Trump Texas Rally Promotes Oil Production as Democrats Dream of a Breakthrough

LUBBOCK, Texas, October 27- A Trump rally in Texas on Tuesday put oil and high gasoline prices at the center of the final week before the midterm elections, as President Donald Trump held two stops in the state to lift Senate candidate Ken Paxton and other Republicans. His goal was to hold off what could be the first statewide Democratic win in Texas in 32 years, a result that would mark a major shift in one of the country’s most reliably Republican states.

Fuel prices weigh heavily on the November 3 races, and Republicans have felt the pressure since the war with Iran began, with voters increasingly linking the conflict to the cost of filling their tanks. Trump has taken several steps to bring down the prices, and his Texas trip was another attempt to show voters that he is actively working on the problem. Polls show Democrats could retake one or both houses of Congress, adding urgency to the party’s final push.

His first stop was in Corpus Christi, on the Gulf Coast. The rally took place within view of an oil tanker moored near the port. Trump said it carried the first oil to arrive from Venezuela under a deal Washington made after removing the country’s former leader. A White House official said the crude is headed to refineries owned by ExxonMobil and Citgo. Trump announced the agreement in August. It gives the United States access to a fifth of Venezuela’s crude reserves, and the White House said in September that oil from the deal would probably reach American supplies in November.

“We’re celebrating the greatest oil victory in history,” Trump told the crowd. Texas has long been one of the main refining centers for Venezuelan crude.

Later in the day, at a stop in Lubbock, in West Texas, Trump announced a proposal to ease methane rules for oil and gas producers. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. The Environmental Protection Agency plan would roll back rules from the Biden years that required companies to fix leaky equipment and regularly check wells for escaping gas, a White House official said.

It would also give relief to small, low-output wells. A program that used outside groups to report large methane leaks would end, while rules designed to phase out the routine burning off of gas at oil wells would be eased, reducing the regulatory burden on energy companies. Trump said the move would save consumers and energy producers $45 billion in costs and produce 210 million barrels of oil. Those figures are his, and the White House presents the plan as a way to produce more energy at lower cost.

The visit was Trump’s third to Texas this month. Paxton, the state attorney general, is in a close race with Democrat James Talarico. A loss in Texas next Tuesday would complicate the Republican path to keeping its slim Senate majority. The state has voted Republican for 30 years, but Democratic hopes rose this year when Paxton won the nomination with Trump’s backing.

Paxton brings baggage. He was indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, and the Texas House impeached him in 2023. The criminal case was dismissed in 2024 after an agreement with prosecutors, and the state Senate acquitted him in the impeachment trial. Trump has publicly teased his longtime ally as sometimes a difficult person to work with. At the same time, he went hard after Talarico, accusing him of opposing Texas values on issues such as oil production, immigration and transgender rights.

“Our policy has always been drill, baby, drill,” Trump said, adding that Texas would lose that wealth if it elected Talarico. He used a mocking nickname for the Democrat and called him a communist.

Talarico has turned the nickname into a fundraising tool, selling T-shirts with the slogan “I’m a Talafreako.” He has also answered back. His campaign, he said, is “a threat to their corrupt system.”

Money is flowing in as Elon Musk and other major donors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a late-stage effort to rescue Paxton’s campaign, funding advertising, voter outreach, and ground operations in the final days before the election. The scale of the spending reflects how seriously Republicans now view a race that was once expected to be an easy win.

Texas is not the only state that Trump visits during his October campaign rally; he has also been to Oklahoma, Alabama, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and Mississippi, as he attempts to secure Republican votes in states that have become highly competitive from being considered safe before. These are Republican-leaning states that were expected to be safe, but several have turned into unexpected battlegrounds as Democrats have invested heavily and polls have shown the races tightening.