Texas Scorecard by Bryan Mena April 20, 2021
The Texas Democrat has spent 2021 so far block walking in South Texas and advocating for voting access before the Texas Legislature. If that means anything for his political future, he isn't saying.
The placid skies and balmy, springtime heat in South Texas made waiting outdoors tolerable on a recent Saturday this April. Around midday, about two dozen masked volunteers mingled outside the Webb County Democratic Party headquarters, pop music blaring in the background.
Most were waiting in a scattered, socially distanced line to greet Beto O’Rourke, the former U.S. Senate candidate who in 2018 gave Texas Democrats their best shot at unseating a statewide Republican official in decades. Each would get an opportunity to pose for a photo with one of the state’s most prominent Democrats, who was wearing his usual blue button-up shirt, before heading out to another shift of block walking.
It had all the appearances of one of the hundreds of rallies O’Rourke held across the state early in his 2018 campaign for U.S. Senate, or during his ill-fated bid for president soon after. But this time, O’Rourke wasn’t campaigning for anything — at least not explicitly. He told The Texas Tribune he mobilized his supporters to simply understand what issues matter to Laredoans and because Sylvia Bruni, the chair of the Webb County Democratic Party, asked O’Rourke in the aftermath of the 2020 elections to help with voter engagement after Republicans performed better than usual in South Texas.
More:
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/20/beto-orourke-2022-texas/