The comments come as the Republican governor has hit the campaign trail to boost Wright, whom French forced into a runoff in the March 3 primary.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Abbott cast the race for the often overlooked statewide office as existential for the state economy, especially at a time of soaring gas prices amid the ongoing war with Iran. The commission oversees the oil and gas industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis agenda would wreck the miracle that we have in producing more oil and gas than ever before \u2014 by the way, more oil and gas than what Iran produces,\u201d Abbott told a crowd of Republicans at a campaign stop in Deer Park. \u201cWe need Jim Wright to be reelected to continue to lead that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wright has the backing of major oil companies, such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil, and the state\u2019s top GOP leadership. Abbott has appeared at multiple events with Wright this week as early voting got underway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The candidates were virtually tied at 32% in the five-way GOP primary in March. The winner in the runoff will face state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, a Houston Democrat and former\u00a0oilfield mechanical engineer, in the general election in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Abbott said anyone who thinks the Republican candidate will win easily \u201cis severely misguided and wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of these elections are going to be close in November,\u201d Abbott said. \u201cIf we were to have a leftist, pro-green agenda elected to be on the Railroad Commission in charge of our oil and gas industry, it would destroy Texas, it would destroy America, it would destroy the world. We cannot let that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The comments come as the Republican governor has hit the campaign trail to boost Wright, whom French forced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-300075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}