AUSTIN — Gov. Greg Abbott and Beto O’Rourke jumped to big early leads and were expected to win their respective parties’ nominations for Texas governor without a runoff Tuesday.
In early returns, Abbott amassed a sizable lead over seven Republican challengers, including North Texans Allen West and Don Huffines. Huffines conceded early in the evening, boasting he had “driven the narrative” and forced the incumbent to deliver for conservatives.
O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman and presidential candidate, vaulted to a commanding lead at the head of a five-candidate Democratic field.
Over the past 15 weeks, frustrating all the other gubernatorial hopefuls, Abbott and O’Rourke exclusively attacked one another. In their appearances and ads, neither ever mentioned primary opponents.
Securing their parties’ nominations marks the start of an eight-month general election slog that’s 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. “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. All of those things, taken together, are going the wrong way [for O’Rourke] in a state where a Republican starts off with a natural, 10-point advantage.”
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.
“We can get back to being big again,” he said in announcing in November.
When he formally kicked off his campaign in McAllen in early January, Abbott said, “We need a proven winner who will fight to secure the future of Texas.”
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.
Huffines, 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,” he said.
Also, the remaining issue of transgender children’s medical care, Jones 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, according to public polls.
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, has 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 Broward and Palm Beach counties in south Florida before moving to Dallas in 2016 to run the National Center for Policy Analysis, a now-shuttered conservative think tank. In July 2020, West ousted incumbent James Dickey as state GOP chairman. West has 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. Of four Democratic rivals Tuesday, the best-known were former Austin radio journalist Joy Diaz, who raised less than $10,000, and Beaumont pastor and civil rights leader Michael Cooper, who raised just more than $7,000.
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.
O’Rourke, returning to a Texas-only audience after a 2019 presidential run in which he highlighted his progressive stands, tried to shine the spotlight back on Abbott as a failed leader. The Democrat accused Abbott of being 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.
“Those in positions of public trust have stopped listening to, serving and paying attention to and trusting the people of Texas so they’re not focused on the things that we really want them to do,” he said in his announcement video.
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