Gov. Greg Abbott has seen his approval ratings tumble since April.
Photo: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma PressAs he gathered on the White House lawn for an event on deregulation last week, Kevin Roberts, executive director of the powerful Texas conservative group Texas Public Policy Foundation, found that others kept pressing him for news from home. They wanted to know: Would Texas shut down again?
In Houston, where booming Covid-19 cases have pushed many hospitals beyond their intensive-care unit capacity for the first time, doctors have been sounding alarms for weeks. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the Democratic elected executive of the county which includes the nation’s fourth-largest city, has been pushing to again implement stay-home orders there. Face coverings, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbottmade mandatory this month, remain a lightning rod of controversy.
The divide over policies to combat Covid-19 has only deepened in a state where politicians have been at war for months. The governor, who has seen his approval ratings tumble, has struggled to form a consistent public-health response to the crisis as he is buffeted from both right and left. Democrats want tougher restrictions, while many Republicans fear he has already gone too far, leaving him bouncing between policies and yet having appeased no one.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo during an April tour of a temporary ICU setup. She has been pushing to implement stay-home orders.
Photo: David J. Phillip/Associated Press“If there’s another shutdown, it will be a cataclysm that will go way past the normal left/right divisions,” Mr. Roberts said. “I can tell you from being in D.C., all eyes are on Texas right now.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Abbott has vacillated between denying another state shutdown is imminent and warning Texans that it will be necessary if things don’t improve.
“I know that many of you are frustrated,” the governor told the state GOP at its virtual convention last week. “So am I. I know that many of you don’t like the mask requirement. Neither do I. It’s the last thing I wanted to do. Actually, next to last. The last thing is lock Texas down again. We must do all we can to prevent that, but every day the facts get worse.”
In Texas, the average number of new Covid-19 cases confirmed each day jumped from around 1,000 in late April and early May to more than 10,000 on many days in July, but has begun to taper slightly. The proportion of tests that are positive, which health experts say should be below 5%, has been nearly 15%. Texans are now dying of the disease at a rate of nearly 140 a day, and more than 4,500 have died of it total.
Texas’s largest cities, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin have all seen significant virus spread, with average daily new cases per 100,000 people ranging from 20 to 60 in the past week. The Rio Grande Valley, meanwhile, has seen death rates six times the state as a whole. But some rural counties, especially in the western part of the state, have remained relatively unaffected.
Texas, like Georgia, Florida and Arizona, was relatively spared for the first months of the virus and then saw a rapid rise in cases following Memorial Day, after reopening from fairly short lockdowns. Over the past week, the proportion of positive tests those states have seen was 16%, 19% and 25%, respectively.
Like Florida and Arizona, Texas has closed bars and limited both indoor dining and large gatherings. Texas also has a mask mandate for most residents, unlike Arizona and Florida, which don’t.
In Houston, the 60 hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center, a medical district considered the largest in the world, have exceeded their normal ICU capacity for the first time in memory and are using 17 of 273 beds added for a “phase two” surge, said Chief Executive William McKeon. The tide of incoming patients is slowing slightly, he said, after the mask mandate.
Despite the rise in Covid-19 cases in Houston, the state Republican party pushed to hold its mid-July 2020 convention in person there, ultimately losing a showdown with Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat.
In Texas, the proportion of coronavirus tests that are positive has been nearly 15%.
Photo: Go Nakamura/Getty Images“This is a convention that Trump wants,” Leslie Thomas, a member of the state’s Republican Party executive committee, said as she voted on July 2 to hold the event in person. “Like it or not, Texas is the Republican state. We bear that. So we need to stand our ground.”
In a recent interview, Ms. Thomas said her vote, weeks before President Trump canceled an in-person convention in Jacksonville, reflected his views on live events, along with her belief that in-person conversations are key to a convention. She said she wasn’t concerned about risks from the virus, likening the convention to going to Walmart.
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Mr. Turner blocked the convention, calling it far too dangerous for thousands of people to gather together indoors. The GOP fought it all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, but didn’t obtain the right to go forward. Instead, the party scrambled to hold the event online, where it struggled to get past repeated computer errors.
