Will Beto O’Rourke become US President

Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s bid for Senate seat in a reliably red state ended in defeat, dashing the hopes of progressives in Texas and beyond who had yearned for a Congress free of Republican Ted Cruz.

Background

Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke is an American politician and businessman serving as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 16th congressional district since 2013. In 2018, O'Rourke was the nominee of the Democratic Party in a U.S. Senate race, running against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. O'Rourke was narrowly defeated by Cruz in November 2018.

Analysis

In the past year, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke has been compared endlessly to the great charismatic stars of the Democratic Party. He was Kennedyesque! He was the next Obama! With his boyish grin, rhythmic speech, and unabashedly left-leaning platform, the Democratic former representative was not just the state’s best hope for going blue: According to political strategists across the country, he is among the party’s most promising presidential contenders in 2020.

He was cast in profiles in seemingly every major publication as a beacon of centrism in an extremist world—someone who could reach across the aisle with an open mind despite his progressive platform. It’s true that O’Rourke spoke with a softness and a compassion that offered a stark contrast to his opponent, the Machiavellian Cruz. O’Rourke called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, even as his more liberal colleagues declined to touch the topic, and touted his support for “Medicare for All.” He supported calls to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Less than three percentage points separated the incumbent senator and his insurgent challenger – 50.9% Cruz, 48.3% O’Rourke – 222,922 votes out of more than 8m cast. For O’Rourke it marks a phenomenal achievement. In just 19 months, almost unassisted, he took the Texan Democratic party from its virtually moribund condition, gave it a stiff dose of adrenalin, and brought it back to life.

For Texas, and for the US, the fact that O’Rourke came within striking distance represents something even bigger – the hope that the second largest state in the union might finally be freeing itself from the iron grip of the Republican party.

O’Rourke attracted more than 4 million votes, a dramatic increase from the Democratic Senate candidate’s 1.6 million votes in 2014, and even improved upon the 3.9 million votes cast for Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election, which she lost by nine percentage points. That’s a formula that the Democratic party nationwide is desperate to replicate. But how did he do it? What was the secret of the Beto magic?

When O’Rourke set out on his unlikely mission he did so with the contemporary equivalent of a horse and cart. As Rolling Stone has pointed out, at that point he had two aides, both of them old friends from El Paso, and a rented sedan.

He put them to good use. By election day he had spawned a vast army of 25,000 volunteers and had raised $70m – all of it through small donations through the online portal ActBlue, not a penny through big corporate donors – more than any US Senate campaign in history.

O’Rourke wore through a lot of shoe leather in the process. He crisscrossed a state that is larger than France – from his hometown of El Paso to the eastern border of Texas is 900 miles – visiting each of its 254 counties. His message was: “I wouldn’t vote for a politician I had never seen either.”

Wherever he went, he sprinkled seeds of Democratic rebirth. Using digital apps, he empowered volunteers in each county to begin mobilizing their neighbours. It was entirely decentralised, with next to no quality control, which meant trusting volunteers implicitly – but it succeeded in unleashing huge reserves of untapped energy.

He also speaks the language of the young. He is fluent in Instagram and Snapchat, and has a flair for producing viral videos, whether air-drumming to the Who or skateboarding through a Whataburger parking lot. According to the Texas Tribune, for much of 2018 his campaign invested more than any other political advertiser on Facebook. In the last six months more than $6m of O’Rourke ads on the site were viewed almost 20 million times.

Counterpoint

O’Rourke’s deficiencies might not be so much his own as they are America’s. O’Rourke ran a campaign that was ideologically and operationally uncompromised: He never shied from his progressive stances, and he held firm in his opposition to deploying negative ads. One could possibly argue that such a campaign has less of a chance of breaking through in a state as historically red as Texas.

Assessment

Our assessment is that O’Rourke may very well emerge the Democratic star of 2020, capturing the national imagination with as much totality as he did in 2018.

We believe that the explosion of energy that O’Rourke has brought to the progressive movement in Texas bears comparison to the equally audacious campaign conjured up by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race.