| Q: On the first day of early voting, O'Rourke spent a lot of time in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and Abbott made stops in Harlingen and San Antonio. What does that say about their priorities, geographically?
A: Democrats need to run the numbers up in big urban areas. If you look at the 2020 election, where the Republicans were getting their votes and where the Democrats were getting their votes, both campaigns seem to be focusing on places where they ran strong and where they need to get maximum votes. So for O'Rourke and for the Democrats in 2020, they had about 2 and a half million urban voters. For Greg Abbott, They had about 2 million rural voters, in addition to about a million more exurban voters. So O'Rourke spending time in Dallas makes total sense. He needs to juice up turnout in one of the most blue counties in the state.
Abbott needs to make sure that he gets the mid-size metro and exurban vote, because that's where he's traditionally been pretty strong, too. To look at what Abbott's doing with respect to the vote in South Texas — Republicans have been trying to get the Latino vote more significantly on their side, and in this election, since they've been such a big swing vote, it might be lucrative.
To put it more firmly, Republicans don't have to win the Latino vote in order to win statewide. They only have to reduce the Democrats' margins. … That's a long way of saying that both sides are spending time in areas where they have either been very strong, or in this election, have been trying to crack a swing vote. |
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