So I highlighted Politico’s story about how Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D. TX) has been making health care a central issue in his U.S. Senate campaign to unseat U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R. TX):
Asked at a recent town hall what would energize Texans who don't normally vote, O'Rourke had a simple answer: health care.
“The overriding concern throughout Texas, big cities and small towns alike, Republicans and Democrats, is our ability to be well enough to do the things we’re intended to do in our lives,” he said.
Yet while the health care message may resonate with Democrats nationally, polls in Texas tell a different story. Health care may not be enough to tip the balance in favor of Democrats in this deeply conservative state.
Only 7 percent of registered voters polled in June — and 11 percent of Democrats — listed health care as the top issue facing Texas, behind immigration, border security and political corruption, and tied with education, according to the Texas Politics Project of the University of Texas.
“The people who are having the roughest time with the health care system are non-voters,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas project. “I don’t think [health care] would be salient in a way that would lead people to reconsider a vote for a Republican.”
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation/Episcopal Health Foundation survey, for example, found that nearly 70 percent of Hispanics in Texas had trouble affording health care, but the Texas Politics Project found that only 4 percent of Hispanics ranked it as the most important issue facing the state.
Still, the campaign has seen massive fundraising hauls. O’Rourke raised $10.4 million in the second quarter of the year — more than double what Cruz brought in. With four months until Election Day, O’Rourke has a campaign war chest of $14 million, compared with $10 million for Cruz, and he says that most of the money comes from small donors within the state.
And both Cruz and O’Rourke have been emphasizing the importance of the Senate seat in shaping the national health care debate — and the differences between the two candidates couldn’t be more stark.
At a town hall last Friday morning in Hillsboro, just north of Waco, a standing-room crowd of a couple hundred people, most there to hear O'Rourke, packed into folding chairs and leaned against the blue walls of a county courthouse in historic downtown.
While O’Rourke no longer uses phrases like “single-payer” or “Medicare for all,” the crowd cheered when he talked about the need for “universal, guaranteed, high-quality health care for all.”
And unlike Democrats running in other red states who hope to capitalize on the popular parts of Obamacare that kept Congress from repealing the law last year, O’Rourke isn’t shy about saying it doesn’t go far enough in providing universal coverage.
“We all get that what we have now might have been better than what preceded it," he said, citing Obamacare's protections for people with pre-existing conditions and the option for children to stay on a parent’s insurance until age 26. "But it is insufficient as premiums continue to go through the roof."
The message resonated among those who attended the gathering.
“I believe in single payer,” said Sue Talent, a retired state employee, who came with her husband David, a former heavy equipment mechanic. Both said that health care was the biggest issue facing state residents, although they have coverage through Veterans Affairs and the state.
Will Lowrance, who was mayor of Hillsboro from 2000 to 2006, said he hadn’t seen so many people in the town show up for a Democratic candidate in 25 years.
“Usually 30 people would be good,” Lowrance, a registered Republican who normally votes Democratic, said at the coffee shop next door, which was playing Christmas music in July. “I’m encouraged by the turnout.”
Well, this clown keeps helping fuel all the excitement for Beto’s campaign by continuing to push to completely get rid of the Affordable Care Act:
But he’s still prodding his party toward an aggressive strategy to get rid of Obamacare — even as polls show voters in both parties now believe the GOP is responsible for any problems with the law.
“Obamacare continues to be a disaster, it continues to drive up the cost of premiums and make healthcare unaffordable to millions of Texans and millions of Americans,” Cruz told the Star-Telegram in an interview this week.
“We should be pursuing regulatory avenues, we should be pursuing legislative avenues, and I’m glad the state of Texas is pursuing judicial avenues” to get rid of it, he added.
That last option, a Texas-led lawsuit with other GOP-led states, is a particularly alarming to Cruz’s fellow Republicans.
If successful, it could effectively gut the law in its entirety. To get there, it takes aim at one of the law’s most popular provisions, requiring health insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions.
A June survey from the non-partisan Kaiser Family Health found 60 percent of Americans claim to live in households with someone who has a pre-existing medical condition. Majorities of voters in both parties, as well as independent votes, said maintaining that piece of the health law was “very important” to them.
“Everybody I know in the Senate — everybody — is in favor of maintaining coverage for pre-existing conditions,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill.
Regardless, Republicans in Washington are now intertwined with the case’s fate — thanks in large part to Cruz, who single-handedly orchestrated the basis for Texas’s argument last year.
After party leaders proclaimed health care dead on Capitol Hill, Cruz rallied his colleagues to gut Obamacare’s individual mandate though the GOP’s tax bill. It passed last year on a party-line basis.
“That’s something I led the fight to do, back in last fall nobody in Washington thought we had a prayer of getting that done,” Cruz told the audience in Waco. “We went from six or seven senators, to in December, all 52 Republicans standing together and repealing the individual mandate.”
Democrats are now eagerly seizing on that vote to tie Republicans nationwide to Texas’ lawsuit.
“The ban on insurance companies kicking people off the health insurance just because they’re sick, just because of their pre-existing condition, just because of their medical history, is working its way up to the Supreme Court,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “People think that Americans don’t care about the court, well they do care about their right to health care.”
The case alleges that without the individual mandate, Obamacare’s pre-existing coverage provision is invalid — ultimately unraveling the rest of the law as well.
Now, why would Cruz be that stupid to keep pushing this losing strategy? Does he really think that it’s going to save him in Texas? Or does he see the writing on the wall and wants to give everyone a final “fuck you” before getting the boot?
With Democrats pouring money into the Texas Senate race faster than his own donors, Sen. Ted Cruz issued a plea Friday that called the news "very bad" for his re-election bid.
Candidates often employ dire language to shake backers from complacency. But it's no hyperbole to say the one-term Texas Republican is getting a run for his money from El Paso Congressman Beto O'Rourke.
On Wednesday, the Democrat announced an attention-grabbing $10.4 million haul for the three months ending June 30 — more than double Cruz's $4.6 million tally.
"Our opponent emailed his supporters and the news is BAD. VERY BAD," Cruz wrote supporters Friday afternoon. "We MUST close the gap. We're being outraised by almost 3-to-1 and the polls are getting closer. We need to step up."
Both have now raised $23.7 million for their Senate campaign accounts, though O'Rourke did it in 15 months. Cruz took six years —though he also raised funds for a presidential bid and for political action committees in that time.
O'Rourke's war chest now stands at $14 million — $3.6 million more than Cruz's.
Meanwhile, Beto continues to expand his campaign to help generate higher voter turnout:
On Saturday, U.S Representative (D-El Paso) Beto O’Rourke unveiled his San Antonio field office for his 2018 Senate campaign. Aside from the opening, O'Rourke was busy canvassing and sweating across town at an LGBTQIA town hall meeting at Casa de Azul de Andrea, a World Cup watch partyon the West Side, and at Las Nieves, where he sampled a half sandia, half mango and lucas raspa with District Representative Diego Bernal.
The dash around San Antonio occurred on the coattails of the announcement that Beto's funding, free from the influence of corporations or PACs, has doubled that of incumbent Ted Cruz. In a Wednesday announcement, O'Rourke's camp said around 70 percent of his donations are coming from Texas, with an average commitment of $33 dollars and that the total number of donations is in the neighborhood of 10.4 million dollars in the past three months.
At the opening, O'Rourke emphasized his vision for the future of Texas and the crucial role San Antonio has in making that happen, stating the city is a demographic example of what the state will become.