Gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke ascended a waist-high tree planter outside the Nueces County Courthouse in Corpus Christi Monday morning to address a group of supporters in no uncertain terms: Low turnout would spell defeat in his race to unseat incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott.
“Voting is important. … I’m grateful that you’re doing it,” the Democratic hopeful told a crowd of more than 150 people outside the busy polling location. “But if we don’t bring more of our friends, family members, classmates, colleagues and neighbors into this election, I’ll tell you the end of the story right now: We will not win.”
The brief campaign stop in Corpus Christi was the first of five he made in South Texas on Halloween, the final Monday of early voting before the high-dollar race is decided on Election Day on Nov. 8. On Monday, he scheduled stops in the cities of Edinburg, Weslaco, San Juan and McAllen — all in solidly blue Hidalgo County.
The former U.S. representative from El Paso spoke for about 10 minutes before taking photos with supporters and speaking with local media. O’Rourke, 50, criticized Abbott, 64, for the two-term Republican’s perceived inaction on the issues of safety and academic performance in Texas public schools, the state’s power grid and high property taxes.
O’Rourke’s remarks on restoring abortion rights in Texas in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that terminating a pregnancy is not constitutionally protected drew some of the strongest applause from the crowd. He also condemned Abbott for signing into law “the most extreme abortion ban in America” without exceptions for rape or incest earlier this year.
“There is no room in the doctor’s office for a politician. No room at all,” said Elizabeth Leal, a 61-year-old Corpus Christi resident who voted for O’Rourke in his 2018 run for U.S. Senate. She said she cast her vote for O’Rourke again because she sees his victory as imperative to bring back abortion rights to Texan women.
O’Rourke also detailed key action items he would seek to implement if elected to the position, including legalizing marijuana and expunging marijuana-related convictions for Texans, raising the state’s $7.25 minimum wage and pay for teachers and eliminating public schools’ annual State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness — more commonly known as the STAAR test.
“It’s the last Monday for early voting,” he said. “The last Monday we’re going to have a chance to cast that ballot and vote for change, and Lord knows we need some change.”
Wearing a maroon ballcap that reflected Uvalde’s school colors, O’Rourke also criticized the governor’s actions in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting at a Texas public school in May, when 19 children and two adults were killed at Robb Elementary School. O’Rourke, echoing other state officials and family members of the victims, reiterated his call for the resignation of Steve McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, for his agency’s response to the shooting. (McCraw last week said DPS “as an institution” did not fail Uvalde.)
The Corpus Christi stop comes as the GOP has sought to make electoral inroads in South Texas, which has been a reliably Democratic stronghold for decades. Abbott has made multiple visits to Corpus Christi this year, and former President Donald Trump held an event in Nueces County in October in an effort to shore up Republican turnout in the area.
Both Abbott and O’Rourke claimed victory in Nueces County in their respective races in 2018. Abbott won the county with a larger margin, carrying 56% of the vote when he defeated Democrat Lupe Valdez to win a second term. O’Rourke, on the other hand, narrowly won the county with 50.5% in his unsuccessful race to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
With Election Day closing in, O’Rourke is trailing in nearly all of the non-aligned polls in the race, with some polls pinning him on the low end of the 4-point margin of error and others placing him well outside striking distance of Abbott. The latest poll, a University of Texas at Tyler poll released Sunday, found Abbott held a 6 percentage point lead over O’Rourke.
O’Rourke downplayed his trailing position in the polls, saying the statewide surveys do not adequately account for newly activated voters or young, first-time voters — both groups he said are essential to winning a term in the Governor’s Mansion. Engaging those voters is a focus of his campaign, he said.
“Our goal in this campaign is … to bring out people we’ve never heard from before, who’ve never voted (and) who will be that margin of victory that we need on Nov. 8,” he said, fielding questions from local media.
On Monday, Abbott held a campaign event in the West Texas city of Abilene, more than 350 miles away from Corpus Christi. He held a rally in Corpus Christi last week at Brewster Street Ice House and again earlier this month for an immigration-focused campaign event with a bipartisan group of county sheriffs. In addition, he held his primary watch party at Corpus Christi’s Texas State Aquarium in March.
Addressing a crowd of about 500 supporters during his Corpus Christi visit last week, Abbott assailed O’Rourke and President Joe Biden on the topics of border security, Texas oil and gas production and what Abbott called “the forces of socialism.” He drew cheers when referencing his 6-month-old policy of busing migrants processed by federal immigration authorities to Washington, New York City and Chicago — a practice O’Rourke on Monday said equated to using immigrants “as a political prop.”
O’Rourke was slated to visit Corpus Christi for a rally in August but canceled a day before the event after he became ill, a campaign spokesperson, Chris Evans, told the Caller-Times at the time. The following month, O’Rourke visited the Coastal Bend for an event with civil rights activist Dolores Huerta at the Richard M. Borchard Regional Fairgrounds in Robstown.
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