Delegates to the state party convention last month reelected the chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, after a competitive race in which the party’s neglect of rural Texas was hotly debated. Texas Democrats are acutely aware they need to improve their margins in rural Texas if they want to have a better chance at winning statewide. Asked about that in the context of the current race, O’Rourke spokesperson Chris Evans provided a statement reiterating that O’Rourke “will put an end to Greg Abbott’s attacks on public education” and noted his three kids attend public schools in El Paso. O’Rourke has been outspoken about vouchers before, including during his 2020 presidential campaign, when his statements directed attention to his wife, Amy O’Rourke, who founded a charter school and continues to advocate for them. But it is the first known paid media the campaign has done beyond its online advertising, and it marks a deliberate choice by O’Rourke’s campaign to appeal to rural voters who long have been key to blocking a Democratic breakthrough statewide. O’Rourke’s campaign said it has spent “around $40,000” on the newspaper ads, a drop in the bucket compared with the $23.9 million cash on hand it had at the end of June - let alone Abbott’s $45.7 million in reserves. They are customized to each market, telling readers of the Abilene Reporter-News, for example, that they should not “let Greg Abbott privatize public education in Abilene.” They have appeared in newspapers with decisively rural readerships, like the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Amarillo Globe and Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel. His campaign has been running the newspaper ads since the end of the school year, around high school graduations. O’Rourke went to a public school, El Paso High School, for two years before attending a private, all-male boarding school in Virginia. “The real question is why is O’Rourke so afraid of parental involvement with their children’s education? Shouldn’t families across Texas have the same opportunities that Beto’s parents had to send their kids to the school of their choice?” “The Governor strongly believes parents deserve more involvement in their children’s education,” Abbott spokesperson Mark Miner said in an email. It is a quote that O’Rourke’s campaign is repeating in a digital ad that argues Abbott has “left behind” rural Texas.Ībbott’s campaign said O’Rourke’s newspaper ads are a “complete lie,” accusing O’Rourke of siding with “union bosses” over parents. “For our rural communities, where there’s only one school district and only one option of public school, he wants to defund that through vouchers, take your tax dollars out of your classroom and send it to a private school in Dallas or Austin or somewhere else at your expense,” O’Rourke told a rural audience recently. O’Rourke is leaning into the bipartisan salience of the issue. In the Legislature, vouchers have long encountered resistance from Democrats and rural Republicans whose public schools are the lifeblood of their communities. Opponents of vouchers say they harm public school systems by draining their funding.
“School choice” tends to refer to the broad concept of giving parents the option to send their kids to schools beyond their local public school, while vouchers would allow parents to use state tax dollars to subsidize tuition for those other options, including private schools. O’Rourke’s campaign is also running newspaper ads in at least 17 markets, mostly rural, that urge voters to “reject Greg Abbott’s radical plan to defund” public schools.Ībbott, meanwhile, is not shying away from the controversy he ignited when he said in May that he supports giving parents “the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school or private school with state funding following the student.” He met privately last week with Corey DeAngelis, an aggressive national school choice activist who had previously criticized Abbott as insufficiently supportive of the cause. His Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is hammering Abbott over the issue on the campaign trail, especially seeking an advantage in rural Texas, where Democrats badly know they need to do better and where vouchers split Republicans. Processing… BY PATRICK SVITEK/Texas TribuneĪ battle over school vouchers is mounting in the race to be Texas governor, set into motion after Republican incumbent Greg Abbott offered his clearest support yet for the idea in May.
0 kommentar(er)
