“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said, looking more relaxed as he chatted with host Sean Hannity, falsely blaming his state’s problems on environmental policies pushed by liberals.

This deadly disaster is one in a series that Abbott has faced in his six years as governor: Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which resulted in the deaths of 68 people, at least six major mass shootings that left more than 70 people dead and a pandemic that has killed 42,000 in the state.

Abbott has often pitched his state as the conservative alternative to California.

Critics have charged that the Abbott administration’s response to the storm has at times resembled the government failures after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

Critics have charged that Abbott and his administration failed to take the storm’s threat seriously or issue sufficient emergency warnings throughout — with meteorologists giving ample warning of a serious storm that could bring record cold, cause power demand to spike, and threaten electrical infrastructure more than a week in advance.

“Short term, I am absolutely certain that the governor’s popularity will suffer as a result of this,” said Bill Hammond, a Republican lobbyist and former head of the Texas Association of Business.

But Hammond said he expects Abbott will quickly rebound, as he has before.

Abbott can make reforming the power grid a defining goal and will be well-positioned to be reelected to a third term, he said.

Two weeks before freezing temperatures swept across Texas, Abbott delivered his annual State of the State address, reflecting on the hardships of the past year but promising that “normalcy is returning to Texas.”.

“To say the pandemic is a challenge is an understatement, but to say that it has been a reversal of who we are as Texans is a misstatement,” said Abbott, 63, a former attorney general and state Supreme Court judge who was appointed by then-Gov.

In the early days of the pandemic, Abbott quickly shut down the state but then was one of the first governors to reopen.

The state’s population has dramatically grown since Abbott took office — before the pandemic it was gaining 1,000 residents each day — but its infrastructure often hasn’t kept up with the growth, leaders and analysts say.

Harry LaRosiliere, the Republican mayor of Plano in fast-growing Collin County near Dallas, said the power and water shortages are exposing how too many Texas politicians failed to invest in the everyday needs of residents, such as highways, schools and public utility projects.

A few years ago, LaRosiliere said, a major company decided not to relocate to Plano because it worried that Texas would eventually run out of water.

As Abbott pushed to reopen the state early during the pandemic, Hidalgo urged her 4.7 million constituents to stay home.

Matt Mackowiak, chairman of the Travis County Republican Party, said that although Abbott should have done more to communicate with Texans in the early hours of the crisis, he expects they remain comforted that Abbott is in charge, citing his judicial temperament and reputation for scrutinizing briefing books and legislative reports.

O’Rourke has said that he’s thinking about running and has thrown himself into responding to this storm, organizing a phone bank to make welfare checks, collecting money and driving cases of bottled water to Austin, where Abbott resides.

Despite worries that Texas could flip blue in the 2020 presidential election, former president Donald Trump won the state by a nearly 6 percentage point margin, and Republicans did not suffer any major losses in the statehouse or Congress

On Saturday, he called an emergency meeting to grapple with a fresh controversy — citizens of his state whose power stayed on during the storm were suddenly socked with hefty electric bills, some from variable-rate plans that charged thousands of dollars for a few days of power as wholesale energy prices soared

“What Texas has become famous for,” he said, “is quick recoveries.”