Five days from Election Day, Texas United States Senator John Cornyn made a stop in Plano. He spoke to supporters in the heart of Collin County, a county he knows will be crucial to his re-election campaign.
In the past decade, Collin County has added a few hundred thousand people. Many of them will be first time Texas voters.
“We’ve seen a lot of new people moving in, and so we need to do a better job, and I think we are doing a better job of telling the story of why Texas has been so successful, including this area, in creating new jobs and opportunity,” Cornyn said. “That’s why you see everybody working so hard and competing for the votes.”
“So to me the most important thing we can vote on in this Election is who is most prepared to re-grow the great American and the great Texas economy,” Cornyn said. “We don’t want to turn Texas into New York or California.”
But his opponent MJ Hegar believes his time is up. Hegar spent Thursday holding a few virtual events with supporters across the state.
“The whole time he’s been in office he’s been saying, 'We need to close the gun show loophole, we need to protect dreamers, we need to protect pre-existing conditions,' yet he has voted against all those things consistently,” Hegar said. “We are not for ripping children away from their parents as a deterrent to seeing as our nation as a beacon of freedom, hope, and democracy. We want to fight for regular, hard-working people. We want to elect people who have faced our challenges who understand how it feels to be worried about making their rent or their mortgage.”
Both candidates spoke of the huge voter turnout.
“We have registered more than 250,000 more Republicans since 2018,” Cornyn said. “That ought to help.”
“I’m blown away by the voter turnout,” Hegar said. “I am definitely enthused and excited at the grassroots enthusiasm across the state. I grew up here, I’ve never seen anything like this. Our democracy is just so much healthier the more people take part.”
Texas voters will soon learn if longtime Senator John Cornyn gets to keep his job.
“I think we couldn’t be more different,” Hegar said. “I don’t have to lie about him to win this election. I can just talk about his record. I think that this election comes down to experience. He thinks it comes down to experience too, but I’m not sure how much more of John Cornyn’s experience we can take in Texas frankly.”
“I know every election we always say this is the most important election in our lifetime,” Cornyn said. “But I really feel it in my bones and in my heart.”