Beto O’Rourke said former Vice President Joe Biden is likely to win Texas in this year’s presidential contest.
The former Democratic congressman, who briefly ran for the party’s presidential nomination this cycle, told Yahoo News he thinks victory in the red state is easily within reach for Biden.
“I think Texas is Biden’s to lose,” he said.
O’Rourke lost the state by 2.6 percentage points in 2018 during his bid for the U.S. Senate, making it the closest Senate race in the state in 40 years. He argued that the slim margin made it clear that a Biden win for the state is within the realm of possibility.
In Texas polling, the gap between Biden and President Trump has been steadily narrowing. Now, they’re neck and neck, with Biden getting a slight edge on Trump. In Fox News’s latest Texas poll, Biden leads the president by 1 percentage point. In a poll taken at the same time in the 2016 election cycle, Trump was polling ahead of Hillary Clinton by 8 points. Trump isn’t doing well in national polling either. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average puts Biden almost 10 percentage points ahead of the president.
[Read more: Biden leads Trump in Texas and Georgia: Fox News poll]
The state has undergone significant demographic change in the past few years as new residents, particularly Californians, move to the state. Democrats hope that these new Texans will help the state turn blue in November. Powered by People, O’Rourke’s PAC focused on Texas elections, boasts having thousands within its volunteer network. O’Rourke said the group has made over 350,000 calls to new Texas residents who are Democrats but aren’t yet registered to vote in the state.
“Now, we’re in a presidential cycle, which tends to boost Democratic turnout,” he said. “We already got so close in 2018. You have just a historic mismanagement of the pandemic and the economic contraction and the record number of jobless claims on top of all of the racism, the hatred and the vitriol from the president, and then in Texas we have some of the most uncontrolled spread of COVID-19.”
Margins between the two candidates are getting slimmer, but a lot can change between now and November. No Democratic candidate for president has won the state since 1976.
