Politico: ““He has basically done the work of Stacey Abrams in Texas, if you look at this record of raising money and volunteers,” said Eliot Shapleigh, a former Texas state senator and longtime friend of O’Rourke, referring to the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate whose organizing helped elect two Democrats to the Senate in her state in January. “Compare him to Republican leaders. It’s the perfect contrast. Let’s take Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz jets off to Cancun, lies about it, comes back and makes a show of handing out water. Meanwhile, Beto’s raised more than one million dollars, has got thousands of people to make calls … Voters respond to that.”
Despite saying before dropping out of the presidential race that he could not “fathom a scenario where I would run for public office again if I’m not the nominee,” O’Rourke had been considering running for governor, frustrated, among other things, by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott’s management of the coronavirus pandemic and his call for Texas to become a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.”
“Whether or not I run,” he wrote, “I 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.”
The long-term political consequences of the storm are uncertain. But short term, it has been brutal on Texas Republicans, 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 put Abbott’s approval rating at just39 percent. And that was before millions of Texans lost power — freezing in their homes and, if they had running water, laboring under orders to boil it.”