As a candidate for Texas governor, the Democrat was considered a long shot. But the state’s new—and extreme—restrictions have galvanized his campaign.

Last year, the Texas legislature passed a law to ban nearly all abortions in the state if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The Court did, and, on August 25th, Texas’s law went into effect: people who are convicted of performing an abortion in the state now face a sentence of up to life in prison, and a fine of at least a hundred thousand dollars. That morning, Beto O’Rourke, who is running for governor, stopped by Houston Women’s Reproductive Services, an abortion clinic that is no longer providing abortions, where he decried what he called “the most extreme law in the country.”

Even before the trigger law went into effect, Texas’s punitive abortion policies were generating uncertainty and fear—and political opportunities for Democrats. O’Rourke appeared alongside Elizabeth Weller, one of a number of Texas women carrying nonviable fetuses who have been forced to continue their pregnancies despite physical and emotional risks. In May, during Weller’s eighteenth week of pregnancy, her water broke. Doctors determined that her amniotic sac had ruptured; the fetus would not survive outside the womb. After consulting with her physician, Weller and her husband decided to have the pregnancy terminated, but, because of uncertainty about the legal circumstances in Texas, the hospital refused to perform the procedure unless she developed certain severe symptoms, she said. “The administration of the hospital told me that I was not sick enough at the time that this happened to me,” she said. “And they sent me home to wait for either my baby to die or for me to incur an infection.” After several days, as Weller’s symptoms worsened, an ethics board finally determined that she could undergo the procedure .

A few months ago, Governor Greg Abbott had a double-digit lead over O’Rourke, but during the summer that gap shrank significantly. The new law and the shooting in Uvalde have kept Texas’s policies on abortion and guns in the news. “That’s not optimal for the Governor,” James Henson, of the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project, said. “That’s not the election environment they were looking for.” Fifty-nine per cent of Texans believe that the state is on the wrong track, according to a survey by the Texas Politics Project, the highest number since the poll started, in 2009. “There’s a lot of discontent out there,” Henson said. “The stock Republican campaign of the last decade, decade and a half, has been talking about Texas prosperity. That doesn’t land quite as well when the mood is so sour.”

O’Rourke ran for Senate in 2018, against Ted Cruz, and narrowly lost. He largely declined to make negative comments about Cruz until the final weeks of that campaign, but this time he has pointedly blamed Texas’s woes on Abbott. The O’Rourke campaign’s first two TV ads, released in late August, condemn the trigger law in manifestly Texan terms. “This is a free country,” a man, identified in the ad as a lifelong Republican, says. “We need a governor who gets that.” The recent vote on a ballot measure in Kansas, where voters overwhelmingly chose to keep the right to abortion in the state constitution, gave new hope that the issue could be a mobilizing factor, even in states that skew conservative. “I watch the polls. It’s made a difference,” Laran Vondo, an attendee at an O’Rourke rally in Fort Bend County on a late-August afternoon, told me. “I believe in my heart that Roe v. Wade—they gave us a gift when they overturned that.”

If O’Rourke, or any Democrat vying for statewide office, is to win, persuading suburban voters will be essential. Fort Bend County, a sprawl of developments southwest of Houston, illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of banking on the suburbs. The once rural area voted reliably Republican for half a century until, boosted by Houston’s supercharged growth, it more than doubled in population between 2000 and 2020, becoming one of the more diverse counties in the nation. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the first Democratic Presidential candidate to win Fort Bend since Lyndon Johnson. Two years later, O’Rourke doubled her margin, winning the county by about twelve points.

O’Rourke outperformed expectations in the suburbs, and his close loss to Cruz seemed to portend the long-awaited purpling of Texas, where no Democrat has been elected to statewide office since 1994. In 2020, Democrats made a splashy effort to win control of the Texas House, targeting twenty-two seats they considered vulnerable. One was in District 28, in Fort Bend, where a moderate Republican had just resigned, triggering a special election. Democrats spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the off-season campaign. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren endorsed the Democratic candidate, Eliz Markowitz, and O’Rourke and Michael Bloomberg block-walked on her behalf. But Markowitz lost the special election by sixteen points and didn’t do much better in the regular election a few months later. Democrats needed to pick up nine seats to flip the House; they didn’t win a single new one. “Why did we not do better? I think Democrats were frankly outworked by Republicans,” O’Rourke told me, last week. “Democrats, in the middle of a pandemic, were literally phoning it in. And the Trump campaign, and Republicans statewide, were really hungry. That’s why what you see from us in 2022 is making sure that we go everywhere, earn every vote, write nobody off, and take nobody for granted.”

