Democrats hope population growth and Republican infighting in the state’s third-most-populous county will help them turn Tarrant County purple.
Martinez, a 33-year-old marketer for a pediatric home health agency, has never identified as strictly liberal or conservative, she said, and sometimes feels like "a walking contradiction." If there’s a spot for her on the traditional political spectrum, she hasn’t found it. When she voted for Abbott in 2014, Martinez identified with what she saw as the then-attorney general’s Christian family values.
At his campaign stop at the UNT Health Science Center, O’Rourke expressed optimism that 125,000 people who have been added to the county’s voter rolls since he ran in 2018, combined with discontent over the power grid failure during last year’s winter storm, the state’s abortion ban and Abbott’s response to school shootings would help deliver him the county.
Earlier in the year, Democrats looked primed to beat expectations that a president’s party gets pummeled during the midterm elections — bouyed by surprisingly high poll numbers in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights earlier this year. But that lead evaporated amid high inflation and Biden’s persistently low approval ratings.
Sharum plans to vote Republican up and down the ballot, though she fears a "hard landing next year" for the economy even if Republicans meet projections and retake the U.S. House. Democrats, meanwhile, are betting they can peel off enough moderate Republicans disaffected by the party’s rightward shift in the last four years to break their decadeslong exile from statewide office — and perhaps countywide office in Tarrant as well.
Voters in a contentious GOP primary for county judge, the county’s top elected position, passed over Betsy Price — who served as Fort Worth mayor for 10 years and is considered more of a centrist — for Tim O’Hare, the former Farmers Branch mayor who in 2008 ushered in an ordinance forbidding landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants, which a federal court later ruled unconstitutional.