Far-left Democrat Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke announced on Monday that he intends to run for Governor of Texas against incumbent Governor Greg Abbott. Texans will choose their next governor in November of next year.
“I’m running to serve the people of Texas, and I want to make sure that we have a governor that serves everyone, helps to bring this state together to do the really big things before us and get past the small, divisive politics and policies of Greg Abbott,” O’Rourke told the Texas Tribune.
Abbott responded to the news with a tweet of his own.
In a hypothetical poll between O’Rourke and Abbot conducted in early November, O’Rourke trailed the current governor by nine points in a head-to-head matchup. Forty-six percent of respondents chose Abbott to only 37 percent for O’Rourke.
Formerly considered a Democrat up-and-comer, O’Rourke’s popularity with Texans waned after his disastrous run for the presidency in 2019. O’Rourke made several gaffes and odd statements during the early debate season, which effectively ended his campaign.
After the announcement, Texas Monthly confronted O’Rourke directly about his recent election history, which has included moves to the far left on guns, immigration, and healthcare.
Jonathon Tilove asked the candidate, “Unlike in 2018, you are now a well-known and polarizing figure, and the Abbott campaign will make sure Texans repeatedly hear the statements you made when you ran for president that put you to the left of most Texas voters. Will those define you negatively?”
O’Rourke deflected, “I don’t think this will be much of a campaign if it’s about me. I think it really has to be about Texas. It has to be about all of us.”
O’Rourke was then asked about the precipitous drop in President Joe Biden’s popularity during the first year of his presidency and how that might affect his chances to unseat Abbott.
According to O’Rourke, the answer to defeating Abbott is all about turnout. “I think you’re trying to say this is not going to be easy. I agree with you. And just to compound everything that you laid out, Texas was already the toughest state in which to register and participate in an election. With the elections bill signed into law by Greg Abbott, it is now even harder to vote in Texas.”
“In the 2020 elections, more than seven million eligible voters did not cast a ballot just in the state of Texas, in the most consequential election arguably since 1864,” O’Rourke said. “I want to make sure that I am reaching out to and listening to those who either had an obstacle in place that prevented them from voting, or never heard from a candidate and felt forgotten or written off or not included in the conversation and in the future of this state.”
A former three-term congressman from Texas’ 16th Congressional District, which includes the City of El Paso, O’Rourke made headlines in 2018 when he came tantalizingly close to defeating incumbent Ted Cruz for one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats.
O’Rourke then followed up his loss to Cruz with a run for the presidency. After gaining no momentum during the early Democrat presidential debates, O’Rourke ended his campaign in November of 2019 before primary season began, eventually joining the Democrat establishment on the day before Super Tuesday in endorsing Joe Biden.
Among O’Rourke’s missteps in his 2020 presidential run was his vow to take away certain guns from legal gun owners. During a debate, when asked by moderator David Muir, “Are you proposing taking away their guns? And how would this work?”
O’Rourke responded: “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”
O’Rourke continued: “I am, if it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield. If the high-impact, high-velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body, because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers.”
Despite receiving a thunderous applause for the pronouncement from a Democrat primary debate audience, the remark was used to accurately paint O’Rourke as a potential gun-grabber.
O’Rourke’s campaign was further dogged by a report that the candidate literally ate dirt in the wake of his loss to Cruz in the 2018 midterms during a January stop in New Mexico. According to the report from the Washington Post, the soil in the area was said to have “regenerative powers.” Apparently, O’Rourke also brought some of this New Mexican dirt home to his family to eat.
Despite a long aversion to political action committees, O’Rourke went on to found the Powered by People PAC, which looks to increase Democrat clout in the Lone Star State in the 2022 election. O’Rourke can now count himself among the candidates that his PAC is supporting.
