Democrat Beto O’Rourke perks up Hometown Coffee & Tea
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke pledged to improve Texans’ wages, health care and schools to a standing-room-only crowd at Hometown Coffee and Tea during his barnstorming campaign swing through North Texas March 18.
O’Rourke, 49, will take on Republican Gov. Gregg Abbott in the Nov. 8 general election. The El Paso native represented Texas’ 16th Congressional District from 2013 to 2019 and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
O’Rourke stopped in Weatherford, Olney, Vernon and Childress for town hall-style appearances, in which he pledged, if elected, to raise the state’s $7.25 minimum wage, to expand access to Medic-aid for low-income Texans and to improve public school education.
“Four out of 10 working Texans do not make a living wage. That means the one job they have does not pay for the rent or the mortgage or to put food on the table, so they work a second job and a third job,” O’Rourke said. “We want to make sure that the jobs that we create really pay. We need to start by raising that minimum wage.”
As governor, O’Rourke pledged to reverse Abbott’s decision to reject $10 billion in federal dollars to expand Medicaid to an additional 1 million low-income Texans. “We’d keep more of our rural health care clinics and hospitals open,” he said. “If we do this, we can lower your property tax bill.”
He advocated giving Texans better access to college or trade schools so that “cost is not a barrier to getting an education.”
The state’s budget should also include higher pay for teachers, who are underpaid by $13,000 a year compared to the nation’s average teacher’s salary, O’Rourke said. Standardized testing should be used as “a diagnostic tool” to create “world-class schools” rather than a way to penalize struggling schools, he said.
O’Rourke, traveling with his wife Amy and son Henry, then took questions from a crowd of about 65 people who gathered in the coffee shop’s rear dining room.
The attendees asked about a range of issues, from O’Rourke’s position on banning assault rifles, voting rights, and the failure of the state’s power grid during the 2021 winter storms.
The candidate, who spoke of the 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart store in his district, reiterated his pledge to ban military-style assault weapons. He said he would roll back Abbott’s voter registration laws, saying the stricter rules prevented a 95-yearold World War II veteran in Houston from voting by mail.
“When I’m governor, we’re going to make sure that every eligible Texan is able to vote, let the chips fall where they may,” O’Rourke said.
He also advocated winterizing the state’s power grid “at the wellhead” and connecting it to the nation’s power grid.
In an interview after the event, The Enterprise asked O’Rourke for ideas to help rural towns like Olney afford needed upgrades to aging infrastructure, including the 100-yearold water plant and crumbling roads.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity right now when it comes to infrastructure,” O’Rourke told The Enterprise. “Congress and the president on a bipartisan basis have made billions of dollars available to the state of Texas for roads and highways and bridges, but also for water systems, and we have a chance in a state that has more troubled water systems than any other state to make these investments that have been deferred for decades, in some cases, and seem to be concentrated very often in rural communities.”