FOUR REASONS O’ROURKE LOST
AUSTIN’S GOP AGENDA IS LIKELY TO MOVE FURTHER RIGHT
If the winner of the 2022 Texas gubernatorial election were determined by the attendance and electricity of the candidates’ events and rallies, Beto O’Rourke would be governor-elect of the Lone Star State, not Greg Abbott. I observed a few of Beto’s events. His supporters are passionate and enthusiastic and his campaign events have a type of rock concert feel to them with the charismatic O’Rourke always the center of attention; all very different from the more subdued, and at times even a tad depressing, Abbott campaign events.
However, campaign events are not a good barometer of the overall sentiment of Texas voters, who on Nov. 8 re-elected Abbott to a third term as governor by an 11 percentage point margin, 55 percent to 44 percent in the final preliminary vote count. Texas is a state of 30 million, and even with only 46 percent of registered voters turning out, 8.1 million people cast a ballot this year. Attendance at O’Rourke rallies, while impressive by Texas political standards, still on average only numbered in the hundreds.
O’Rourke began his gubernatorial bid with higher name recognition than any Democratic gubernatorial candidate since Ann Richards and enjoyed the highest net approval rating among Texas Democrats of any politician. He also started off with a large database of Texas supporters built during his 2018 U.S. Senate campaign and with a vast network of donors, the latter of which helped him raise more money ($77 million) than any Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Texas history.
For many long-suffering Texas Democrats, O’Rourke appeared to potentially be the messiah they had been waiting for to lead them to the promised land after more than two decades in the opposition wilderness. But O’Rourke lost, for four principal reasons.
First, unlike 2018, 2022 was not a good year for Texas Democrats statewide due to the presence of an unpopular Democratic president in the White House
(rather than an unpopular Republican), high inflation rates not seen in 40 years, and policies pursued by national Democrats in the areas of immigration, crime and public safety, and oil and natural gas that were opposed by large numbers of Texans.
Second, in 2018, O’Rourke’s profile was that of a postpartisan pragmatist, with centrist positions in policy domains including Second Amendment rights. However, in his failed 2020 presidential bid, O’Rourke renounced most of his previously centrist positions and adopted the profile of a national progressive Democrat, a good move if the goal is to capture the Democratic presidential nomination, but a bad move if the goal is to be elected governor of Texas.
Third, to be successful this year O’Rourke needed members of Generation Z and younger Millennials who, in a mid-October University of Houston Hobby School poll supported O’Rourke over Abbott by a more than two to one margin) and African Americans (who supported O’Rourke by a more than 7 to 1 margin in the poll) to turn out in record numbers. Instead, the opposite occurred with the participation of those under 30 down by a fifth and African American turnout down by a sixth compared to 2018.
Fourth, unlike Texas Republicans in 2018, Abbott did not underestimate O’Rourke. For the past year Abbott campaigned like his job depended on it while sparing no expense in a record-setting campaign, which through Oct. 29 had spent $136 million, and will approach $150 million by the time the last 2022 campaign report is filed in early January. Abbott was aided by Texas’ no-limit campaign finance system under which 12 people have contributed $1 million or more to his campaign over the past two years.
Along with the gubernatorial contest, there were 12 other statewide races on the ballot, all of which were won by Republicans. This extends the GOP’s statewide winning streak that dates back to 1996 (166 consecutive Republican statewide victories), including two races where Democrats had hopes of flipping the posts of attorney general and lieutenant governor, albeit via distinct strategies.
