Source: Politics<\/p>\n
While Ted Cruz was getting clobbered for fleeing Texas amid its historic winter storm, the Democrat he defeated in 2018, Beto O\u2019Rourke, was already deep into disaster relief mode \u2014 soliciting donations for storm victims, delivering pallets of water from his pickup truck and once again broadcasting his movements on Facebook Live.<\/p>\n
It was part of an effort orchestrated by O\u2019Rourke and his organization, Powered by People, in response to the crisis. It was also, to Texas Democrats, a sign that O\u2019Rourke the politician is back.<\/p>\n
The former congressman and onetime Democratic sensation acknowledged <\/b>last month that he\u2019s considering<\/a> running for governor in 2022, <\/b>and he has discussed <\/b>the possibility with Democratic Party officials and other associates. The drubbing that Texas Republicans are taking in the wake of the deadly storm may provide him with an opening \u2014 even in his heavily Republican state.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter all of Texas freezes over because of poor leadership, I think it\u2019s a different state of Texas than it was two weeks ago,\u201d said Mikal Watts, a San Antonio-based lawyer and major Democratic money bundler.<\/p>\n If O\u2019Rourke runs for governor, Watts said, \u201cI think he could catch fire.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Rourke\u2019s political prospects \u2014 like those of every Texas Democrat \u2014 appeared to significantly dim following the November elections, with Republican victories in the state grounding Democrats\u2019 once-sky-high expectations there and seeming to confirm the GOP\u2019s continued dominance. Donald Trump carried the state by more than 5 percentage points, and Republican Sen. John Cornyn won reelection by nearly 10 points.<\/p>\n Yet O\u2019Rourke is appealing to Democratic donors and party officials in Texas because of his popularity among the rank-and-file and expansive political network in the state, which he has only broadened since abandoning his presidential campaign in November 2019. One Democrat described him as \u201cthe<\/i> Democratic Party in Texas.”<\/p>\n During the general election last year, O’Rourke’s organization said it registered some 200,000 people to vote. And Powered by People, which includes two longtime advisers from O’Rourke’s political campaigns, was beginning a program to sign people up for coronavirus vaccines when the storm hit, prompting it to shift its focus to the relief effort. <\/b>O\u2019Rourke, through his group, has raised more than $1.4 million for the recovery, scrambled a legion of volunteers to knock on doors and, via phone banks, made more than 900,000 wellness checks on seniors.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has basically done the work of Stacey Abrams in Texas, if you look at this record of raising money and volunteers,\u201d said Eliot Shapleigh, a former Texas state senator and longtime friend of O\u2019Rourke, referring to the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate whose organizing helped elect two Democrats to the Senate in her state in January. \u201cCompare him to Republican leaders. It\u2019s the perfect contrast. Let\u2019s take Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz jets off to Cancun, lies about it, comes back and makes a show of handing out water<\/a>. Meanwhile, Beto\u2019s raised more than one million dollars, has got thousands of people to make calls \u2026 Voters respond to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite saying before dropping out of the presidential race that he could not \u201cfathom a scenario where I would run for public office again if I\u2019m not the nominee<\/a>,\u201d O\u2019Rourke had been considering running for governor, frustrated, among other things, by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott\u2019s management of the coronavirus pandemic and his call for Texas to become a \u201cSecond Amendment sanctuary state.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhether or not I run,\u201d he wrote<\/a>, \u201cI will do everything in my power to elect a Governor who looks out for everyone, keeps Texans safe, answers to the people instead of the special interests & guarantees that we all have equal opportunity to achieve our best in life.\u201d<\/p>\n The long-term political consequences of the storm are uncertain. But short term, it has been brutal on Texas Republicans<\/a>, including Abbott, who, in addition to sitting as governor during massive power outages, was panned for echoing a misleading claim that renewable energy was to blame for the crisis. A University of Houston poll fielded in mid-January<\/a> put Abbott\u2019s approval rating at just <\/b>39 percent. And that was before millions of Texans lost power \u2014 freezing in their homes and, if they had running water, laboring under orders to boil it.<\/p>\n Still, that same poll put Abbott\u2019s public approval rating 4 percentage points higher than O\u2019Rourke\u2019s. And even some Democrats fear that O\u2019Rourke\u2019s strident position on gun control during the presidential campaign could hamstring him in a general election in Texas, a culturally conservative state with a historic attachment to firearms. Supportive of a mandatory buyback for assault weapons, the former congressman had said during a presidential debate, \u201cHell yes, we\u2019re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.\u201d<\/p>\n Colin Strother, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state, said, \u201cHad he not run for president, without the \u2018We\u2019re going to come to your house and take your guns\u2019 line, I would have a completely different opinion\u201d on O\u2019Rourke\u2019s statewide viability. Watts called it an \u201cunforced error,\u201d but one that O’Rourke could overcome \u201cif he keeps making good decisions, like the way he reacted to the freeze over the past week.\u201d<\/p>\n James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, which had Abbott <\/b>polling in the upper 40s<\/a> as of late last year, said that if O\u2019Rourke does run for governor, \u201cyou still have to favor the Republicans\u201d in Texas.<\/p>\n However, he said: \u201cYou can hear the arguments already. The argument is going to be made that Abbott has now underperformed in two major crises in the state \u2014 the pandemic and then the big freeze and the power outage.\u201d<\/p>\n Republican strategist Dave Carney, who advises Abbott, said Tuesday that he hopes O\u2019Rourke runs for governor, even though he doesn\u2019t think he will, noting that Republicans successfully yoked down-ballot Democrats to O\u2019Rourke and \u201cit just worked like a charm.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe may still get adoring fans who fawn over him around the country,\u201d he said, but <\/b>\u201cvoters in Texas have not been enamored.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, while generally critical of O\u2019Rourke \u2014 \u201cBeto\u2019s like a moth to a flame. If there\u2019s a TV camera there, he will be there\u201d \u2014 Carney said that \u201cduring a crisis, anybody helping out is a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has raised several million dollars<\/a> for the disaster relief, as O\u2019Rourke has noted during his frequent livestreamed appreciations <\/b>of other people helping.<\/p>\n