Even as Texas suburbs trend more competitive, they’ve become the sites of the state’s most vicious culture wars. Ultraconservative groups have successfully taken over ostensibly nonpartisan school boards in the North Texas suburbs and have said that they hope to expand elsewhere in the state. The big news in Fort Bend County the week I visited was about a mother in the city of Katy who’d filed a criminal complaint, citing a book in a high-school library that she considered “harmful.” (The book, “Flamer,” by Mike Curato, is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a closeted teen-ager at Boy Scout camp; it won a Lambda Literary Award in 2021.)

But Texas Republicans’ pandering to their radical fringe has offered O’Rourke an opportunity to position himself as the reasonable alternative, and the abortion law provides him with a particularly strong case. Eighty per cent of Texans, including more than seventy per cent of Republicans, support access to abortion for victims of rape and incest—for whom the law makes no allowance—according to the Texas Politics Project’s polling. O’Rourke is making an overt play for these voters, releasing a series of social-media posts featuring former Republican voters who have switched allegiance. “I’ve always been a bit more conservative-leaning, but I find his passion intriguing,” a middle-aged woman in a floral blouse told me, at an O’Rourke event in a San Antonio bookstore. When I asked her about the abortion law, she sighed. “That’s a hard one. For me to lean toward the middle on that is . . . ” she said, widening her eyes theatrically. “But I’ve come to see there are gray areas.”

In his campaign appearances, O’Rourke is emphasizing another area in which some of his views align with the majority of Texans’: gun restrictions. During its 2021 session, the legislature removed many limits on carrying firearms in public. In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, perpetrated by a young man who bought two AR-style rifles days after his eighteenth birthday, O’Rourke has been pushing to raise the minimum age for buying such weapons to twenty-one. The idea is broadly popular in Texas, even with the notably conservative mayor of Uvalde, who is no fan of O’Rourke. Families of Uvalde victims, as well as the Uvalde city council and the school board, have asked Abbott to call a special session to enact the policy; so far, he has declined to. (O’Rourke is also advocating red-flag laws and universal background checks, which are likewise supported by a majority of Texans.)

Republicans have done their best to paint O’Rourke as a gun-seizing radical. But not everyone is buying it. “I’m anti-government, and she’s more left,” Tyrel Dunaway told me at the event in Fort Bend, gesturing at his girlfriend, who was wearing a pink Beto 2022 shirt. “She gets mad at me for going around the house saying, ‘Taxation is theft!’ But I agree with most of his policies.” Dunaway, a hunter and a fan of sport-shooting, said that he found O’Rourke’s views on guns “very sensible”: “I have kids in school. After Uvalde, for two days I couldn’t sleep, just thinking that we could’ve done something, but we didn’t.”

To win, O’Rourke will have to overcome the obstacle of negative partisanship, which is strong in Texas—and particularly so when it comes to him. But his opponent faces similar challenges; Abbott’s disapproval rating is higher than Ted Cruz’s was in the months before O’Rourke lost to him. “It’s one thing for a Republican to not agree with the abortion law, but it’s another thing entirely to vote for Beto O’Rourke,” Henson said. “But there’s a lot more uncertainty about that now than there was six months ago.”

Outside the venue where the Fort Bend rally had happened, a group of about ten protesters held signs with slogans that included “Defund the Media” and “Unborn Lives Matter.” The head of the Fort Bend County Young Republicans, a freckled woman with a delicate gold necklace, told me that her group was there to protest O’Rourke, but had also recently protested on behalf of the unborn, for instance, at a Planned Parenthood in Fort Bend County. With abortion essentially banned in Texas, some Republicans are considering even more radical action. The state has already got creative with its anti-abortion legislation, most notably via S.B. 8, which allows private citizens to file civil suits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion in the state, with a minimum award of ten thousand dollars. The Texas Freedom Caucus, a group of the most conservative state legislators, has threatened to propose a number of additional measures: making it a felony to pay for abortions or abortion-related expenses in another state; criminalizing employers who cover abortion in their health plans. One legislator intends to introduce a bill that would allow district attorneys to prosecute across jurisdictions in abortion cases, after some Texas D.A.s said that they wouldn’t pursue charges against people seeking abortions.

Inside the venue, O’Rourke painted his candidacy in historical terms, invoking the Voting Rights Act, Appomattox, Selma. Fifty years ago, he noted, women in Texas didn’t have the right to an abortion, either. “No one rode to our rescue or saved the day,” he said, pointing out that it was a Dallas woman, known as Jane Roe, and her two Texan lawyers, who took Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court. “And I bet you it’s going to be Texas women today who win it back.”