Elections

O’Rouke Again Delights Supporters In Response To Abbott Hecklers

Beto O’Rourke made national news last week with an expletive-laden retort to an Abbott supporter that went viral on social media. On Thursday, O’Rourke again exhilarated a crowd of supporters in deep-red Fredericksburg by responding to a gaggle of hecklers with, “Lest we be annoyed or judge these Abbott people, let’s have a little sympathy, their candidate never shows up to talk to them.”

While this quip didn’t contain the same galvanizing F-bomb as last week’s event, the rather sizable crowd of O’Rourke supporters still erupted in gleeful cheers at the gubernatorial candidate’s brush-off.

O’Rourke is trying to capitalize on a 49-day tour of Texas towns, with an ambitious 70 public events planned in more than 65 counties that will cover about 5,600 hundred miles statewide. The tour comes amid polling that shows a tighter race with incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott than most expected.

“It’s all going to be uphill, we’re going against the odds, and 32 years since Texas elected a Democrat to be governor,” said O’Rourke at a rally in El Paso that kicked off the 49-day tour.

O’Rourke drew an exultant crowd last Saturday afternoon in Frisco, a once reliably red city he says he can turn blue, with about 2,500 attendees gathered to hear the candidate speak in the town-hall style event.

Gov. Abbott hasn’t held as many campaign events with average Texans, preferring to focus on fundraising events over retail politicking.

Nick Anderson

Writer, editor, photographer and editorial cartoonist Nick Anderson has joined the Reform Austin newsroom, where he will employ the artistic skill and political insights that earned a Pulitzer Prize to drive coverage of Texas government. As managing editor, Anderson is responsible for guiding Reform Austin’s efforts to give readers the unfiltered facts they need to hold Texas leaders accountable. Anderson’s original cartoons will be a regular feature on RA News. “Reform Austin readers understand the consequences of electing politicians who use ideological agendas to divide us, when they should be doing the hard work necessary to make our state government work for everyone,” Anderson said. “As a veteran journalist, I’m excited about Reform Austin’s potential to re-focus conversations on the issues that matter to common-sense Texans – like protecting our neighborhoods from increasingly common disasters, healthcare, just to name a few.” Anderson worked for the Houston Chronicle, the largest newspaper in Texas, from 2006 until 2017. In addition to the Pulitzer, Anderson earned the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award. He’s also a two-time winner of Columbia College’s Fischetti Award, and the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Award. Anderson’s cartoons have been published in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune and other papers. In 2005, Anderson won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning while working for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. The judges complimented his “unusual graphic style that produced extraordinarily thoughtful and powerful messages.”