With less than five days until early voting starts, Gov. Greg Abbott’s team is on track to surpass their door-to-door goal by more than 1 million houses.
On a conference call held this week with a select group of media members, Abbott’s senior advisors said that their focus is on the ground game and Gov. Abbott will be making 31 stops in the final 21 days before the election,
“The governor will be crisscrossing the state doing turnout events.”
Mark Miner, Communications Director and Senior Advisor to Gov. Abbott, said that even though every county is important, they will be putting a special emphasis on Tarrant and Collin counties,
“We have a great slate of candidates up and down the ballot. We will hold Tarrant County and keep it the largest Republican county in the country. We have a great ground game [in Tarrant county], our Deputy Director has been working on this for 18 months.”
Gov. Abbott’s challenger, Robert Francis O’Rourke (D) narrowly won Tarrant county back in 2018 and got 46.% in Collin county when he lost his battle to Senator Ted Cruz for a Senate seat, but Miner says their team is confident Governor Abbott will score the victory in both counties, not to mention statewide, come November,
“We feel good about it. I look at the polling data for the various candidates…It’s competitive, and it’s going to be a battle but we are in the trenches and we plan to be successful. Every indication is that we will win Tarrant county and Collin county as well.”
According to the latest poll by FiveThirtyEight, Gov. Abbott is up more than 7 points currently at 50.5%, with O’Rourke sitting at 43.2%.
The Abbott campaign is anticipating a historic level turnout for this race, anywhere between 9.8 – 10.6 million.
According to the campaign, Gov. Abbott is pouring money into OTT streaming ads, radio ads, and has even purchased ad space in AMC theatres across the state adding that the ads are being pushed out in both English and Spanish.
“Our goal is to win 50% plus one actually 52%. Our goal is to win [the] Hispanic vote state-wide. That is not just urban areas and Southern Texas. In Midland, Texas the top two [radio] stations are both Spanish-speaking. Hispanics are in every community in our state and we are reaching out in Spanish with digital ads, door teams, and OTT ads (online streaming services.) When we go to an undecided house if they decide to talk in Spanish we have bilingual door knockers to engage with them. We feel spectacularly positive about what’s going on in our southern Texas region.”
The team has sent out double the field staff in Southern Texas than the rest of the state and said that the Democrats have already admitted they will lose at least one of the congressional seats in South Texas to the Republican candidate.
In addition, Miner says that they predict Gov. Abbott will get a large boost from the Hispanic community in El Paso,
“Our door program there has had some of our best results, Beto’s hometown. I’m not going to sit here and say we are going to win El Paso, but we will be extremely competitive there, will do pretty well there and we feel that a large chunk of our Hispanic vote will come from El Paso. We feel good but I’m not predicting a win.”
Gov. Abbott will be making a stop in El Paso on November 1, 2022.
