Beto O’Rourke gives his concession speech in downtown El Paso. Photo: PAUL RATJE/AFP/Getty Images
Last January, before Beto O’Rourke’s campaign raised — and ultimately dashed — the hopes of Democrats around the nation, I flew down to Dallas to see him. We had first met some years before, back when he was a city councilman in El Paso, but he had become more important since then, as a young Democratic congressman with a safe seat in the House. For some reason, though, he had decided to risk his career on a high-stakes gamble, running against Senator Ted Cruz. From afar, it looked like a mismatch. Cruz was one of the country’s most high-profile conservatives, in a Republican state, and O’Rourke was still largely unknown across the vast expanse of Texas. El Paso is far from Dallas as New York is from Detroit.
That Friday, O’Rourke was committed to appear at a series of events organized by a volunteer group called DFW for Beto, which had spontaneously come together on Facebook. O’Rourke spoke at an organizational meeting held at the home of one of DFW for Beto’s founders, and then drove on to a town hall event in the working-class suburb of Garland. Chris Evans, O’Rourke’s spokesman and constant travel companion, told me he had been surprised to see around a thousand people had RSVP’d for the town hall on Facebook. He and O’Rourke wondered aloud about what percentage would actually show up on a weekend night, ten months before the election. Maybe they’d get a few hundred?
