TX Observer: “O’Rourke, who rose to fame with a near-successful bid to topple Senator Ted Cruz four years ago, looks headed for another defeat. Polls show him trailing by as much as 15 points against Texas’ Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, who thrashed his two prior Democratic opponents and sits on a $55 million warchest. Unlike in 2018, when O’Rourke rode a backlash to President Trump, he now stares down a projected red wave. After a quixotic 2020 run for president, he’s alienated swing voters. His Democratic base may still adore him, but in Texas, that’s not enough.
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What was it that made Beto magic?
In early 2017, just a couple months after Trump took office and a year and a half before the next election, O’Rourke announced his run against Ted Cruz on a shaky handheld livestream. The Texas Democrats had seen their last statewide star, Wendy Davis, crushed in the 2014 governor’s race. The going wisdom was that Davis, or one of San Antonio’s Castro twins, would eventually snap the party’s nearly three-decade statewide losing streak—if not this year, then soon. Instead, those rising stars rose until they winked out of sight. And there was O’Rourke, campaigning like a man on fire.
There he was, racing in his pickup to rural towns no rational Democrat would visit and delivering supplies amid Hurricane Harvey. There he was jogging, losing his phone, getting a haircut. Everything was live-streamed. No one recruited the little-known congressman from the Mountain Time Zone to do this; he recruited himself. Yet somehow he didn’t come off as arrogant. The Trump-era had filled the air with an urgency matched by his energy. As Christopher Hooks wrote for this magazine at the time: “Nothing this year feels good, but this does, and that can have a power of its own.”
Ideologically, O’Rourke was fuzzy in a smart way. Like Bernie Sanders, he swore off PAC money, and his volunteer apparatus was modeled on Sanders’ 2016 presidential run. He even flirted with Medicare for All. But O’Rourke never fully anchored himself to the policy positions that were rending the party between progressives and moderates. Ultimately, he was more of a good vibes guy. Soon, the money flowed in by the millions.”