I think that Beto will perform much more strongly than most of you think. He's a uniquely talented retail politician who is being underestimated because posters are wrongly conflating his bad instincts in interacting with national media with being a "bad politician". Even if he is treated as a kind of joke, Abbott is governing in a very polarizing way that guarantees that Beto will receive ~45% of the vote or something like that.
I would probably predict a stronger performance than most posters, who are overreacting to his fairly close loss in 2018 and Texas' results in general in 2020, but there's a big coalition Texas Democrats need to pull together and it's fair to doubt his ability to do that. Of course lots of people are horrified with the way Texas Republicans handled the freeze and all this craziness Abbott is doing to sate the grassroots conservatives, but can O'Rourke really play the reformist fighter while also pulling over some small business conservatives? How will he walk the line on social issues? What will he do to address perceptions of inauthenticity? Most importantly, will he be able to harness the latino vote? Not to mention there's lots of gaffes that can drag down his campaign, like the gun comment.
I see Democrat victories in Texas in the 2020s, but I don't know if 2022 is it.
Poll
