Warren rises in Texas ahead of debate

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has moved into second place with Texas Democratic voters, behind former Vice President Joe Biden, according to two polls released Wednesday, just ahead of Thursday's third Democratic debate at Texas Southern University in Houston.

Two Texans — Beto O'Rourke, the former El Paso congressman, and former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, both lagging in the surveys — will be among the 10 candidates onstage for Thursday night's three-hour debate, the first in which all the candidates who met the Democratic National Committee's increased polling and fundraising thresholds will be appearing on the same stage the same night.

While Biden continues to hold a comfortable lead in Texas in both the Quinnipiac University Poll and University of Texas/Texas Tribune polls, as he does in virtually every national survey, the two new Texas polls both offer good news for Warren, who held a rally Tuesday night before 5,000 people on the shores of Lady Bird Lake in Austin.

According to the UT/Texas Tribune poll, Warren is also the second choice of more voters than any other candidate, an important measure in a big field that will almost certainly winnow before the state's March 3 primary. Also, according to Quinnipiac, voters prefer Warren's policy ideas to those of all the other candidates.

The two polls also indicate that, while O'Rourke is well-liked among Texas voters and he is performing better in his home state than he is at this moment nationally, he is — in the words of Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, which conducts the UT/Texas Tribune poll — "stuck in the mud" in Texas, and thereby losing ground as Warren rises.

Castro, who served as housing secretary in the Obama administration, is liked but far less well-known than O'Rourke. He is rated positively by 62% of voters and negatively by 7%, with 31% holding a neutral or no opinion.

The debate offers the best chance yet for Castro and O'Rourke to make an impression with a national audience, expected to be larger than the first two debates, held over two nights and during the summer, when many voters were on vacation and otherwise distracted.

Warren in Austin

Cheryl Smith, a 61-year-old Austin theatrical costumer, was delighted with the selfie she had taken with Warren an hour past the end of her campaign event at Vic Mathias Shores.

Last September, Smith was among the vast throng of about 55,000 people who came to an O'Rourke rally — and Willie Nelson performance — as O'Rourke's Senate campaign against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was reaching its crescendo, "and I regret not getting one with Beto. I was too impatient."

Tuesday night, Smith had no regrets, waiting for the photo with Warren, who has taken more than 50,000 selfies in the course of a presidential campaign.

Warren's crowd, credibly estimated at 5,000 by her campaign, was a tenth the size of O'Rourke's (and Nelson's), but it was a different moment on the political calendar, and the intense crush of national cameras and microphones surrounding Warren between the rally and selfies, spoke to her steady ascent nationally.

Smith loves Warren, her passion, her smarts, her gift for narrative and her promise do something big and bold about economic inequality, starting with a 2-cents-per-dollar wealth tax on net worth exceeding $50 million and a 3-cent tax on each dollar of net worth above $1 billion, a plan that she estimates would pay for free public college, universal child care and pre-K, canceling student debt, and more.

"It's brilliant," said Smith. "It's just 2 cents out of a dollar. That seems very reasonable."

"We need someone who doesn't live in a bubble," Smith said.

As for O'Rourke, Smith said, "He's not ripe yet."

"He's not ready to be president. He's just not," she said of O'Rourke, 46, who served three terms in Congress.

"I'm not saying that he won't be," Smith said of O'Rourke's presidential potential. "I do love him, and I love his passion. I like what he says. I think he's great. I think he needs a little bit more experience and maturity."

Also, Smith said, "I need him in the Senate," of her wish that O'Rourke had run for Senate again, this time against U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

O'Rourke's slide

Smith was not alone among those at Tuesday's Warren event who wished O'Rourke would run for Senate, relighting the fever people had for him in 2018.

"I had it too," said Alex Cogen, 31, who worked full time for the Senate campaign in Austin in its last months.

"I was as all in," Cogen said. "He’s a fantastic orator; he knows how to draw the crowds."

But, she said, he doesn't have the background, life experience and preparation of someone like Warren, leaving him looking like "another white man running for president."

"I’m not going to lie," Cogen said. "I think we need some drastic change. I love the fact that Warren's a woman, but she's not just a woman. She's been successful in her career, and we should reward that."

O'Rourke has said he's not abandoning his presidential run, even as his campaign has struggled to gain traction nationally since his entry into the race six months ago.

"I think that you can't force someone to be in a position that they don't feel that they should be in. And I respect completely his decision to run for president, and you shouldn't put someone down and say, `You need to do this before you can do this,’” Remy Ellison, 19, a University of Texas sophomore from Corpus Christi, said after the Warren event. "But I hoped he would have seen the need for him in the Senate. And he would have recognized and realized that he's so young and he has time for that later on."

As for Warren, she said, "I think she's a phenomenal person."

Houston presidential debateThe third Democratic presidential debate will be 7-10 p.m. Thursday at Texas Southern University in Houston.

It will be broadcast on ABC and Univision. ABC News Live also will livestream the debate. The moderators will be George Stephanopoulos, David Muir, Linsey Davis and Jorge Ramos.