UVALDE, Texas, USA (AP) – A few hours after voting began in Texas, Kimberly Rubio voted in the same building in the city of Uvalde where she waited in May to find that her daughter, Lexi, was one of 19 alumni Fourth-graders were shot dead at Robb Elementary School.
“If our children aren’t safe, neither is your job,” Rubio said as he walked out of his polling station wearing a “I voted” sticker. Nearby, another woman waved a Gadsden flag with the slogan “Don’t step on me”.
The deadliest shooting in Texas history has cast a long shadow over the midterm elections. It prompted Republican Governor Greg Abbott to step up his campaign against Democrat Beto O’Rourke and fueled a wave of TV commercials. On Thursday, a Republican congressman joined the call for the Texas state police chief to resign, a reflection of the anger that persists five months after the massacre.
But with over 2 million votes already cast in Texas, the Uvalde families who have been most critical since the May 24 attack face an uphill struggle to achieve bigger changes on election day, including a change of governor.
Abbott, who turned down calls to tighten Texas gun laws in the wake of the shooting, has never fallen behind in the polls. He is also taking advantage of the headwinds Democrats face nationwide, which risk losing control of the House of Representatives, which could derail the chances of tightening federal gun control laws in the coming years.
The Democrats had hoped that the outrage generated in Texas by the latest in a grim series of mass shootings would mobilize voters to go to the polls. As of Thursday, voter turnout was below 2018 levels in the state’s largest counties, which also have the highest concentration of Democratic votes. There is still another week of early voting to go.
“We are still very much in favor of the Second Amendment” of the Constitution, said Matt Langston, a Republican political strategist from Texas, where many residents proudly proclaim their constitutional right to bear arms.
School safety remains an important issue for voters, he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily translate to, ‘We will intensify gun restrictions.’ It sounds more like “We have to protect the place where we send our children.” It’s kind of a fuzzy answer, “Langston said.
Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, whose South Texas borough includes Uvalde, this week became the first prominent GOP figure to call for the resignation of the state police chief over hesitant police response and changing statements from authorities.
The families of the victims continued to pressure Colonel Steve McCraw, head of the State Department of Public Security, who said Thursday that his police department “has not failed” Uvalde. Two officers have been fired, others are under investigation, and the town’s school superintendent suddenly announced his retirement this month.
But even a few blocks from Robb Elementary School, where a huge supply of wooden crosses and stuffed animals remain outside the closed campus, we’re reminded that the shooting isn’t the biggest concern for many voters.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with my vote,” said Dolly Schultz, 52, a Navy veteran and president of the local GOP constituency. “There have been a lot of failures, with the police and all. But most of these people are not running for public office, so I don’t think that will have a real impact on my vote. “
President Joe Biden’s most recent arguments ahead of the November 8 elections focus on economic issues, between galloping inflation and fears of a recession. A poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in June found that about 30 percent of Americans called gun politics one of the top issues facing the country.
In 2018, Florida lawmakers enacted new gun restrictions just three weeks after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. Around the same time, Texas Republicans – who are poised to maintain a large majority in the state legislature – went the other way, expanding access to guns after the mass shootings at Santa Fe High School in suburban Houston, and an El Paso Walmart.
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was one of 17 people killed in the Florida shooting, said his advice to Uvalde’s parents is not to feel frustrated or discouraged.
Gun control opponents “bring things back, make progress more difficult,” Guttenberg said. “But the voters can choose.”
Among the places where you can vote early in Uvalde is the civic center where parents were asked to wait until the day of the shooting on May 24. On Monday in the parking lot, Javier Cazares set up a blue awning and sat behind a table with three piles of election brochures on the first day of early voting, in which more than 700 votes were cast in the county.
His daughter Jackyln, 9, was killed in the shooting. You are now running as an unregistered candidate for the Uvalde County Commissioner. “Some people listen to us, others prefer to turn a blind eye. But we won’t stop doing it, “Cazares said.
When the parents of other children killed in the shooting came to vote together, they each held pro-Cazares placards as they examined a sample of ballot papers to learn how voting for unregistered candidates works.
“We’ve had people fighting for the past 15 years, from Columbine to Virginia Tech, there are a lot of people who are still fighting,” Cazares said. “It will be me from here on out.”
