O’Rourke and Emhoff elevate one other million for Harris marketing campaign, tout voter registration momentum

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Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, continued his swing by Texas on Tuesday accompanied by former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, who teamed up with the second gentleman to lift at the very least $1 million at an Austin fundraiser earlier than grabbing a late lunch at Texas’ most beloved fast-food chain, Whataburger.

It was a callback of kinds to the 2020 presidential marketing campaign, when O’Rourke endorsed his one-time rival, Joe Biden, at a Dallas rally and promised to deal with him to a “world-class meal” later that night time — Whataburger, it turned out.

Greater than 4 years later, at a Whataburger joint south of downtown Austin, O’Rourke — after ordering a double meat burger with jalapeños and no tomatoes — advised reporters he was optimistic in regards to the power sparked by Harris’ ascent to the highest of the ticket, particularly amongst younger voters.

Sidelined from the poll himself after three straight losses for the Senate, presidency and governorship, O’Rourke has centered his efforts this cycle on registering Texans to vote by his political group, Powered by Individuals. He has spent the final couple months touring faculty campuses and selling voter registration among the many legions of overwhelmingly liberal college students.

“They’re calling it the Kamala effect. Young people are getting registered to vote in record numbers,” O’Rourke mentioned, citing figures from TargetSmart, a Democratic polling and knowledge agency, that discovered newly registered voters in Texas have leaned extra Democratic this cycle than in latest elections.

O’Rourke particularly introduced up a latest discovering from TargetSmart’s senior adviser, Tom Bonier, who famous that within the week after Biden dropped his reelection bid in July — and successfully handed the reins to Harris — newly registered voters in Texas leaned Democratic by a 10-point margin. That marked a drastic change from the identical weeklong interval in 2020, when Republicans had a 16-point edge amongst newly registered voters in Texas, in line with TargetSmart’s mannequin. (Texans don’t join with a political social gathering after they register to vote, so the agency makes use of a fancy mannequin that elements in issues like demographic and client knowledge to find out the probably partisan make-up.)

The development has largely continued by the primary a number of weeks of Harris’ marketing campaign: TargetSmart’s mannequin has discovered that Democrats have a roughly 11-point benefit among the many greater than 200,000 Texans who’ve registered to vote since Biden exited the race. The bloc of newly registered voters is youthful and features a bigger share of girls and non-white voters than in 2020, in line with Bonier.

Emhoff, making his first Texas go to since his spouse turned the Democratic presidential nominee, stopped in San Antonio on Monday to rally with down-ballot Democrats and maintain a fundraiser that took in additional than $1 million for the Harris marketing campaign. Emhoff and O’Rourke headlined one other donor occasion in Austin simply earlier than their Whataburger journey, which Emhoff mentioned was “another million-plus-dollar fundraiser.” The second gentleman was set to construct on his $2 million Texas haul Tuesday night, when he and O’Rourke had been scheduled to carry one other fundraiser in Houston.

Briefly remarks after he ordered his Whataburger meal — additionally a double meat burger, no pickles — Emhoff continued to criticize Republican measures that he had characterised at Monday’s rally as “attacking the right to vote.”

“People literally died for this,” Emhoff mentioned of the nation’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 go to comes after a collection of statewide polls have urged that Texas may very well be in play for Harris and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, the Democratic Senate nominee who’s difficult O’Rourke’s one-time GOP foe, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. The wide-ranging ballot outcomes have usually proven Allred trailing Cruz by just a few share factors and Harris working at the very least a number of factors behind Trump.

Talking on the Democratic Nationwide Conference final month, Harris marketing campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon urged that the marketing campaign doesn’t intend to make a lot of a play for Texas. She famous the excessive price of promoting within the state and urged it might divert sources from different extra intently 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 mentioned.