In the wee hours of Monday morning, state Republicans participating in the online convention voted to replace their party chairman with Allen West, an Army veteran and onetime Florida congressman known for his firebrand style. His statement before the vote derided Mr. Abbott’s Covid-related executive orders as “the despotism, the tyranny that we see in the great state of Texas.”
The view reflects the ire of some of Mr. Abbott’s fellow Republicans in response to making masks mandatory. Some consider such requirements unconstitutional. Local Republican parties in a handful of counties approved censure resolutions to condemn the governor’s move.
A Covid-19 testing center in Austin, Texas, on July 7.
Photo: Sergio Flores/Getty ImagesMs. Hidalgo first required masks in the Houston area in April, following other Texas counties and cities. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, called it “the ultimate government overreach” and local Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican, said penalties could “lead to unjust tyranny.” The Houston Police Officer’s Union called the rules “draconian” and sought a ruling on whether they were legal. Looking back in a recent interview, Ms. Hidalgo said the order was the beginning of a political battle.
“But I didn’t realize how much it would grow,” she said. “It was a harbinger of things to come.”
Typical of Texas politics, which is often marked by tugs-of-war between Republican leaders of the state and Democratic leaders of its largest cities, Mr. Abbott overturned the mask mandates of Harris and other counties when he began reopening the state in May.
Texas walked back its reopening last month. Austin, Texas, shown here in June, has seen significant virus spread.
Photo: sergio flores/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesTwo months later, however, after the number of Covid cases diagnosed each day had increased eightfold, he issued his own statewide mandate requiring face masks. Last month he was also forced to walk back the reopening, closing bars for a second time and reducing restaurant capacity.
Houston resident Kiersten Tapia, 32, said the state reopened too quickly, “like it was red light to green.” She remains a supporter of Mr. Abbott, whom she has long liked, but is concerned the changing requirements regarding masks led many in her area of central northwest Houston to take fewer precautions than she did.
“It was confusing,” she said of the mask shifts. “They should have started out with them being mandatory.”
David Van Delden, however, an owner of 14 bars in Austin, Dallas and Houston, said the state moved too quickly to reverse its reopening and shut bars down again, leaving him unable to pay his workers. Instead, he said, there should have been stronger attempts to enforce rules regarding capacity and distancing at bars.
“You can’t pick and choose who is shut down,” he said. “We need to open back up and people need to be more responsible for their own actions.”
Mr. Abbott, the most popular politician in Texas and one of the most popular governors in the nation, has seen the effects of the virus crisis on his favor. Approval of his handling of the virus has fallen from 60% in late April to 44% in late June, according to the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States, a joint project of four major universities which has surveyed governor approval ratings in all states. Texans’ opinions of their governor are now in the bottom fifth of U.S. states, according to the report.
The average number of new Covid-19 cases confirmed each day in Texas jumped to more than 10,000 on many days in July. Here, a street in Austin, Texas, on June 18.
Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Wall Street JournalSome local Democratic officials, meanwhile, are now beginning to test the limits of Mr. Abbott’s authority. In Hidalgo County, on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, which has seen a death rate this month six times that of the state, County Judge Richard Cortez, a Democrat, said Monday he will issue a new stay-home order for nonessential employees.
Understanding the Coronavirus
Mr. Cortez acknowledged in an interview on local radio station KURV that such an order contradicts the state’s reopening—so he has no way to enforce it. Asked whether he expects a punitive response from Austin, Mr. Cortez replied “I don’t know.”
Monday, Mr. Abbott tweeted that “the mask mandate is successfully slowing the spread of Covid-19 in North Texas” and “a community lock down is not needed as long as masks & other distancing strategies are used.”
Mr. Crenshaw, the congressman who had taken aim at Ms. Hidalgo’s mask mandate, retweeted it, with the comment “This is good news.”
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Write to Elizabeth Findell at Elizabeth.Findell@wsj.com
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