the governor's office in 1990, beating Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox in a Democratic primary runoff and then businessman Clayton Williams in the general election. She had come to national attention two years earlier as Texas state treasurer, when her keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention made her a national figure. In 1994 she lost her re-election bid to George W. Bush, and when Bush succeeded her in January 1995 the Republican hold on the office began. It ran unbroken through Bush, Rick Perry and Abbott — who first took office in January 2015 and was seeking a fourth term — until Hinojosa ended it on November 3, 2026.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, the Associated Press count carried by KPRC Click2Houston put Hinojosa at 5,231,979 votes, or 53 percent, to Abbott's 4,525,393, or 46 percent. Hinojosa, a 52-year-old Austin state representative and former Austin school board president who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, will also be the first Latina sworn in as Texas governor and only the third woman to hold the office, after Richards and Miriam A. Ferguson, who served two separate terms in the 1920s and 1930s. She takes office in January 2027 for a four-year term.
"A win by Hinojosa would be perceived as an earthquake" after decades of Republican statewide victories. — David Crockett, political science professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, speaking before the election
The stakes explain the searching. Texas has not elected a Democrat to any statewide office since 1994, and the governor's office is the biggest prize in the state: the governor signs or vetoes legislation, appoints state officials and sets the agenda for the legislative session. Hinojosa built her campaign on public education and household costs, opposing Abbott's private-school voucher program and pledging to replace the state education commissioner with an educator. She will likely face a Republican-led legislature, which means getting legislation through will require finding ground both sides can stand on — the same divided-government reality Richards governed under in reverse.
Richards died on September 13, 2006, twelve days after her 73rd birthday, and for two decades her four years in Austin stood as a historical footnote Texans had to look up. This week they looked it up in the millions, because the footnote just became the previous chapter. Hinojosa closed her victory night in Austin by reaching for exactly that sense of an era turning: "We did not end one era of single-party rule to usher in another."