Why Beto 2022 Matters

Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX)

It is looking increasingly plausible that former Rep. Beto O'Rourke will mount a third major campaign in five years in Texas, running against incumbent-Governor Greg Abbott in 2022 as Abbott mounts his reelection campaign.  While O'Rourke has not announced yet, every indication seems to be hinting at him making this campaign, and of course with that, it feels like a good time to think about Texas.  Texas is rarely not in the news for Americans-a state of contradictions (one of the very few states to have been its own separate country at some point), it is fiercely independent, but also historically conservative.  While it was Democratic (politically) until the 1990's, it has been a Republican bedrock state for decades now, the GOP's counterweight to New York & California.  But as O'Rourke proved in 2018 (losing by just 2.5 points), and Joe Biden continued in 2020 (losing by less than 6-points, the best margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in the state since 1996), Texas is a state that reads as winnable, or nearly so, and I wanted to talk about what O'Rourke's candidacy means not just for the Democrats' chances in the Lone Star State, but the importance of the state for the future.

Let's start with Beto himself.  O'Rourke knows what's at stake for himself if he runs here.  In 2018, he used his progressive bonafides, innate stump skills, and general handsomeness as an easy counterweight against Ted Cruz, who, well, is not a handsome, charming politician no matter how much you agree with his stance on the issues.  This nearly created a major upset.  While Democrats ended up with a net loss of Senate seats in 2018, they nearly won Texas on election night, and O'Rourke outperformed expectations.  However, O'Rourke misread America's progressives' passion for his campaign, and instead of taking that momentum and channeling it into an immediate Senate sequel against John Cornyn in 2020, he ran for president.  And though he started with momentum, it soon became clear that O'Rourke couldn't cut it, and he ended the primary with an embarrassing loss under-his-belt.  He went from being a 46-year-old near dragonslayer to a two-time loser in two years.

Oftentimes in politics we underestimate people who have lost campaigns before, as many of the most noted politicians in America (including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, & George W. Bush) have all lost elections prior to grand success.  But O'Rourke losing twice in a row puts a lot of pressure on his next run for office-if O'Rourke doesn't win the governorship, he is almost certainly done with electoral politics, and will be looking at a place in the Biden administration to lick his wounds.  That's a tough road for a guy who isn't fifty yet.

And it's worth noting this is an uphill battle.  Abbott has been the poster child for incompetence in the past few years (between the electric grid debacle in Texas and his abhorrent policies during the Covid-19 pandemic), but tribalism in American politics is rampant, and Abbott will be difficult to beat in a presidential midterm.  O'Rourke also took some progressive stances, particularly on gun control, that conventional wisdom dictates will be difficult to stand-behind in Texas, though I'll play devil's advocate here; I don't think that an NRA-beloved Democrat is going to win in Texas any more than one with O'Rourke's record on guns will, and I suspect in a modernizing Texas when someone does breakthrough, they'll resemble O'Rourke more than John Bel Edwards or Joe Manchin.  All of this is to say that O'Rourke's run is one fraught with peril for a once rising star (though I will also say if he pulls off the upset, he'd quickly become an easy option for the 2024 or 2028 presidential elections).

But O'Rourke's candidacy matters in a different way, and it's important for Democrats that they run someone like him in 2022, because Texas is clearly a possibility now for Democrats, and they need to start testing the state with real candidates to know if they'll win.  Stacey Abrams didn't win in 2018, but it's next-to-impossible to see how Joe Biden wins in 2020 without knowing how Abrams nearly got the W that year.  The same can be said for Hillary Clinton in Arizona in 2016 compared to the subsequent victories in the states for Kyrsten Sinema & Mark Kelly.  O'Rourke's campaign in 2018 busted up a lot of myths about the stranglehold the Republicans could have on the suburbs of Austin & Dallas-him running again creates more opportunities to test GOTV strategies in these areas, and potentially get a W, or find the magical formula to get a W in the future.

Because Democrats need Texas to be competitive.  The Republicans are trying to gerrymander the state, but a fast-growing state where the conventional wisdom about how many voters in each district vote red or blue makes gerrymandering a fraught situation (this nearly happened in 2020 for the Republicans-if the party presses its luck too much next year, it will surely happen by decade's end if Democrats continue to run real campaigns).  Texas is also one of the few states that Democrats could make a real dent in the Senate.  Right now Trump/Biden split the state count 50/50 between Republicans & Democrats, but there are a lot more states where Trump came close to winning (MI/PA/WI/NV/GA/AZ) than states that Biden did (NC/FL/TX).  Democrats need to either add DC and Puerto Rico to the mix, or they need to actually win some of the Senate seats in those three states to make up for the Republicans having more swing states they can gain ground in on the left.  This is why Beto O'Rourke is so important.  He guarantees tens of millions of dollars in advertising money that might not happen with a generic candidate.  He might not win, but he will make it harder for Republicans to gerrymander, and more likely that they'll overplay their hand, giving the Democrats a seat or two in the House in, say, a Trump +3 seat.  This is how parties are made, and while like Stacey Abrams or Hillary Clinton, O'Rourke might ultimately be on the losing side of his political history, his movement will have gained greatly by using his celebrity & power in a major way in 2022.