Beto O’Rourke, who came strikingly close to ousting Sen. Ted Cruz, only to lose the Senate race by slightly more than two points — and with it his congressional seat — isn’t discouraged.
He’s running for president, announcing a bid for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
Last November, O’Rourke proved a Democrat — or at least one named Beto O’Rourke — could be competitive in deep-red Texas. The moment O’Rourke lost against Cruz, his supporters (and not just those in Texas) were already calling on him to run for office again. He ran the closest Senate race in Texas since 1978, earning him national political celebrity.
He broke fundraising records and outperformed polling. His campaign landed him onstage with Willie Nelson and on a couch with Oprah Winfrey. He has been compared to Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. He’s been consistently polling on the same level as some of the biggest 2020 names in the Democratic field in early surveys.
Important to understanding Beto O’Rourke’s success is that it’s based in ideas. Unlike other rising stars in the Democratic party, like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, who got on the map because of a nerd fight over concrete policy proposals — O’Rourke has made waves for simply stating that a Democrat with liberal values could win in Texas.
Though he doesn’t yet have a binder full of policy proposals, he does have a set of priorities. He believes climate change is serious and that the U.S. should pass commonsense gun control. He champions immigration and doesn’t think border walls are effective. He wants to achieve universal health care coverage “whether it be through a single-payer system, a dual system, or otherwise.”
O’Rourke’s actual political record is what you might expect for a Texas Democrat; despite harnessing the progressive grassroots energy, he’s voted more conservative than the average Democrat. When his name was first being floated for a possible 2020 presidential run, he took hits from the left for taking campaign money from the oil industry and for being part of the New Democrats coalition — a group of House moderates.
At 46 years old, O’Rourke is identifiable because of his charisma. He can command a crowd. He’s a confident dad living out a rock-star dream. And as every profile of him has to mention, he actually was a punk rocker in his youth. Those performances didn’t come close to the crowds he’s drawing now.
Now, Beto O’Rourke is going back on tour — this time for the presidency.
Beto has an open-ended approach to politics and policy
O’Rourke doesn’t have a slogan. He doesn’t have a singular message. And most notsbly, he doesn’t have a prescriptive set of policies to solve what he sees as the country’s biggest challenges. Depending on who you ask, that is either his biggest asset or most apparent vulnerability.
O’Rourke proved the enduring power of retail politics. His primary talking point was that he was willing to talk — with anybody, regardless of their political background or demographic, in every single one of Texas’ 254 counties.
He approaches policy similarly. O’Rourke offers a starting point: a set of liberal values.
For the last several months, fighting against Trump’s immigration agenda has been at the forefront; a native El Paso, Texan, O’Rourke grew up on the border — a region of the country he represented in the House for six years and continues to live in. When President Donald Trump was rallying for his border wall in El Paso in February, O’Rourke was holding his own rally across the street making the case for taking walls down. For the last couple months, he’s capitalized on his large social media following to highlight how immigrants and Americans peacefully share the border region.
That’s his position: Immigration is a cultural and economic good. O’Rourke supports the DREAM Act, Democrats’ go-to bill creating a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. He wants Congress to actually debate comprehensive immigration reform.
In February, when O’Rourke’s interviewed with Oprah Winfrey, he was met with environmental activists championing the Green New Deal — a bold and comprehensive proposal to address climate change and income inequality. “What is your plan?” their signs read.
O’Rourke has said he’s “supportive of the concept” of the Green New Deal — particularly the focus on green jobs. As the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson put it, “O’Rourke’s default stance is to call for a debate.” It doesn’t matter the issue.
Health care? He likes Sanders’ single-payer bill. He also supports a public option. He also wants to hear your ideas.
O’Rourke is already on Trump’s radar
In many ways, O’Rourke came out of nowhere. He was a backbench Democrat who rarely engaged in the big fights in Congress. His underdog 2018 Senate run against Cruz — notoriously hated by Texas Democrats — put him on the map — along with a pileup of national profiles. He became a poster boy for the blue wave across the country, and drew media attention from celebrities like Stephen Colbert and Ellen DeGeneres.
Republicans correctly bet that they would win Texas in 2018, but they underestimated O’Rourke. For a campaign that didn’t have a political consultant or pollster; a candidate who live-streamed almost every aspect of his life, from his kids eating breakfast to his morning runs with voters, and had a distinctly liberal message — O’Rourke broke through with Democrats and independents. His campaign raised more than $38 million in the final months of the campaign, the most any US Senate candidate has ever raised in one quarter.
If he can propel that energy through a packed Democratic primary, he’s certainly a top contender. And he has already caught Trump’s attention.
“Beto O’Rourke is a total lightweight compared to Ted Cruz, and he comes nowhere near representing the values and desires of the people of the Great State of Texas. He will never be allowed to turn Texas into Venezuela!” Trump tweeted in October.
After O’Rourke lost, Trump continued to hit him, saying, “He lost and he wants to run for president. I thought you had to win to run for president.”
And in standing in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso, Trump took another swing at the former Congress member, calling him “a young man who’s got very little going for himself.”
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