Abbott Makes Frantic Fundraising Pitch
as O'Rourke Takes Rural Areas by Storm

Capitol Inside
July 30, 2022

As Democrat Beto O'Rourke packed churches, senior centers, a skating rink and a union hall in rural Republican strongholds across Texas in the past two days, Governor Greg Abbott campaigned behind the scenes with calls to major donors with a sense of urgency that some perceived as panic with just three months left to go before the 2022 midterm vote.

O'Rourke could be on the verge of another valuable gift from the Republicans with a brewing furor on an appeals court ruling that found that the Public Utility Commission acted improperly when it slashed payments to telecommunication providers in rural areas by 70 percent and failed to fund Texas Universal Fund as required by state law.

The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled in a 63-page opinion that the PUC must pay the telecom firms $200 million as a result of its actions that put access to phone and Internet service in rural areas at risk despite legislation that was approved last year to prevent that from happening. The PUC that Abbott appointed gave O'Rourke a new weapon to use in rural areas to go with the governor's support for private school vouchers - an issue upon which he seized this weekend in East Texas where they're roundly opposed.

O'Rourke played to full houses in Longview, Lufkin and Palestine on Friday before stops in Hemphill, Woodville and the Beaumont-Port Arthur area on Saturday. O'Rourke was the first gubernatorial candidate since Democrat Ann Richards to appear in Woodville - an East Texas town with a population of 2,500 on the highway between Jasper and Livingston.

O'Rourke dominated the front page of the Longview News-Journal on Saturday morning with a pair of photos from a rally the day before at the skaters venue REO Starplex with a giant headline `Let's Do Big Things' crowning the news package devoted to his visit there.

O'Rourke unleashed a new attack on Abbott's push to subsidize private tuitions with public fund in the East Texas phase of the Drive for Texas tour that got under way last week. The former El Paso congressman chastised Abbott for an unstable Texas power grid - portraying the incumbent as an accomplice in the theft of $11 billion from Texas consumers in inflated electricity costs during Winter Storm Uri in early 2021.

“It’s the largest transfer of wealth in Texas history - those energy traders, those pipeline CEOs who are charging more than 200 times the going-rate for fuel," O'Rourke said in Longview. "Not only was that immoral, it was illegal. As governor, we are going to pursue those illegally gotten $11 billion and return it to you.”

Abbott's campaign has been staggered by a mass school shooting in Uvalde and the state's mishandling of the response with a coverup by the Department of Public Safety in a botched bid to hide the inaction of 91 state police officers who'd been on the scene there during the massacre. Abbott has ignored the daily aftershocks as much as possible as though he's hoping that the tempest will cool before the election November 8. But the damage to Abbott's campaign from Uvalde may deepen before it subsides with a looming investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the police response on May 24.

Operation Lone Star has fizzled as a compelling issue or effective distraction as voters realize that the flow of migrants and drugs into Texas hasn't been deterred by the appearance of border security that Abbott has sought to create with DPS Director Steve McCraw as the initiative's maestro. McCraw has been preoccupied - however - as the instigator of a scapegoat scheme that had been designed to pin the blame for the law enforcement breakdown in Uvalde before it was fleshed out by Mayor Don McLaughlin and Democratic State Senator Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio.

Abbott has ample cause to be running scared at a time when O'Rourke has a monopoly on the momentum, energy and emotion with a traditional campaign that he's taking to the people without regard for partisan voting trends while the incumbent hunkers down in Austin, tweets about Operation Lone Star and buttonholes big-giving supporters with high-pressure tactics on the telephone.

The governor could have decided that a record war chest was his only remaining advantage beyond his status as a Republican - and he appears to see substantial reinforcements of donor funds as its only possible saving grace.

Abbott left the Governor's Mansion earlier this week to attend an event in an event that the Pecos County GOP hosted in Fort Stockton. Abbott tweeted a picture of him speaking on a raised platform to a group of people in an audience. But the campaign cropped the photo in a way that made it impossible to see how large the rare Abbott audience turned out to be at the West Texas visit.

Abbott hosted a virtual town hall that he said attracted thousands of supporters to the Internet. But former Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen was the only other person besides the governor in a picture that Abbott attached to the tweet about the town hall.