In my new piece for The Lever , I take a look at how Corporate Democrats’ donor-coddling neoliberalism lost America’s red states for a generation — and how populists are competing to win them back with a very different formula: anti-oligarchy. One of the most significant examples is Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, who is not merely crusading against billionaires and tech bros, but also contrasting her politics with both traditional liberalism and the Third Way brand of corporate politics her party has touted for the last half century.

In an interview with The New York Times — America’s beating heart of corporate liberalism — Hinojosa got into a revealing scuffle with journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro over her brand of politics. The exchange tells us everything about the stakes not just in one Texas election, but in the entire intensifying battle over the direction of the Democratic Party.

In particular, it explains why Corporate Democrats are so fearful of a massive populist, anti-corruption wave on Tuesday — they know such a wave could be the final blow that makes them totally irrelevant.

Watch the clip , or read the exchange here:

NYT : I’m curious how you define “populist” and “progressive,” and tell me why you’ve landed on “populist” as a label for yourself.

Hinojosa: I think “populist” meets the moment of our time. The one fight in this country is about economic power, and populism is about economic power. We see that things are so stacked against working people in this country. Listen, it’s just a label, but if I were to pick a label to describe my politics, it is economic populism. It happens to be a type of politics that is rooted in our Texas history. It was L.B.J.’s grandfather, who was part of the Farmers’ Alliance, that organized farmers against big railroads that were taking advantage of them. Now we have working Texans who are up against big tech. And so I chose this title to define my politics because I think this has to be the politics of the moment to meet the challenges of the moment.

NYT : Is part of it also that the progressive or liberal label could be perceived as pretty toxic by certain members of the state that you’re trying to get to vote for you?

Hinojosa: No, it is not that. But I think those labels have been associated with culture wars, and I just don’t think that the culture wars are the fight of 2026.

NYT : Being a progressive could also be about the way you use taxation to redistribute wealth. It could mean the way you want the health care system to work in terms of supporting Obamacare or Medicare for all. It’s not just a label that has to do with culture wars. I think it means more than that.

Hinojosa: It may mean more than that to you, but to a lot of people, it means the culture-war fights, because those are the fights we’ve been fighting for the last 10 years.

NYT : So that comes back to my thing that it’s toxic.

Hinojosa: No, it’s not that. It comes back to that it doesn’t meet the political moment. It is not what 2026 is about. Look, we are facing an almost existential crisis in this country because tech giants are having their way with us. There is one fight, and we are so caught up in fighting each other in a divided nation, fighting each other over the ways we disagree about social issues and culture wars that we’re all about to lose. And so I’m not going to perpetuate that anymore.

It is amusing to behold The New York Times seemingly perplexed by the whole idea of populism and by the notion that it is something more than just a cynical liberal misdirect. But what’s significant is a top-ticket Democrat deliberately casting economic populism as fundamentally different from her own party’s traditional liberal politics.

I don’t know if Hinojosa will win. It’s Texas, after all. But it is a big deal that her brand of populism appears to be competitive in such a deep red state. It doesn’t suggest merely that such populism can win red states — it suggests that it is required for any Democrat to even be competitive in such difficult political terrain.

In other words: Hinojosa’s clear distinction between populism and her party’s old politics could be the key to red state “electability” — which would destroy Corporate Democrats’ generations-long argument that moderate neoliberalism is a winning strategy.