There’s more than a little dissatisfaction, and a quite palpable, bit of envy in the Lone Star state over its governor Greg Abbott. But that friction doesn’t seem like enough to derail his bid for re-election this fall.

Abbott’s approval ratings have been up and down over the past couple of years – he was riding high in the mid-50s according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll back in 2019, but that dipped all the way down to 43 percent last October. It seems he’s on the rebound, though; a Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll has Abbott at 51 percent approval.

Why the slide, which has apparently been repaired? One theory we’ve heard from a number of places is that Texans have seen Ron DeSantis in Florida, and they want one. Abbott occasionally does DeSantis-like things, like his recent moves to man the state’s border with Mexico with National Guardsmen and to use state resources to build a border wall that the Trump administration was intent on finishing in its second term before the current administration canceled it. But he doesn’t have the energy to keep pace with DeSantis’ nonstop criticisms of federal perfidy and incompetence, and that has given some Texans envy of what Florida has.

That angst generated a number of Republican primary opponents for Abbott, perhaps most notably former Florida congressman and recent Texas GOP chair Allen West, Dallas-area car dealer Don Huffines and even former Texas governor Rick Perry, who seems like he’s just looking for something to do.

But the Dallas Morning News poll says those opponents haven’t made much of a dent in Abbott’s re-election hopes so far…

2022 #TXGov Republican Primary Poll:

Greg Abbott 59%
Allen West 6%
Rick Perry 4%
Don Huffines 4%
Kandy Kaye Horn 2%
Chad Prather 2%
Paul Belew 1%
Danny Harrison 1%@UTTyler/@dallasnews ~ 514 RV ~ 1/18-1/25https://t.co/4ZSZ6OFaC2

— PollTracker (@PollTrackerUSA) January 31, 2022

There’s another poll of the Texas governor’s race out, this one a YouGov survey attached to the University of Houston, and its numbers are pretty similar…

2022 #TXGov Republican Primary Poll:

Greg Abbott 58%
Allen West 11%
Don Huffines 7%
Rick Perry 3%
Chad Prather 2%
Danny Harrison 1%
Kandy Kaye Horn 1%
Paul Belew 0%@YouGovAmerica/@UTAustin ~ RV ~ 1/14-1/24https://t.co/Lk0SwRZnbI

— PollTracker (@PollTrackerUSA) January 31, 2022

So Abbott’s going to cruise to the nomination unless something weird happens. How’s he looking against the likely Democrat nominee Beto O’Rourke?

Welp…

A new poll released Sunday shows Texas Governor Greg Abbott holds a lead of 11 percentage points over his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke in this year’s Texas gubernatorial race.

The survey from The Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler found 47 percent of respondents said they would support the Republican Abbott, while 36 percent said they would vote for O’Rourke. Sixteen percent said they would vote for someone else.

Abbott holds a firm lead among Republican and white voters over O’Rourke. The incumbent governor also holds a small—though statistically insignificant given the poll’s margin of error—lead among Hispanic respondents, 40 percent to O’Rourke’s 39 percent.

A couple of observations can be made from that. First, it’s pretty clear that O’Rourke is a fading star in the political sky – he’s not the force he was when he fought Ted Cruz to a virtual standstill in the 2018 Senate race. There are politicians who begin to stink after a certain number of races they’ve run, and Beto is definitely that.

Continuously threatening to take away Second Amendment rights in Texas will do that to a politician, you know.

Perhaps part of the loss of Beto’s charm comes from the fact Texans are starting to realize that he’s no more Hispanic than Shaun King or Rachel Dolezal are black or Liz Warren is Cherokee. He’s a lily-white connected rich kid from El Paso who picked up the nickname Beto because the Mexican help gave it to him, and he used it to make a fake identity for himself.

That realization would partially explain why the fake Mexican is losing the Hispanic vote to Abbott. But another part of that equation is that Hispanic voters in Texas are fast becoming fed up with the Democrat Party in the age of Joe Biden, they’re sick and tired of South Texas becoming a cartel-owned battleground thanks to nonexistent border enforcement and they’re swearing off the Democrats altogether.

If the Hispanic vote is going to split 50-50 around the country, and in Texas and Florida it looks like it’s trending even more the GOP’s way than that, there’s a massive sea change coming in American politics. It could be that the DMN poll is something of a harbinger of that, though we’ve seen it elsewhere for the last few months.

What about that University of Houston poll? It’s a little closer – but still has Abbott ahead of O’Rourke 48-43. In that poll, O’Rourke is ahead of Abbott 51-39 with Hispanics.

That one would indicate he still has some work to do to put O’Rourke away.

But let’s not forget that Greg Abbott’s war chest is more than $65 million cash on hand, and O’Rourke, who burned through almost $100 million in the Senate race against Cruz, has raised a grand total of $7 million.

Abbott isn’t losing that race. He might want to take some pointers from DeSantis in order to salt it away, though.