Abbott Projected Winner In 2022 Texas Governor Race

TEXAS — Gov. Greg Abbott is the projected winner in the gubernatorial race against Beto O'Rourke, FOX News and NBC News reported Tuesday night.

Abbott had 3,128,147 votes to O'Rourke's 2,542,016 as of shortly after 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to unofficial totals from the New York Times.

Tuesday marked the end of a contentious campaign as Texans took to the polls to determine whether the next leader of the Lone Star State would be incumbent Republican Abbott or former Democratic congressman O’Rourke.

Abbott had painted O’Rourke as a candidate who’s too liberal for Texas, criticizing the challenger as a socialist who supported cuts to police funding, according to The Dallas Morning News. O’Rourke called out Abbott for the state’s rising property taxes, struggling power grid, abortion ban and gun violence, the newspaper reported.

Also on the ballot were Green Party candidate Delilah Barrios and Libertarian Mark Tippetts.

Going into Election Day, polling appeared to favor Abbott, who led O’Rourke in a recent University of Texas poll by 6 points, according to KDFW. Additionally, the governor paced ahead of his Democratic opponent in a University of Houston poll by 13 points, KENS reported.

“The bloom is off the rose of the Beto candidacy in a lot of respects,” political scientist Matthew Wilson told KDFW in reference to O'Rourke, who attempted to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 and ran for president in 2020. “There's not as much energy and enthusiasm this time around as we did in 2018. We just don't have the high-intensity race to drive turnout like we saw the last two cycles.”

Early voting had been low leading up to Election Day, KDFW reported, with the question of who would be Texas’s next governor to be determined in part by which demographic groups turned out to the polls. It’s been more than 30 years since Ann Richards was elected Texas’s last Democratic governor, according to the Morning News, which noted the state’s Republican voter majority.

Both O’Rourke and Abbott amassed impressive campaign coffers this election season, with O’Rourke raising nearly $77 million and Abbott bringing in $143 million, the Houston Chronicle reported, fueling a bitter advertising war that has played out on televisions across Texas.

Throughout the campaign, the national political climate has been in flux, tempered first by anxieties related to the Uvalde school shooting and reversal of Roe vs. Wade, and, more recently, affected by worries about border security and the burdens of an unpredictable economy, according to the Morning News. Those issues all played a role in the race leading up to Tuesday, but one loomed particularly large, according to the Morning News.

“The economy is the hurricane of issues,” Republican consultant Bill Miller told the newspaper. “These other issues are smaller storms.”