Democrat Beto O’Rourke Gets Mixed Reception at Rural Texas Campaign Stop

O’Rourke bets on small-town voters to defeat Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Beto O’Rourke watched his language at a campaign stop in a rural East Texas town Saturday after dropping the f-bomb on a heckler earlier this week.

O’Rourke was met with a full house and a pocket of protesters at the Reecy Davis Recreation Center in Greenville, Texas. Police estimated the crowd to be about 600, with some 200 forced to wait outside.

His stop in the rural town was part of a seven-week campaign across the Lone Star State to 254 counties. He faces Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in November.

O’Rouke pushed a liberal agenda of expanding health care, championing abortion, legalizing marijuana, and embracing open borders and access to transgender procedures for children.

Mark Lee Dickson, a director with Right to Life East Texas, in front of the Supreme Court building on June 26, 2022. (Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times)

“I’m watching my swearing,” he joked at one point—a reference to an incident at a campaign stop in Mineral Wells on Aug. 10. O’Rourke used profanity when an Abbott supporter laughed as he described AR 15s as weapons of war in reference to the Uvalde, Texas, mass school shooting.

If elected, O’Rouke wants universal background checks and red flag laws, which allow authorities to take guns away from anybody considered a threat to themselves or others on the basis of an anonymous tip. He also wants to raise the legal age to buy a firearm to 21.

Ron Haight drove from the neighboring town of Terrell to hear O’Rouke. He approves of O’Rouke because he’s “for the people” and supports abortion and gay rights.

For him, recent Republican policies of busing illegal immigrants caught in the state to Washington and calling on the Texas National Guard