Beto 2020? How O'Rourke became a Texan sensation who could shape the future of the Democrats

[arenean]

From Ed Pilkington in The Guardian:

When Beto O’Rourke, the punk rock guitarist turned US congressman for the distant border town of El Paso, announced in March 2017 that he was going to run for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat in Texas, the spokesman for the state’s Republican party quipped: “Who?”

No-one is asking who Beto O’Rourke is now. He may have lost his plucky bid to win the first statewide election in Texas as a Democrat since 1994, but he came so close that he thoroughly wiped the smirks off Republican faces.

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.

Full story: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/09/beto-o-rourke-ted-cruz-texas-democrats-midterms

[dalton99a]

1. 'The midterm election in Texas was unlike any the state has seen in decades'

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/us/texas-election-takeaways-cruz-orourke.html

A Two-Party Texas and Other Takeaways From the Cruz-O’Rourke Race
By Manny Fernandez
Nov. 7, 2018

His coattails helped Democrats flip 12 State House seats, two State Senate seats and two congressional seats, and Democrats managed to win the largest county in the state — Houston’s Harris County. Not a single Republican county-level elected official was left standing there, including the county’s top elected official, County Judge Ed Emmett, who had helped lead the region through Hurricane Harvey. Mr. O’Rourke carried much of urban Texas and scored surprising victories in battleground suburbs like Fort Bend and Williamson Counties — though that success was ultimately undermined by losses in rural West Texas, East Texas and the Panhandle.

Before the election, Mr. Cruz called Fort Worth’s Tarrant County “the biggest, reddest county in the biggest, reddest state.” Tarrant County is tied to the mythic Texas cattle country, so friendly to conservatives that Republicans have regularly hosted their state conventions in Fort Worth. For years, Tarrant County was the red exception to the blue rule: The biggest urban counties in Texas are all blue — around Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas — but Tarrant is red. Tarrant, over the years, went for Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, Donald Trump — and also Mr. Cruz, who crushed his Democratic opponent in 2012 in the county by 16 percentage points.

But Mr. O’Rourke did what Hillary Clinton and many other Democrats could not — he won Tarrant County, by a statistical hair: 49.89 percent of the vote compared with Mr. Cruz’s 49.27 percent. And Mr. O’Rourke’s supporters had a hand in defeating a Republican state senator and longtime Cruz ally in the county, State Senator Konni Burton, who lost to the Democrat, Beverly Powell. (It was the State Senate seat that previously had been held by another Democrat, Wendy Davis.)

[Paladin]

2. Beto O'Rourke ought to be heading up national Democratic efforts.

2020 will be upon us before you know it. Beto needs to be leading national party efforts against the trump regime. Immediately.

[dalton99a]

3. +1. It would be Trump-size idiocy to not utilize his talents and to write him off

as some kind of isolated Texas phenomenon

[Paladin]

4. I don't know what Beto's future plans are......

....but I'm confident that being "written off" isn't among them.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

5. Greatest Page for this important post!