Uvalde, Texas (AP) — Just hours after polls opened in Texas, Kimberly Rubio voted at the same Uvalde city building she waited for in May when her daughter Lexie voted for Rob. I learned that I was one of 19 fourth graders who were fatally shot. primary school.
“If our children aren’t safe, so is your job,” Rubio said as he left the polling place holding an “I voted” sticker. Na” waved.
The worst classroom shooting in Texas history has cast a long shadow over the midterm elections, stepped up Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign against Democrat Beto O’Rourke and sparked a TV advertising blitz. On Thursday, Republican congressmen joined calls for the Texas police chief to resign.
But with more than one million votes already cast in Texas, Uvalde’s family, who have been the most outspoken since the May 24th attacks, are voicing their support for big changes on Election Day, including a change of governor. Facing uphill.
Abbott, who has turned down calls for tighter gun control in Texas since the shooting, has never lost a single poll. He also said that over the next two years, the national campaign facing Democrats, who are in danger of losing control of the House of Representatives, could end the chances of stricter gun laws being enacted at the federal level. I’m catching headwinds.
Democrats hope Texas outrage over a string of tragic shootings will rouse voters to the polls. It was well below the county’s 2018 level.
“We are still very much Second Amendment friendly,” said Matt Langston, a Republican political strategist in Texas whose constitutional right many proudly claim to own guns. said.
School safety remains an issue for voters, he said. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Let’s toughen up gun control.’ It’s more like ‘We have to protect where we let our kids go.’ It’s a subtle reaction,” Langston said.
Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez, who belongs to the South Texas district that includes Uvalde, was the first major Republican to call for the resignation of the state police chief this week over law enforcement’s hesitant response and a change in explanations from officials. became.
The victim’s family has continued to press the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Col. was announced.
But even just a few blocks from Robb Elementary School, where wooden crosses and stuffed animal memorials remain in disarray outside the shuttered campus, shootings aren’t the primary concern for many voters. It reminds me of
“I don’t think it has anything to do with my vote,” said Dolly Schultz, 52, a Navy veteran and chairman of the local Republican precinct. “There have been a lot of failures in law enforcement and everywhere else. .”
President Joe Biden’s closing arguments for the Nov. 8 election focus on economic issues amid raging inflation and fears of a recession. A poll conducted in June by the Associated Press and NORC’s Center for Public Relations and Research found that about 30% of Americans named gun policy as one of the major issues facing the country. .
In 2018, just three weeks after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Florida legislature enacted new gun laws. In the same time frame, Republicans in Texas are poised to maintain a supermajority in the state legislature after Election Day, but go in the opposite direction, following the Houston suburb of Santa Fe High School and the El Paso shootings. Later, we expanded access to guns. Walmart.
Fred Guttenberg (whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was one of 17 people killed in the Florida shooting) advised Uvalde’s parents not to get frustrated or discouraged. said to
“They slow things down and make it harder to move forward, but we voters have to make a choice,” Mr. Guttenberg said of the opposition.
Among Uvalde’s early voting stations is a civic center where parents were asked to stand by on the day of the May 24 shooting. In the parking lot on Monday, Javier Cazares set up a blue canopy and on the first day of early voting, when more than 700 votes were cast in his county, campaign brochures were tidied up in three stacks. We were seated behind a table with
His daughter Jackiene, 9, died in the shooting. Currently, he is running as a writing candidate for Commissioner of Uvalde County. “Some people listen to us, others go in the opposite direction. But we’re not going to stop doing this,” Cazares said.
When the other parents who lost their children to the shooting arrived to vote together, they each held up a Casares sign while examining a sample ballot to learn how write-in ballots worked. They grunted in anticipation of the vote.
“People have been fighting for the last 15 years, from Columbine to Virginia Tech, and there are still many people fighting,” says Cazares. “That’s who I am from now on.”
This story was corrected to show that Dolly Schultz is 52 instead of 53.
For more information on AP coverage of the Uvalde school shooting, please visit https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting.
