Congressman Beto O’Rourke has been seemingly everywhere lately. Campaigning across Texas. Blowing up on the internet, with a video defending NFL players’ right to kneel during the National Anthem. Even making a guest appearance on the Ellen Show. But will all this attention translate to votes? O’Rourke has drawn large crowds at town halls across Texas, including in his hometown, El Paso. That city is solidly blue, but it also has low voter turnout. Will O’Rourke’s bid for Senate bring more local voters to the polls?
It’s a sweltering afternoon in El Paso. Beto O’Rourke is back in his hometown, after more than a month on the campaign trail. Hundreds of fans are here to greet him, packed onto an outdoor patio that’s way too small for the crowd.
O’Rourke shouts out his fellow El Pasoans. “I gotta tell you, the intensity, the pride, the fierceness of how we feel about ourselves,” he says, “no longer- as a lifelong El Pasoan, no longer apologizing for who we are, being defensive about what we’re about. Saying that the border is absolutely amazing and should be the example and the model for the rest of the country.”
The excitement here is palpable. But come November, will it translate to a large turnout at the polls?
“The jury is still out on that,” says Richard Pineda, director of the Sam Donaldson Center for Communication Studies at UT El Paso.
El Paso County typically has low voter turnout. In the last midterm election, about 20%of registered voters showed up at the polls. That was lower than the state average, which is 34%.
There are many reasons for this. First, candidates don’t always put in a ton of facetime here. El Paso is geographically far from other major cities. And it’s a solidly blue country in what’s long been a very red state.
“We sit on the outlier of politics in the state,” says Pineda.
Lydia Camarillo is with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. She says demographics also have an impact. El Paso is more than 80% Latino.
“And candidates are not spending money talking and reaching out to Latino voters,” Camarillo says. “Because there’s a premise and a false narrative that Latinos do not vote.”
Camarillo has spent decades working to mobilize Latino voters. She says many of these voters are young and balancing full time jobs and families. They respond when campaigns reach out directly, like through phone calls or canvassing.
“But this takes time and resources,” she says, and many candidates focus their attention elsewhere. So voters might just hear a generic radio ad. And that ad might run well past the deadline to register to vote.
Camarillo says there’s another challenge, when it comes to midterms.
“The competitive elections for El Paso take place in most cases in the primaries,” she says. “So there is very little attention to the general elections.
Take the race to replace Beto O’Rourke in Congress. It’s pretty much understood that whoever wins the Democratic primary will ultimately win that seat; it hasn’t gone to a Republican since 1963. So voters who wanted to pick their next Congressperson turned out for the primary.
But a homegrown candidate, in an extremely high stakes Senate race, could boost voter turnout this November.
“I think that Beto O’Rourke being from El Paso plays a big part in trying to activate voters in El Paso,” says Richard Pineda. “I think that the county is likely to see a surge in voters for this Senate race.”
O’Rourke says El Paso County isn’t big enough to swing an election. But if O’Rourke can mobilize voters in El Paso and other border counties, he could present a real challenge. But Pineda says the question isn’t just whether O’Rourke can turn out Democratic voters.
“Can you swing moderately Republican voters who are familiar with O’Rourke, who are willing to hold back on an ideological vote in this Senate race to vote for the person they might think is better or the person they find to be more likeable?” he asks. “And so in some ways that’s actually the secret sauce for El Paso County. Can you motivate moderate Republicans to jump ship this election?”
Pineda says he thinks Republicans in the borderlands may be more likely to jump ship.
“I do think locally there’s been a backlash to the administration’s stand on immigration and on border control policy,” he says. “So I do think there are moderate conservatives that are part of the business community here that recognize the need to have open trade, the need to have secure but much more open immigration policy. I don’t necessarily know that that’s gonna be in true in other parts of the state.
It remains to be seen just how many voters show up for O’Rourke or at all. But on the ground in El Paso, there’s a push to mobilize voters. On a recent, muggy night, about a dozen people gathered at a local bar for a postcard writing party.
Yasmin Ramirez helped organize the event. “Once the postcards are personalized with messages on why it’s important to vote, they’re gonna mail them out to low turnout voting areas,” she says.
The postcards aren’t pushing a particular candidate - just encouraging civic engagement. For Ramirez, the most important thing is convincing the larger community that voting actually matters.
“I know a lot of people believe voting does nothing,” she says. “But if that was the case then there wouldn’t be issues with gerrymandering or there’d be a national holiday for us to vote. But there always seems to be sort of these obstacles for people to vote. And that in itself should be a message: it is important, it does do something.”
Ramirez hopes this election brings more El Pasoans out to the polls.
