Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) Democratic competitor Beto O’Rourke blamed President Joe Biden for Latino voters in Texas turning rightward, saying the President is disregarding this demographic.
Speaking at a Q&A session at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Saturday (September 24), O’Rourke highlighted how “Candidate Biden didn’t spend a dime or day in the Rio Grande Valley or really anywhere in Texas, for that matter, once we got down in the homestretch of the general election.”
He added, “You got to be locking eyeballs with the people that you want to fight for and serve and whose votes that you want to win.”
In 2020, despite losing the general election, the former President won 38 percent of the Latino vote, a 13 percentage point increase from what Republicans received in the 2018 midterm elections.
During the session, O’Rourke explained that Trump also had a “very strong, compelling economic message” during the last general election.
The Democratic gubernatorial candidate also compared Democrats’ campaigning message in 2020 to Republicans’ prominent campaigning, describing the GOP message as “literally one syllable one word, it was ‘jobs,’ and he kind of offered a false choice: ‘ I can either keep you holed up in your house during this pandemic, or I can open up all places of employment and prioritize the economy.”
O’Rourke then queried, “What did we have on our side? Nothing.” he said.
Republicans making significant inroads into the typically blue leaning demographic is most prevalent in the election of Republican Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-born congresswoman to serve in the House.
In June, through a special election, Flores flipped a decades-long blue House seat red.
