O’Rourke running for Texas governor
AUSTIN, Texas – Democrat Beto O’Rourke is running for governor of Texas, pursuing a blue breakthrough in America’s biggest red state after his star-making U.S. Senate campaign in 2018 put him closer than anyone else in decades.
O’Rourke’s announcement Monday kicks off a third run for office in as many election cycles. He burst into the 2020 Democratic presidential primary as a party phenomenon but dropped out just eight months later as money and fanfare dried up.
“It’s not going to be easy. But it is possible,” O’Rourke said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of his announcement. “I do believe, very strongly, from listening to people in this state that they’re very unhappy with the direction that (Gov.) Greg Abbott has taken Texas.”
O’Rourke’s return sets up one of 2022’s highest-profile – and potentially most expensive – races for governor. Abbott, a Republican, is seeking a third term and has put Texas on the vanguard of hard-right policymaking in state capitals and emerged as a national figure. A challenge from O’Rourke, a media-savvy former congressman with a record of generating attention and cash, could tempt Democrats nationwide to pour millions of dollars into trying – again – to flip Texas.
Still, O’Rourke is coming back an underdog. Although the state’s growing population of Latino, young and college- educated voters is good for Democrats, the party’s spending blitz in the 2020 presidential election left them with nothing.
Texas has not elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards in 1990. And freshly gerrymandered political maps, signed into law by Abbott in October, bolster Republicans’ standing in booming suburban districts that have been drifting away from the party. That could mean fewer competitive races and lower turnout.
O’Rourke, 49, will have to win over not only hundreds of thousands of new voters but some of his old ones. When O’Rourke lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 by just 2.5 percentage points, Abbott won reelection by double digits that same year, reflecting a large number of Texans who voted for O’Rourke and for the GOP governor.
That crossover appeal was a hallmark of a Senate campaign propelled by energetic rallies, ideological blurriness and unscripted livestreams on social media. But as a presidential candidate, O’Rourke molded himself into a liberal champion who called for slashing immigration enforcement and mandatory gun buybacks.
In one pronouncement heard far and wide in firearm- friendly Texas, O’Rourke declared: “Hell, yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15.”
Abbott has already begun working to make sure voters do not forget that and other stances O’Rourke took as a presidential candidate. As O’Rourke got in the race Monday, Abbott was on the U.S.-Mexico border, where a longtime Democrat in the statehouse announced he was switching parties and joining the GOP. Sharp inroads Republicans made with Hispanic voters along the border last year alarmed Democrats, and O’Rourke will spend the first days of his campaign this week trying to make a fast impression in South Texas.
“They weren’t just at odds with Texans. They
were hostile to Texans,” Abbott said of O’Rourke’s positions during his White House run. “He wants to go take your guns and deny your Second Amendment rights. We will not let that happen.”
In the interview, O’Rourke signaled he’ll try to reclaim the middle in his bid for governor. He blasted Abbott for a “very extremist, divisive” agenda that caters to the hard right.
Asked about gun control, he said he does not believe Texans want to see their families “shot up
with weapons that were designed for war.” But he pivoted quickly to slamming Abbott abolishing background checks and training for concealed handgun permits, gun regulations that once had bipartisan support.
O’Rourke argued that the broad coalition of voters that powered his near- upset in 2018, which included Republican moderates, could be formed again.
“What I’m going to be focused on is listening to and bringing people together to do the big work before us,” he said. “And
obviously that first big job is is winning this election. But the voters and the votes are there.”
O’Rourke officially announced his candidacy in a two-minute video, in which he directly speaks to the camera and criticizes a GOP agenda that he says ignores things voters “actually agree on,” such as expanding Medicare and legaalizing marijuana. “Those in positions of public trust have stopped listening to, serving and paying attention to the people of Texas,” he said.