Governor Greg Abbott has begun a campaign advertising blitz with radio and television spots touting Texas’ low unemployment and economic growth, all in an effort to help down-ballot Republican candidates including vulnerable U.S. Congressmen, embattled U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Texas House and Senate candidates, and county candidates.
Abbott faces no real threat from his own challenger, former Dallas sheriff Lupe Valdez, who trails him by 19 percentage points in a recent NBC/Marist poll and has a tiny fraction of the campaign funds that he has. This has allowed Abbott to ignore issues raised by Valdez and instead use his campaign money to boost Republican voter turnout and drum up a party-wide message.
Because Texas has a straight-ticket option at the ballot – this year is the final election that it will be in use – any party-line voters who turn out for Abbott will also help the other Republicans on the ballot.
The governor’s most recent filing with the Texas Ethics Commission in July showed that he had booked $16,151,362 in media ads for the fall campaign. The ads began airing Tuesday. He also had $29 million cash on hand even after making this ad buy.
One radio spot released Tuesday says, “Jobs, wages, opportunities – all growing in Texas under Governor Greg Abbott – 800,000 new jobs and counting. Higher wages for workers. Better education for all Texans, with high school graduation rates at all time highs. But Governor Abbott knows there is more to do. That’s why he is recruiting new employers from across America – even the world – to come to Texas.”
The ad goes on to describe investments in Texas universities, which the governor says will help drive more economic growth, and again it stresses the strength of the Texas economy. A second ad describes Abbott’s tenure as “the dawn of a new era in Texas,” saying, “Our families are safer. Texas is locking up thousands of dangerous gang members so they can no longer prey on innocent Texans.”
The governor’s positive messaging contrasts sharply with that of Democratic candidates for statewide office who are pointing to rising property taxes, problems in the state’s healthcare system, and the need for criminal justice reform as reasons to oust the ruling Republican party, which has won every statewide election since 1994.
Abbott’s spokesman John Wittman acknowledged in a statement in July that the governor’s ad campaign would not be about merely securing the governor’s own reelection. Instead it aims to “help Republicans up and down the ballot,” he said. He hinted that the $16 million ad buy represented only the “first wave” in a series of television campaigns.
This massive investment in the general election isn’t just about beating Democrats – it also strengthens Abbott’s hand within the Republican Party of Texas, which has competing internal factions. If the governor is able to take credit for helping muscle out Democratic challengers, then he’ll appear stronger than other party leaders heading into a new legislative session in January, including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, with whom Abbott has ideological differences.
“If not only Greg Abbott but the Republicans as well win big, it will demonstrate that he’s the leader of the Texas Republican Party — and even Ted Cruz may be indebted to him,” says Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, as quoted in the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday. “They’ll owe their re-elections in November to him and not, for example, to Dan Patrick.”
Patrick, for his part, kicked off his own reelection campaign earlier this week. In July he torpedoed an idea first raised by Abbott in a school safety plan published after the Santa Fe school shooting – a ‘red flag’ gun law. Though Patrick initially granted a request by the governor to allow the Senate to study the idea throughout the summer, a final report by the Senate Select Committee studying school security watered down recommendations floated in the governor’s earlier report.
