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Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, continued his swing through Texas on Tuesday accompanied by former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, who teamed up with the second gentleman to raise at least $1 million at an Austin fundraiser before grabbing a late lunch at Texas’ most beloved fast-food chain, Whataburger.
It was a callback of sorts to the 2020 presidential campaign, when O’Rourke endorsed his one-time rival, Joe Biden, at a Dallas rally and promised to treat him to a “world-class meal” later that night — Whataburger, it turned out.
More than four years later, at a Whataburger joint south of downtown Austin, O’Rourke — after ordering a double meat burger with jalapeños and no tomatoes — told reporters he was optimistic about the energy sparked by Harris’ ascent to the top of the ticket, especially among young voters.
Sidelined from the ballot himself after three straight losses for the Senate, presidency and governorship, O’Rourke has focused his efforts this cycle on registering Texans to vote through his political group, Powered by People. He has spent the last couple months touring college campuses and promoting voter registration among the legions of overwhelmingly liberal students.
“They’re calling it the Kamala effect. Young people are getting registered to vote in record numbers,” O’Rourke said, citing figures from TargetSmart, a Democratic polling and data firm, that found newly registered voters in Texas have leaned more Democratic this cycle than in recent elections.
O’Rourke specifically brought up a recent finding from TargetSmart’s senior adviser, Tom Bonier, who noted that in the week after Biden dropped his reelection bid in July — and effectively handed the reins to Harris — newly registered voters in Texas leaned Democratic by a 10-point margin. That marked a drastic change from the same weeklong period in 2020, when Republicans had a 16-point edge among newly registered voters in Texas, according to TargetSmart’s model. (Texans don’t sign up with a political party when they register to vote, so the firm uses a complex model that factors in things like demographic and consumer data to determine the likely partisan makeup.)
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, right, and former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke visit a Whataburger after a fundraising event Tuesday in Austin.
Credit:
Jasper Scherer/The Texas Tribune
The trend has largely continued through the first several weeks of Harris’ campaign: TargetSmart’s model has found that Democrats have a roughly 11-point advantage among the more than 200,000 Texans who have registered to vote since Biden exited the race. The bloc of newly registered voters is younger and includes a larger share of women and non-white voters than in 2020, according to Bonier.
Emhoff, making his first Texas visit since his wife became the Democratic presidential nominee, stopped in San Antonio on Monday to rally with down-ballot Democrats and hold a fundraiser that took in more than $1 million for the Harris campaign. Emhoff and O’Rourke headlined another donor event in Austin just before their Whataburger trip, which Emhoff said was “another million-plus-dollar fundraiser.” The second gentleman was set to build on his $2 million Texas haul Tuesday evening, when he and O’Rourke were scheduled to hold another fundraiser in Houston.
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In brief remarks after he ordered his Whataburger meal — also a double meat burger, no pickles — Emhoff continued to criticize Republican measures that he had characterized at Monday’s rally as “attacking the right to vote.”
“People literally died for this,” Emhoff said of the country’s voting rights. “Don’t let anyone prevent you from registering and from voting. Of course we want you to vote for Kamala and [vice presidential nominee] Tim [Walz], but the important thing is just make sure you exercise your rights, your freedoms.”
Emhoff’s visit comes after a series of statewide polls have suggested that Texas could be in play for Harris and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, the Democratic Senate nominee who is challenging O’Rourke’s one-time GOP foe, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. The wide-ranging poll results have generally shown Allred trailing Cruz by a few percentage points and Harris running at least several points behind Trump.
Speaking at the Democratic National Convention last month, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon suggested that the campaign does not intend to make much of a play for Texas. She noted the high cost of advertising in the state and suggested it would divert resources from other more closely contested states.
“At the end of the day, our responsibility as a presidential campaign is to ensure we get to 270 [electoral votes],” O’Malley Dillon said.