By Robert T. Garrett
AUSTIN — Gov. Greg Abbott and Beto O’Rourke jumped to big early leads and won their respective parties’ nominations for Texas governor without a runoff Tuesday.
In unofficial returns, Abbott easily won over seven Republican challengers, including North Texans Allen West and Don Huffines.
O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman and presidential candidate, vaulted to an even more commanding lead over a five-candidate Democratic field.
Appearing in Fort Worth, where he shocked the state’s political establishment four years ago, by flipping Tarrant County from red to blue, O’Rourke acknowledged he faces tough odds in a GOP-controlled state.
“Look, we’ve got our work cut out for us in a state that has tried to make it hard to vote,” he said at the Flying Saucer bar in downtown Fort Worth.
Abbott, speaking in Corpus Christi, said O’Rourke and the Democrats “have stoked fear-mongering” and threaten to kill off Texas energy jobs and “defund” the police.
“We’re building a safer, smarter, freer and more prosperous state for everybody,” he said. “But we must fight to keep it that way. Because our opponents, they want a completely different Texas.”
Over the past 15 weeks, frustrating all their primary contest foes, Abbott and O’Rourke exclusively attacked one another and ignored the others. The eight-month general election campaign ahead is likely to get nasty.
“Now he’ll be pivoting to Beto and essentially painting Beto as a national, left-wing progressive Democrat and tying him as much as possible to unpopular decisions made by the Biden administration or promoted by Speaker Pelosi or Senator Schumer,” Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said of Abbott, referring to Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
“So essentially: If you don’t like national Democrats, you don’t like Beto.”
O’Rourke didn’t get a political bump from further problems with the state’s main electric grid this winter, Jones noted.
Since this year’s early February ice storm, the Democrat has been mostly lying in wait, recognizing that the Republican gubernatorial primary would “consume most of the oxygen,” the professor said.
But unless President Joe Biden can revive his own political fortunes, this year looks forbidding to a statewide Democratic candidate in Texas, he said.
Absent a gain in Biden’s standing with voters, O’Rourke “wouldn’t have a chance even if he ran a perfect campaign,” Jones said. He cited differences in 2022 from O’Rourke’s near-miss bid for U.S. Senate against Ted Cruz in 2018.
“This time around, he’s campaigning against the much more likable Greg Abbott. He’s no longer the post partisan, pragmatic centrist … and you no longer have an unpopular Republican in the White House, Donald Trump.”
Competing visions
Abbott is asking voters for a third term, warning in stark terms that Texas’ very identity as a bastion of freedom is imperiled by O’Rourke’s liberal views. He calls it “a left turn” the state shouldn’t take. Doing so would jeopardize economic gains and public safety, he has said.
O’Rourke has said Abbott pushed “extremist policies” on abortion, guns and civics education to “divide us” and distract from the state GOP’s failure to expand health coverage, bolster the electric grid, support teachers and create high-paying jobs in industries that don’t accelerate global warming.
In his GOP primary, Abbott had plenty of advance warning that Huffines and West were gunning for him. Capitalizing on Democratic lawmakers’ quorum breaks over a bill they called “voter suppression,” Abbott held the Legislature hostage in Austin for much of last year and dribbled out agenda item after agenda item fervently sought by social and populist conservatives:
More spending on the border, further restrictions on medication abortion, limits on teaching about racism in U.S. history, bans on transgender youth competing on school sports teams other than of the sex listed on their birth certificates.
Practically the only issue sought by fervent conservatives that Abbott didn’t deliver on was outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children, though “he was able to get that in part done through executive action and with help from the attorney general,” Ken Paxton, who recently issued a nonbinding opinion that such medical treatment constituted child abuse, Jones noted.
On Tuesday, Huffines conceded soon after polls closed, boasting he had “driven the narrative” and forced the incumbent to deliver for conservatives. But he, West and Blaze TV host Chad Prather, a third challenger, struggled to cast Abbott as Republican or conservative in name only.
“You know you’re sort of grasping at straws on the right when you’re saying, ‘OK, we can’t hit him on abortion. We can’t hit him on transgender students, … election security, Second Amendment rights,” Jones said.
Also, the remaining issue of transgender children’s medical care, the professor said, “isn’t really a rallying cry that you’re going to get a lot of people to vote against the sitting governor, who gave them 99% of what they want, by focusing on the 1% that in many cases they didn’t even know they wanted.”
Huffines, who joked in a TV spot that the Dallas Cowboys would win the Super Bowl if he were elected governor, and West, who after testing positive for COVID-19 told conservative audiences, “I got hit by Mr. Wuhan,” never caught fire.
Abbott, 64, who’s been in statewide elective offices for more than a quarter-century, relied on more than his rightward policy swing of the past year to limit the salience of his challengers’ attacks.
He also leaned into his gargantuan fundraising edge. Since last July, a month he entered with $55 million in the bank, the incumbent has raised about $25 million.
Huffines, 63, a real estate developer who loaned his campaign $5 million in the first half of last year, raised slightly more than $6 million since July 1 – most of it, from family and two West Texas oilmen, Tim Dunn of Midland and Farris Wilks of Cisco, and their PAC, Defend Texas Liberty.
West, 61, a former Army lieutenant colonel, served one term in Congress representing south Florida before moving to Dallas in 2016 to run a now-shuttered conservative think tank. In July 2020, he ousted incumbent James Dickey as state GOP chairman. West raised $3.3 million since July 1.
Also running on the GOP side was Parker County conservative activist Ricky Lynn Perry. Though his ballot name was “Rick Perry,” he wasn’t the former governor and U.S. energy secretary.
O’Rourke, 49, has raised about $13.3 million since entering the race in mid-November.
On Tuesday in Fort Worth, he called Abbott incompetent, corrupt and cruel. O’Rourke has slammed Abbott as afraid of his party’s right wing when it came to protecting Texans from coronavirus and so beholden to big donors he couldn’t bolster the electric grid.
The closest thing Abbott had to a rough patch in his primary was a weeks-long stretch last fall when Fox News personality Tucker Carlson hammered him for not sending enough National Guard soldiers to the Texas-Mexico border. Carlson invited West and Huffines to appear on his large-audience show, forcing Abbott to belatedly come on to explain his state push to secure the border.
With the exception of constructing a state border wall, Abbott’s high-profile efforts to stem a migrant surge are surprisingly popular with Hispanic voters, Rice’s Jones said.
“The Hispanic voters are Republicans’ secret weapon,” he said, noting Abbott’s frequent trips to campaign in South Texas. The state GOP hopes to build on gains Trump made in 2020.
“I’ve been the Rio Grande Valley more than any governor in the history of Texas,” Abbott said in his Jan. 8 announcement speech in McAllen.
Staff writer Michael Williams in Fort Worth contributed to this report.
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