Beto O’Rourke Announces Run for Texas Governor, Testing Democrats’ Strength

HOUSTON – Beto O’Rourke entered the Texas governor race Monday, challenging an ultra-conservative and well-funded two-year Republican incumbent to win an office last held by the Democrats in 1995.

The arrival of Mr. O’Rourke immediately set the stage for a political showdown on the future of Texas next November, at a time when the state – with its expanding cities and diversifying population – seemed increasingly winning.

Former El Paso Congressman and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, Mr. O’Rourke has been a favorite of Texas Democrats and party activists since his run against Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. Despite losing the Senate race by nearly three percentage points, the fact that he was close to ousting the incumbent Republican Senator turned O’Rourke into a national figure and convinced many Democrats that the state was on the brink of turning the blue.

His campaign hopes to rekindle that enthusiasm as he seeks to oust Greg Abbott, the Republican governor who has re-elected for a third term. A recent public poll found that Mr. O’Rourke was almost level with Mr. Abbott in one hypothetical match, and another showed that he lost nine percentage points.

“Those in public positions of trust have stopped listening to, serving and paying heed to – and trusting the people of Texas,” said O’Rourke in a video announcing his campaign released Monday. He contrasted the “extremist policies” of the Texas Republicans, which have limited abortion and expanded gun rights, against positions he would support, including the expansion of Medicaid and the legalization of marijuana.

And the video tried to recapture Texans’ anger after the state power grid went down in February. “That’s a symptom of a much bigger problem we’re having in Texas right now,” he said.

But Democrats have also seen their story of political change in Texas complicated by the results of the 2020 election.

Former President Donald J. Trump won the state by almost six points over Republicans among Hispanic voters in the democratic stronghold of the Rio Grande Valley. The Republicans also held the state House of Representatives, although the Democrats made concerted efforts to reverse control. And Republicans have an election freeze on the governor’s mansion that has been in place for nearly three decades. The last Democrat to serve as governor was Ann Richards, who won the elections in November 1990 and was in office from January 1991 to January 1995.

The 2022 race will take place against a national backdrop that favors Republicans, including an economy still struggling to recover from the pandemic and a Democratic president whose popularity has plummeted. And after his own failed presidential election, Mr O’Rourke faces the challenge of demonstrating to Texas voters that he is focused on the affairs of the state rather than the national spotlight.

His advisors seemed aware of the need to remind voters of Mr. O’Rourke’s actions in Texas, especially after the winter storm that led to the devastating power outage in February. Mr. O’Rourke asked for donations for storm victims, organized wellness checks for the elderly, and delivered water from his pickup truck.

His organization Powered by People has also helped enroll voters – nearly 200,000 since late 2019, according to the campaign – and Mr O’Rourke raised around $ 700,000 to aid the Democrats at Texas House after many fled to Washington were to get a restrictive new voting measure that was ultimately passed.

He has also used his platform to push for pandemic-related public health actions such as those backed by local Democratic leaders in Texas, in contrast to Mr Abbott, who has banned mandates for masks or vaccines.

The campaign message, his advisors said, was that Mr. O’Rourke was there for the Texans while Mr. Abbott put his own political ambition and the demands of the Republican primary election above the needs of the common people.

In the video, Mr. O’Rourke, who speaks fluent Spanish, made his announcement from the Hispanic-majority border town of El Paso, where he grew up and now lives.

The Democrats had been pressuring Mr. O’Rourke to get into the race for months, and he had started giving it serious consideration in late summer when he called the Democratic leaders in the state. Aside from giving them a chance at the governor’s mansion, the Democrats are hoping that the presence of Mr. O’Rourke at the top of the ticket will increase the turnout and help Democratic candidates in down-vote races across Texas.

With the elections a little less than a year away, no other great Democrat has entered the race, so Mr Abbott’s advisors are considering a number of messages to attack Mr O’Rourke as being too extreme for Texas. You will likely focus on comments he made during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary election on guns and the border wall.

“Republicans didn’t need a lot of reason to perform and have intensity, but that will sap it up,” said Matt Mackowiak, an Austin political adviser and Republican Party leader in Travis County, referring to Mr. O’Rourke’s going into the race. “It will be kryptonite for Democrats in the suburbs and it will be rocket fuel for Republicans in rural areas.”

Long before Mr. O’Rourke’s announcement, the governor’s campaign began publishing digital advertisements with montages of these statements, including one from a 2019 debate that resulted in some political observers in Texas fighting Mr. O’s uphill battle ‘Define Rourke in the State.

Findings from the 2021 elections

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The democratic panic is increasing. Less than a year after taking power in Washington, the party faces a bleak immediate future as it struggles to motivate voters and continues to lose intelligence wars to Republicans.

“Damn it, we’ll take your AR-15, your AK-47,” Mr. O’Rourke said to the applause of the crowd.

Back then, his presidential campaign advertised a shirt with these words on it. His Texas campaign is likely to take a different direction. Aides said Mr. O’Rourke requested an extension of the background checks.

Though he has never won statewide in Texas – no Democrat has won since 1994 – he has remained one of the few Democrats with enough fundraising and statewide campaigning skills to take on Mr. Abbott, a former Texas attorney general who Has overseen a dramatic turn right in the state and has a war chest of nearly $ 60 million.

The eagerness among the Democrats to find someone to challenge Mr. Abbott led to an interest in seeing actor Matthew McConaughey enter the race. Mr. McConaughey timidly said he would “measure” this but has not yet made an announcement.

For his part, Mr Abbott recently highlighted his efforts to restrict classes on race and gender in schools, an obvious nod to the unexpected success of the Republicans in Virginia, where Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race with a. gained a similar focus on schools. Mr. Abbott has also regularly drawn attention to his efforts to increase the presence of Police and National Guard forces on the border.

The Abbott campaign responded to the announcement by visually connecting Mr. O’Rourke to President Biden – in a slowly changing image of their two faces – and in a statement attacking Mr. O’Rourke for being the “pro-overt Limit “the Biden government’s backed policy.”

“The last thing Texans need is President Biden’s radical liberal agenda coming to Texas under the guise of Beto O’Rourke,” a campaign spokesman, Mark Miner, said in the statement.

The governor’s race would likely take place on two terrains in the state: in its fast-growing suburbs, particularly the outskirts of Austin, Houston, and Dallas, and along the border with Mexico.

Mr O’Rourke’s campaign envisioned an aggressive local organization going door-to-door in places like South Texas, where a lack of personal campaigning had apparently harmed the Democrats in 2020. Mr. O’Rourke was expected after his announcement that he would be campaigning for the first time through the South Texas border region.