Every election cycle Democrats hope that “this year” will be “the year” that Texas goes blue. Every election cycle they become eventually disappointed with the outcome.
For this cycle, Democrats selected Robert Frances “Beto” O’Rourke to run the gauntlet against incumbent Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. This marriage of convenience, since Beto is a serial campaigner with an open schedule, might result in a worse trouncing than even the most pessimistic Democrat could’ve imagined.
For what it’s worth, Abbott has his vulnerabilities. When Texas experienced a once-in-a-lifetime ice storm that crippled the state’s power grid for weeks, Abbott took a beating for why his state wasn’t better prepared for such an event. Ultimately, he weathered the storm, so to speak, and has once again regained a strong level of popularity. Abbott is also helped by the fact that Beto is a one-trick pony. He hates guns, and he’ll tell you that. Often. Other than that, Beto isn’t known for much else:
But even here in Democratic-heavy Austin — even to many of O’Rourke’s supporters — it is looking more and more like it may not add up to enough.
In other states, ever since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June, Democrats have been performing better than expected — in the rejection of an anti-abortion rights ballot measure in Kansas and in special congressional elections in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York. President Joe Biden’s public approval ratings have ticked up. But if the political winds of a post-Roe summer were lifting Democrats elsewhere, they do not appear to be blowing into Texas.
In a survey released in mid-September by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler, O’Rourke was running 9 percentage points behind Abbott in the race for governor. A University of Texas/Texas Project poll put the margin at 5 points. A few days after the church service, O’Rourke’s deficit registered in a Quinnipiac University poll at 7 points.
If abortion and gun control can’t save Beto, his playbook is exhausted. Neither issue plays well with the Texas electorate in general. On the other hand, maybe Beto’s just a bad candidate, too. Abbott is probably at both his strongest and weakest point since his tenure started. The aftermath of the Texas power grid failure and the deadly mishandling of the Uvalde school shooting both happened under his watch. Whether Abbott bears direct responsibility will be for voters to decide.
Ultimately, the Biden administration is helping make Abbott’s case easier to sell. The border is basically open under Biden, a point Abbott has made repeatedly. This is an issue that cuts across party lines in Texas. Democrats, after all, own land along the border as well. They don’t want safety concerns and rampant migrants trampling their property and causing mayhem in their cities.
As one analyst noted, Texas politics over the spring and summer were consumed with Uvalde and abortion:
“Near as we can tell,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, “the things that made the summer look good for Democrats and lead us to ask perhaps why isn’t this race tighter — they’ve proven to be a little more ephemeral and not able to disrupt what is the basic pattern of politics in Texas.”
“The narrative in my mind is, we spent the summer talking about abortion, looking at the unending string of bad news and bad responses to Uvalde, and the difficulty that Abbott and his team had handling or not handling that,” Henson said.
At least in the polling, it didn’t appear to stick. “What seemed like an apparent, potential shift in the issue agenda for the election,” Henson said, “seems to have not taken hold.”
Voters faced with the question of whether they’d rather fire Abbott and hire Beto seems to be a pretty easy choice. The inexperienced former Congressman with a perpetual losing streak will probably be adding another “L” to the column in November. Someday, maybe not this year or next, but Democrats will finally realize that Beto is a political loser and they should stop wasting money on him.
