Fact-checking the Texas governor debate between Greg Abbott and Beto O’Rourke
Beto #Beto
WASHINGTON — Gov. Greg Abbott and challenger Beto O’Rourke clashed over a range of topics Friday night in their sole debate, not always with the facts on their side.
Some fact-checks:
Abortion
Abbott depicted O’Rourke as an extremist on abortion.
“He not only supports abortion of a fully developed child to the very last second before birth” but, said Abbott, he opposes “providing medical care for the baby who survives an abortion. He is for unlimited abortion at taxpayer expense.”
O’Rourke insisted “that’s not true.”
The claim about denying medical care for a baby who survives an abortion is based on a no vote O’Rourke cast in 2015 against a GOP-backed bill during his stint in the U.S. House.
For context, the overwhelming majority of abortions, about 93%, are conducted in the first trimester — the first 13 weeks after the start of a woman’s last menstrual cycle. Less than 1% of all abortions take place in the final trimester, almost always in cases of fetal deformities that could not be detected earlier.
Those statistics predate the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in June, overturning Roe vs. Wade and ending constitutional protection for abortion access that had been in place since 1973.
Under Roe, states were authorized to ban abortion only after the point of viability, when the fetus could survive outside the womb. That’s roughly 22 weeks into the pregnancy.
Does O’Rourke support unfettered access to abortion? Abbott’s campaign backs that claim by citing instances when O’Rourke sidestepped the question and emphasized that women should have the power to make decisions about their own bodies.
He gave a more direct answer Friday night when pressed: Roe, he said, is the correct standard for restrictions, meaning that he accepts the viability cutoff.
“That limit was decided in 1973. … I want us to return to that. It was the law of the land for nearly 50 years,” he said.
Migrant buses
Is Abbott refusing to coordinate with New York and other cities where Texas is sending busloads of migrants?
Last week, New York Mayor Eric Adams asserted that the Texas governor’s office has been sending buses filled with migrants without any heads-up or coordination.
“Our team reached out and … communicated with his team and stated, ‘Can you let us know so we can coordinate the effort?’ They refused to let us know, they continued to send the buses,” Adams said during the Texas Tribune Festival. “It’s inhumane, it’s un-American and it’s unethical.”
Abbott aides have refuted that and the governor reiterated the denial Friday night.
“Mayor Adams has never called my office, never talked to anyone about it in my administration,” he said. “What he’s saying is flat-out false.”
Soon after the debate ended, Adams’ press secretary, Fabien Levy, tweeted a screenshot of an email sent Aug. 1 from an Adams aide to an Abbott aide. There’s no mention of migrants or any other topic.
But Levy told The Dallas Morning News by email, “That’s what the call was about. Also, if Governor Abbott is claiming otherwise, I would point out that he said tonight that we have never called or reached out to his office — period — he didn’t say about this issue, even though it was.”
Border security
One remarkable point of agreement: They both said Texas should spend nothing on border security — albeit for entirely different reasons.
“Zero dollars should be going to Operation Lone Star,” Abbott said, declaring his target for border expenditures by the state. “And that’s what it would be if we had a president who was enforcing the immigration laws of the United States.”
“It’s clearly failed. … We’re seeing not fewer but more encounters at our border right now,” O’Rourke said of Operation Lone Star. “When the governor spent 4 billion of our tax dollars on what has turned out to be political theater for his political career, he promises that it will deter people from coming to this country. You’ve only seen more people come.”
All true, from both candidates.
The flow of migrants this year is at record levels, and immigration and border enforcement are federal responsibilities. Point for Abbott.
O’Rourke, however, is also correct. Abbott promised much more bang for the buck out of Operation Lone Star.
Inflation
Hours before the debate, O’Rourke asserted that Texas has endured “inflation the likes of which we’ve never seen,” in particular due to record housing prices “directly connected to his failed leadership.”
Consumer prices in Texas were 9.9% higher in May compared to a year earlier. That’s a huge pinch on family budgets. But if you’re at least 41 years old, this is not the worst you’ve ever seen.
Nationwide, inflation hit 11.7% in early 1975 during the OPEC oil embargo, and 13.6% in June 1981. It remained in double-digits until a full year after Republican Ronald Reagan ousted Democrat Jimmy Carter.
In the debate itself, O’Rourke made a slightly different claim.
Arguing that rising energy bills, property bills and housing are driving inflation, and that Abbott has failed in each area, O’Rourke said that “he’s the largest driver of inflation in the state of Texas right now.”
Federal data show that housing costs nationwide have risen 7.8% in the past year, and the pinch is, in fact, somewhat worse in parts of Texas: 8.2% in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, though the increase is below the national average in Houston.
Is Texas inflation Abbott’s fault?
With some regional variation, inflation trends are national. That’s a big reason Carter didn’t get a second term, and why Abbott’s fellow Republicans pin rising prices on President Joe Biden in their push to retake Congress in the midterms.
“He just makes this stuff up,” Abbott said.
Grid
The rivals traded punches over the Texas power grid, whose failure left millions without heat during a winter storm in early 2021, and cost at least 240 lives.
O’Rourke’s claim: “The grid is still not fixed. … We’re no better prepared going into this winter than we were in February 2021.”
Abbott’s claim: “The grid is more resilient and reliable than it’s ever been.”
They could both be right.
Four months after the blackout, Abbott signed two laws intended to improve power reliability. One requires weatherization of power generators and transmission lines. The other changes the governance of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, putting more clout in the hands of political appointees.
Abbott boasted expansion of natural gas generation capacity, to address demand surges.
All of which means the grid is in better shape than before the massive blackouts. That doesn’t mean it’s fixed, or resilient enough to withstand everything a Texas winter can throw at it.
Federal energy regulators, and a host of independent experts, say the outages could have been averted if Texas connected its grid to the rest of the country’s so it could draw power in an emergency. O’Rourke would end the grid’s isolation. That would mean more federal regulation, which Abbott and other Republicans resist.
The grid hasn’t failed in a massive way since February 2021 but there have been problems, as O’Rourke noted in the debate: “Just ask Toyota. They stopped their third shift in San Antonio because it was drawing too much power. We had 33 conservation notices this summer.”
Rape kits backlog
After O’Rourke needled the governor for effectively giving rapists more rights than their victims, Abbott shot back with a patently false statement: “I signed a law that eliminated the rape kit test backlog at the Texas Department of Public Safety.”
(O’Rourke was arguing that even a rapist could win a $10,000 judgment under Texas’ abortion bounty law, by suing relatives who help his victim terminate her pregnancy.)
In September 2019, Abbott signed the Lavinia Masters Act, named for a woman whose rape kit — the hair, semen, blood, clothing and other evidence collected after an attack in hopes of finding a DNA match to a suspect — sat untested for more than two decades. The law provided $50 million to speed testing with more staff and equipment.
In Congress, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has led the effort to address the issue. Last week, he announced $2 million in Justice Department grants for North Texas agencies.
In 2011, the backlog of untested kits for which DPS was responsible was nearly 20,000. By early last year, that was down to 6,100. The latest reported figure is about half that.
It’s progress, to be sure. But the backlog has not been eliminated.
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