Texas Gov. Greg Abbott easily wins re-election by defeating Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has won re-election for a third term by defeating Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s challenger, NBC News projects.
At one point, early in the cycle, pundits regarded the competition as the more interesting matchup in the country, with O’Rourke branding the same enthusiasm four years earlier, when he nearly rejected a different Texas conservative. did. , Sen. Ted Cruz.
In May, O’Rourke crashed the Abbott news conference, the day 19 children and two teachers were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde before police pulled him out of Abbott’s pro-gun policies. , Removed. Charges reached the stage. Over the summer, he launched the 5,600-mile “Drive to Texas.”
But this time, O’Rourke’s campaign was never entirely successful.
Elections in recent months have shown Abbott making steady progress; Recent polls from RealClearPolitics ahead of the election showed him leading by more than 8 percentage points.
O’Rourke had always faced an uphill climb. Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in more than three decades, Abbott is a formidable fundraiser, and Texas Republicans have made inroads with Latino voters.
O’Rourke’s supporters had claimed that a trio of crises — the failure of the state’s power grid last year, the loss of abortion rights and the tragedy in Uvalde — had left Abbott vulnerable in solid red Texas.
In the race’s only televised debate, in September, O’Rourke tried to capture those topics, as well as Abbott’s highly publicized program of settling migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. and other Democratic-run cities.
However, the optimism proved to be wishful thinking. After running for a short time in the summer after the election was short, he began showing Abbott ahead.
Former Congressman O’Rourke’s defeat is the third time in four years he has failed to win a high office after his close but unsuccessful Senate bid in 2018 and a run in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
