Texas: 600,000 votes

[brooklynite]

That’s how much Trump won by in 2020. How does Beto O’Rourke shift that many votes from Abbott to him?

[blogslug]

1. Well, golly

I guess we should just give up then

[Atticus]

16. Your attitude AND your sarcasm are much appreciated. 👍 nt

[BlueTsunami2018]

2. He doesn't.

Beto, as much as I like him in general, killed himself with the gun stuff. He has zero chance of winning.

[ColinC]

3. Can you cite a poll?

Specifically one that shows a substantial amount of Texans support the right to carry AR15s?

I'm assuming you are talking about his "we will take away your AR-15" quote.

[BlueTsunami2018]

5. Indeed.

That’s a political death sentence in Texas. Hell, that’s a political death sentence in many purple states as well. The gun control thing is a lost cause, we’re better off leaving off on that. The horse left the barn a long time ago.

[ColinC]

7. I think polls have shown Texans are either evenly split or in favor of gun control

This poll is one of the only ones I can find. It is from 2018. It shows a vast majority of Texans support stricter gun laws. Banning AR15s sounds like common sense to most people. It seems like that might be the case in Texas as well.

https://www.fox7austin.com/news/survey-poll-suggests-texas-voters-overwhelmingly-support-stricter-gun-regulations

[BlueTsunami2018]

8. Here's a pretty good site.

http://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/archive/html/poll/features/gun_control_feature/slide1.html


It lets you see the polls on different questions with a pretty thorough breakdown.

[ColinC]

10. It appears those are 2013 numbers

If you click national comparison, it shows that the polls was taken January/February 2013.

[LeftInTX]

11. But Beto was over-the-top

He could have toned it down, but he double downed.

He could have just said he supported sensible gun safety laws and said he spoke out of passion for El Paso, but he doubled down on what he said.

[ColinC]

13. Banning AR15s is a wildly reasonable thing to do.

A lot of people do support doing something wildly unreasonable, like letting people buy assault rifles. But even in Texas, it appears far from a majority.

[MagickMuffin]

4. Well . . . . WINTERS COMING

And last winter we had blackouts during subfreezing temps. I got to experience several days without heat and electricity. People died!


We just need to continue to GOTV.

[LeftInTX]

12. Only if we have weather like that again.

Everyone was panicking because it got down to 25 last night, but it's 55 right now. No freeze in forecast for tonight.

[MagickMuffin]

14. D/FW will be roller-coasting the next few days.

Plus the winter storm this past year happened in February. Plenty of time for something else to happen, since there wasn't any movement/improvements on the power grid.


I'm so glad the Fed is looking into the power grab for money for overcharging customers for the blackouts.


You would think that belonging to a political party wouldn't matter over the power outages, but mages.

[moose65]

6. He doesn't

Texas has one of the worst voter-turnout records in the country - that voter suppression thing works!

The population of Texas is about 29 million, according to the 2020 census. About a quarter of that population is under the age of 18, so that leaves about 21,750,000 adult residents. We'd have to take out the non-citizens, which I have no idea how many there are, but let's just say there are 20 million eligible voters in Texas.

Looking at the Texas secretary of state's web site, I see that there are around 16 million registered voters in Texas, so it looks like there are about 4 million eligible voters in Texas who aren't registered. THOSE are the voters that we need to go after, with a Stacey Abrams-style registration drive.

[lame54]

9. Hopefully Abbott will meet him halfway

[dsc]

15. percent is what matters not raw number

Trump won TX by just under 5.5% of the vote. In comparison, he won NC by just over 1.3%. Roy Cooper, on the same ballot, won by 4.5%. That is a swing of about 5.8%, which, if it happened in TX, would swing TX to Beto. Now, is Beto the correct candidate to do that, I haven't a clue. But Roy Cooper shows it is doable.

[brooklynite]

17. Absolutely wrong...

It requires as much effort to turn out one more voter in NC as it does in TX, regardless of what percentage that voter represents.

[dsc]

18. nope

since TX is larger, there are more people to do the work. While the person hours would, indeed, be larger the number of people doing the work would be larger as well thus the hours needed would not necessarily increase.

[panader0]

19. Beto lost to Cruz in 2018 by 223,000 votes or 2.6%.

That's a more reasonable gap to bridge, especially with Abbott's dismal record.