Beto O'Rourke Already Getting Crushed In Texas' Governor Race

According to the latest polls, Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke is losing by 10 points to Republican incumbent Greg Abbott in Texas' gubernatorial race, and the gap between the candidates jumps to more than 20 points among Independents. This is not good news for Beto or the Democrats in the state, as they clearly had an opening to make serious inroads in Texas. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening and why it could be that Beto is failing to badly right now.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Beto O'Rourke is already in pretty serious trouble in his bid to become the next governor of the state of Texas. Even though incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott is still hugely unpopular in the state and his popularity among his own Republican base is actually lower than that of other Republican governors across the country. Abbot is still beating Beto O'Rourke in the latest polling by 10 points. A long way to go before the election, right? Beto could close a 10 point gap, but it's not the 10 point gap that he should be concerned about. It's the 21 point gap that really matters because the 21 point gap is the gap between the independents who say they support Abbott over O'Rourke, 42 to 21%. So of course Abbott's gonna pull the Republicans, O'Rourke is gonna pull the Democrats, but Abbott has twice as many independents, which of course is going to swing the election his way.

So, yeah, as it stands right now, Beto O'Rourke's campaign is dead on arrival. And I've never been the biggest fan of Beto O'Rourke. I believe he has some serious missteps, even though I'm okay with his statement, that we're gonna take the guns away. That personally is not something that offends me whatsoever, uh, in the state of Texas that's a pretty stupid thing to say. And of course, that is what Beto O'Rourke had said long ago, we're gonna come and we're gonna take your guns away, feeding into that right wing myth that they've been pushing for decades and he said it. That's pretty much a non-starter for any office in Texas. But he recently had to come out and say, no, no, no, nobody's gonna take anything. So he's already tried to do damage control for something he said a year or two ago. It's not going well.

But beyond that, I do have to question why? As I mentioned, Abbott's approval rating even among Republicans at 77% may seem high, but it's actually one of the lowest out of all Republican governors in the United States. His own party, 77% are okay with him, 23% are not, that's not good numbers for an incumbent. But more importantly, he only has a 44% approval rating overall in the state. People don't like him. They don't like his policies, even those hard right policies, people don't like it. But here's where these polls get interesting. Let me read you this. 36% approve of the job that president Biden is doing and only about a third, so maybe 33%, approve of Republican Senator John Cornyn, Republican attorney general Ken Paxton and Lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, also a Republican. Just 43% said they have a favorable view of former president Trump.

Senator Ted Cruz has a job approval rating of 39%, while 43% disapprove. Only 23% of Texans believe the country's headed in the right direction. 53% say the economy's worse off than it was a year ago. So Texans, and this is why I think this story is so relevant, it's way beyond Beto O'Rourke, Texans hate their politicians. So how hard is it for the Democrats to find somebody that is popular? They hate Ted Cruz. They hate John Cornyn. They hate Greg Abbott. They hate Dan Patrick. They hate Biden. They hate Trump. You can't get a majority to approve of any of these people. And Beto O'Rourke is the best the Democrats have. But you know what? I'm not gonna blame it all on Betoor the Democrats. I'm gonna blame it on the voters themselves.