Along with the gubernatorial contest, Democrats believed that their best prospect of a statewide victory in 2022 was in the attorney general race, with Rochelle Garza pitted against incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton. Garza’s campaign strategy consisted of two main tactics. First, energize women (using the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade), as well as Latinos and younger voters, to turn out in large numbers. Second, educate Texans about Paxton’s substantial legal and ethical challenges with the hope that a non-trivial number of regular Republican voters would split their ticket in the attorney general race so as to not re-elect someone with Paxton’s tarnished image as the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
That Paxton was the weakest member of the Republican herd was no secret. A host of prominent Texas GOP elites attempted to defeat Paxton in the 2022 Republican primary. But while challengers George P. Bush, Eva Guzman and Louie Gohmert kept Paxton below 50 percent on March 1, he easily defeated Bush in the May runoff, 68 to 32 percent. Paxton may have his detractors, but they are a decided minority within the GOP primary electorate, with a large majority of that electorate fully supportive of Paxton’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and of his strong ties to Donald Trump, and largely dismissive of Paxton’s felony indictments and investigation by the FBI which they either believe are politically motivated or easy to turn a blind eye to given Paxton’s steadfast support for conservative policy priorities.
Garza was only able to raise $4 million, not nearly enough to raise the visibility of a firsttime candidate from the Rio Grande Valley or to boost Paxton’s negatives by educating voters of his myriad misdeeds. In the Hobby School survey conducted immediately prior to early voting, 55 percent of likely voters said they did not know enough about Garza to have an opinion about her, while Paxton’s net approval rating remained positive among all voters (46 percent favorable vs. 39 percent unfavorable), and very high among Republicans (71 percent favorable vs. 15 percent unfavorable).
Like O’Rourke, Garza lost, but with the consolation prize that her 10 percent margin of defeat, 54 percent to 44 percent, was the smallest of any statewide Democratic candidate. Paxton’s victory reminds us that the pivotal election in Texas continues to take place in the spring rather than in the fall, and thus observers should not be surprised when the legislative priorities of the Texas Republican Party are often more in line with the preferences of the 1 to 2 million Texans who vote in the Republican primary than with those of the 22 million Texans who are of voting age.
In the lieutenant governor election, Mike Collier ran as a middle of the road former Republican turned Democrat, with moderate positions on a wide range of policies and the support of centrist Republicans such as Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley in Fort Worth, state Sen. Kel Seliger and state Rep. Lyle Larson (none of whom sought reelection). He contrasted his centrist approach to politics and public policy with what he characterized as Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s extreme conservative positions, with the hope of convincing moderate Republicans and independents to cross over and vote for him, even if they were voting primarily for Republicans elsewhere on the ballot. Like O’Rourke and Garza, Collier was unsuccessful, losing to Patrick by 11 percentage points, 54 to 43 percent, leaving control of the Texas Senate in the hands of Patrick for a third four-year term, with a GOP majority that increased by one seat to 19 of 31.
In 2018, with O’Rourke leading the charge, Texas voters put the fear of God into Texas Republicans, with several statewide candidates defeating their Democratic rival by less than 5 percent and the GOP losing 12 Texas House and two U.S. House seats. The result was a 2019 legislative session focused more on bread-and-butter issues of concern to November voters than on the red meat preferred by the Republican base.
This fall, voters delivered a landslide victory to Republicans, in spite of the potential problems that the Uvalde massacre, the Dobbs decision, the 2021 grid failure and O’Rourke’s well-funded campaign could have caused for the Texas GOP. The result is likely to be a 2023 legislative session that will involve healthy portions of red meat for GOP primary voters in policy areas such as abortion, school choice and gender-affirming therapy, and which is now less likely to involve legislative moves toward the center in sensitive areas for the base such as reforms that would permit abortion in the case of rape or incest, ban the purchase of assault rifles by those under the age of 21 or expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
This week Texas Republicans are experiencing the thrill of victory, Texas Democrats the agony of defeat. And, Texas Democrats are left to wonder what might have been had O’Rourke not run for president or if Trump had been re-elected. In that fictional alternate universe, O’Rourke could have woken up Wednesday morning as the next governor of Texas.
But the actual reality for the next four years will be an emboldened Abbott, Patrick and Paxton continuing to control the levers of power in Austin.