El Paso Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke is officially running for Ted Cruz’s senate seat in 2018.
Cruz will still be a prohibitive favorite incumbent with a national profile, a battle-tested campaign team and demonstrated fundraising prowess running in a deep red state. However, in O’Rourke he faces something he’s never run into in a statewide race: A serious Democratic office holder who actually wants to run, something notable absent in 2012.
O’Rouke is not someone to sleep on. The same year Cruz was elected to the Senate, O’Rouke knocked off 8-term Democratic incumbent Silvestre Reyes in a district that’s 79.5% Hispanic. I suspect that he would make a much more formidable general election opponent than the much-better-known Rep. Joaquin Castro. But whether he can get by the likely better-funded Castro in the Democratic primary is another matter.
O’Rourke is talking about running an unconventional campaign:
But the El Paso Democrat is earnestly bullish that he will go to the Senate through a strategy of bringing retail politics to a state of 27 million people.
He has no pollster and no consultants at this point, and said he has no interest in hiring operatives of that ilk.
“Since 1988, when Lloyd Bentsen won re-election to the Senate, Democrats have spent close to a billion dollars on consultants and pollsters and experts and campaign wizards and have performed terribly,” he said.
The approach offers a clear contrast with Cruz, who has used his own consultants to devastating effect in his races for the U.S. Senate and the White House. Last month, several members of Cruz’s political team showed attendees at the Conservative Political Action Convention a presentation of his presidential campaign’s investment and innovations in data analytics.
Certainly Democrats need to change something about running statewide campaigns in Texas, but the “blame the consultants” strategy seems to be yet another case of Democrats ignoring the fact that their liberal policies are unpopular with the Texas electorate.
Then there’s the money issue:
Cruz begins the race with $4.2 million in campaign money. And the early signs amid O’Rourke’s run is that Tea Party groups and establishment organizations will line up with tens of millions of dollars to back Cruz at the slightest sign of trouble.
Nationally, Democrats have no appetite at this point to spend serious money in Texas, and O’Rourke is not accepting money from political action committees. He, like all federal candidates, has no control over whether a super PAC opts to get involved.
But anyone opposing Cruz is a likely magnet for angry liberal dollars. And O’Rourke could have the makings of a Bernie Sanders-type fundraising operation. He is one of the most adept politicians when it comes to social media and was an early adopter of building a following with Facebook Live, a means of broadcasting events through that website.
That’s the problem for Texas Democrats: The message that pulls in nationwide liberal dollars is not the message that wins statewide in Texas, as Wendy Davis can attest.
And that will be the problem for O’Rourke, who seems to be a doctrinaire liberal on just about every issue, from gun control to the border wall to abortion. Indeed, there does not seem to be any issue where O’Rourke is any less liberal than Davis, and he’s arguably worse on gun control.
If O’Rourke makes it past Castro in the primary, Democrats will probably find out, yet again, that the liberal Democratic policies are still out-of-step with Texas voters.
Bonus: O’Rourke was in a punk band called Foss in college. Here they are pretending to be a gospel band to get on a Christian access show:
Well, O’Rourke probably made the right decision not to pursue a musical career. I don’t think Johnny Rotten and Jello Biafra were hearing footsteps…