Texas Is The Election Canary in a Coal Mine
With everything that has happened in Texas, if Beto doesn’t beat Abbott, it is not a good sign for the country.
Over the last two to three years, Texas has had every single crisis that we’ve been told over and over would create a Blue Wave and lead to a large number of people voting Dem. They’ve had people die both of heat stroke and hypothermia due to climate change and horrific, corrupt energy grid management, one of the worst school shootings to date due, not just to the number of children killed, but the absolutely inhumane and sickening lack of response by police.
Abbott’s border posturing cost the state billions of dollars in revenue due to “enhanced inspections” which accomplished nothing, then they lost even more billions in future revenue when Mexico told Abbott to fuck off and chose to build their new freight railway through New Mexico instead.
Then there’s the teacher shortage, the hatred of the LGBTQ community, and what was the other one? Oh yeah, the whole $10k bounty on abortion providers and stripping women of their rights, along with threatening to not let women leave the state to get an abortion elsewhere.
There’s more, but those are the highlights.
So, we have Beto on one side, the tireless Democrat, who has shown himself to be the perfect example of an actual public servant over and over. He has not only run repeatedly to defeat the GOP but also organized voting drives and repeated grounds up outreach to try to help people in need during all the Texas’ recent climate changed induced catastrophes.
He is tireless, he cares about Texas and has traveled, literally, to every county in Texas multiple times to reach out to and speak with voters. He’s certainly not lacking in the messaging department.
Then we have Abbott, who couldn’t even be bothered to attend any funerals of children who died in the Uvalde school shooting.
Now, one would think that rational sane empathetic people would be flocking to a politician that provides solutions, has shown that he cares about Texans on multiple levels, and be abandoning the guy that refuses to do a single thing to address any issue facing Texas. What more evidence of GOP failures do people need? Apparently, at least in the case of white conservatives, a lot.
To be fair, Beto has gained a lot of ground. In December of 2021, he was close to 20 points behind Abbott. Beto announced his official campaign in December and was sitting at 37% of the vote vs Abbott’s 54%. As of June, it’s 48% Abbott vs 43% Beto, which sounds good, until you dig into the numbers.
The first number is the margin of error for this poll which is +/- 2.8% which means it could be almost 3 pts closer or Abbott could be 3 pts more ahead. That’s the thing with polls people always forget, the MOE plays a huge part in it. As far as the other numbers, well, there are some problems.
It’s called the Indies and the White Voters and People Over 35. They’re not moving towards Beto in the polls, and this happens in every swing state/purple state election, which is why we keep losing or getting nail-biter electoral college votes.
In today’s poll, Republicans (90–5 percent) and independents (46–40 percent) back Abbott, while Democrats (96–2 percent) back O’Rourke.
There are also big differences by gender, race, and age. Abbott wins the support of men 59–33 percent, while O’Rourke wins the support of women 52–38 percent. Abbott wins the support of white voters 63–30 percent, while O’Rourke wins the support of Black voters 73–11 percent and Hispanic voters 50–41 percent.
O’Rourke leads among voters 18–34 years old (56–35 percent), while Abbott leads among voters 35–49 years old (50–38 percent) and voters 50–64 years old (57–37 percent). Among voters 65 years of age and over, Abbott receives 50 percent, while O’Rourke receives 45 percent.
Asked to choose the most urgent issue facing Texas today, the Texas-Mexico border tops the list (29 percent) followed by the economy (19 percent) and gun policy (17 percent).
Among Republicans, 56 percent say the Texas-Mexico border followed by the economy (24 percent).
Among Democrats, 34 percent say gun policy followed by abortion (13 percent).
Among independents, 25 percent say the Texas-Mexico border followed by the economy (21 percent), gun policy (18 percent), and abortion (10 percent).
We won’t be able to blame Boomers much longer if GenX-ers and Millennials keep trending conservative, which is, sadly, what historically happens as people get older for some reason. Beyond that though, the group that makes or breaks elections for Dems is White Folks. The reason Biden won was enough white people were sick of Trump.
Now, one would think that a whole lot more women would be backing Beto after the shit that went down about abortion, but no, we’re still stuck with the 30–40% that vote conservative no matter what.
You would think seeing elderly people dying of heat stroke and hypothermia would get old people motivated to vote Dem, but nope, they’re still voting conservative too. I am not even going to talk about all the COVID deaths, they aren’t so why bother?
You’d think all the concern about kids being safe in schools and gun safety (which according to this poll 61% of people in Texas are “concerned” about school shootings) that parents would be willing to vote for someone who wants to make it harder to get guns like AR-15s. That age group is the 35–55-year-olds (they tend to have kids in school) but nope, they’re still happily backing Abbott.
So, after living through disaster after disaster, after women having their rights to bodily autonomy stripped away, after doctors being turned into criminals for providing female health care, and after a school shooting that the GOP Governor barely acknowledged happened, where are we election-wise? About the same place we always are.
So, the governor election is in November I believe and we have midterms coming up nationwide. The question facing all of us, not just Texas, is how many more horrors will it take to get people to stop voting based on guns, abortion, bigotry, lies, and racism?
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