The spot will stream throughout the Spurs-Knicks series on ESPN+, depicting Gov. Greg Abbott as a basketball-playing string puppet committing “turnover after turnover of our money to his donors.”
State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, is launching her first ad buy of the general election with a digital spot to be aired during the NBA Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks.
The initial spend comes in at five figures, according to Hinojosa’s campaign, which declined to provide a more specific sum. A campaign spokesperson said Hinojosa planned to drop as much as needed to max out her ad time on all ESPN+ NBA Finals streaming content for the duration of the series.
The Austin Democrat is facing off against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a formidable three-term incumbent with a staggering $96 million war chest as of February. Hinojosa’s ad buy is the first by either gubernatorial candidate since they secured their respective party nominations on March 3. In TV interviews and campaign appearances, Abbott so far has trained his fire at state Rep. James Talarico, the U.S. Senate nominee atop the Democratic ticket, while hardly, if ever, mentioning his opponent.
Hinojosa’s campaign refrain, echoed in the ad, accuses Abbott of selling out Texans to the megadonors who’ve helped fill his campaign coffers, leading Texans to pay what she dubs the “Abbott corruption tax,” in the form of higher everyday costs and underfunded public schools. The ad depicts the governor as a basketball-playing string puppet, controlled by men in suits, who force him to commit “turnover after turnover of our money to his donors.”
“It’s a good time to be Team Texas, but Greg Abbott is not playing for us,” Hinojosa says in narrating the spot. “He’s coached by the corporations and billionaires that pay him off. So even when our team is winning, hardworking families across this state are losing.”
The first game of the series — and the first time Hinojosa’s ad will reach Texans — is on Wednesday.
“I’m running for governor to defend our kids, drive down our energy bills and bench the billionaires who’ve been running up the score on Texas families,” Hinojosa says in the ad.
Abbott has not responded to Hinojosa’s attacks directly, but he has broadly denied that the people who donate to his campaign get special treatment. He has also pushed back on Democrats and public education advocates who have criticized GOP leadership for not keeping pace with inflation in funding the state’s public schools.
“Texas supports our public schools,” Abbott wrote on social media during last year’s legislative session, urging followers not to believe “the lies about public school funding” amid a debate over his proposal for a school voucher program, which passed along with an $8.5 billion school funding package.
Hinojosa, a former school board president and leading critic of Abbott’s voucher campaign, began the midterm race with far fewer resources to introduce herself to voters and spread her campaign message across the state’s numerous and expensive media markets. As of late February, her campaign had $618,000 in the bank after raising $2.3 million over the previous eight months — a fundraising delta with Abbott that will likely persist through the fall.
The NBA Finals ad buy reflects an effort to channel Hinojosa’s more limited campaign dollars toward young male and Latino voters, audiences that the Democratic Party has struggled to connect with in recent cycles. ESPN has been the most-watched cable network by young men for decades, the Austin Democrat’s campaign said, while the ESPN+ streaming platform in particular is “one of the best ways to reach the male and Latino voters who’ll decide this race — the hardest audiences to find on traditional channels.”
Recent polls show Abbott leading Hinojosa, with Texas Southern University finding the governor ahead by 6 percentage points in a survey fielded from late April through early May. Roughly a third of voters in that poll said they did not know enough about Hinojosa to have an opinion about her.
Source: Kayla Guo,
Photo Credit: State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, Democratic candidate for governor, speaks during her campaign launch event in Brownsville on Oct. 15, 2025. Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune
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