Beto O’Rourke’s shoe leather Senate campaign turning heads in Texas

DENTON, Texas — If actions speak louder than words, U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke  was a momentary example recently when he stopped  talking to more than 1,000 sweaty Texans as fire truck sirens filled the air on a sweltering September Saturday.   

“Somebody from my team, can you find out what’s going on?” said O’Rourke. “I want to make sure we can be helpful to what’s going on. Let’s focus our energy, our love, our compassion on the person who needs our help right now.”

Holding the microphone, the 45-year-old O’Rourke waited to resume his campaign remarks until he saw a first responder’s thumbs up at the edge of the crowd, where a young woman had suffered a heat stroke.

For Luna Kincaid, O’Rourke’s willingness to pause in concern for a fellow Texan showed why the Democratic congressman’s campaign to oust Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is one of the most closely watched races of the nation’s midterm elections. If O’Rourke wins, it could tip control of the Senate to the Democrats.

“It was really inspiring,” said Kincaid, 32, a singer-actor who registered to vote at the Denton rally. “He stopped, and it gave me goose bumps. It was serendipitous that it was at the moment he was discussing health care.”

Health care is a key issue for O’Rourke, but it’s hardly the only thing that prompted supporters to fuel his campaign with more than $23 million, much of it in $200 or less donations.

Cruz, in his first re-election bid, has raised a similar amount, making it also one of the most costly campaigns in the country. Public opinion polls show a close race in a red state where a Democrat hasn’t won a Senate seat in more than three decades.

“There’s a recipe for Democrats to be successful but it requires a very particular environment and a very specific kind of candidate,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston political scientist. “There are several Democrats capable of executing it but they haven’t chosen to do so.”

Cal Jillson, a Southern Methodist University political scientist, said despite talk of a blue voting wave on Nov. 6 that could propel Democratic candidates, O’Rourke’s showdown with Cruz is “the only even race in Texas.” 

Kimberly Williams rode her Harley-Davidson to the Denton rally with six other bikers to pick up a black-and-white “Beto” yard sign and see O’Rourke in action.

“I’m interested in humane immigration reform,” said Williams. “I’m big on individual rights that (allow) women to choose our reproductive rights.”

Municipal building inspector Jeff Hyde, 50, cited O’Rourke’s willingness to hold town hall meetings and get around the state as a measure of his engaging voters. He has visited each of the 254 counties in Texas with his shoe leather style of politicking. 

“Here in Texas, it’s an uphill battle,” for a Democrat, Hyde said, “but we’ve got to start somewhere.”

The previous Sunday at a San Marcos town hall meeting on the Texas State University campus, O’Rourke loped onto the stage in a packed ballroom that seated 580 and turn-away crowds in the overflow space.

Sherri Benn, TSU’s student affairs vice president, said it was “probably the largest political event that our students have put on” in her 25 years on the college’s staff.

Saint James Limoges, 55, was among the Harley riders attending the Denton rally 35 miles north of Dallas. A black woman, she said she’s married to a white Cruz supporter who “thinks Fox News is the holy grail” and that makes life together tough because she prefers O’Rourke’s progressive proposals.

“This (polarized) political climate falls right in my household,” said Limoges. “He thinks everything is fake news. Hillary Clinton called him a deplorable; that kind of pushed him over the edge.” 

Limoges’ main issues are minority rights, health care and women’s right to choice. She also embraces the Black Lives Matters movement as the mother of five sons by a previous marriage. She’s hoping O’Rourke is elected to the Senate to protect those rights.

O’Rourke’s Denton visit was his first since 25 years ago when he performed here with a punk rock band. Voters in the state’s 16th Congressional District first elected him to the U.S. House in 2012 and re-elected him twice. It is a majority Democratic district centered on his hometown of El Paso in West Texas, stretching along the Rio Grande River and the Texas border with Mexico.

Texas has been a predictable Republican state for years, but O’Rourke is banking on the state’s growing Hispanic population, general concern over health care and progressive immigration reform, and first-time young voters to win the Senate seat in his first statewide campaign.

His campaign has been compared to that of Bobby Kennedy when he ran for president in 1968 – connecting with voters on a one-to-one basis. He is also a Kennedy look-alike with his toothy smile and shock of hair that drops over his brow.

Oddly enough, his first name is Robert, but his friends and family in El Paso began calling him Beto from an early age, and it stuck as he grew older. 

Francisco Amaya sat under an oak tree in Denton, mulling O’Rourke’s talking points: ending the war on drugs, cutting the school-to-prison pipeline and stopping Texas’ maternal-mortality crisis. 

Amaya said his political posture has stretched “from one side to the other,” voting for candidates of both major parties over time, but not Donald Trump in 2016.

“There’s too much dirt on him,” said Amaya, a county jail corrections officer in Gainesville, just south of the Oklahoma border.

Amaya likes the way O’Rourke talks about doing something for county jail prisoners with mental-health problems. He said too many of them have nowhere else to go.

Amaya also backs O’Rourke on marijuana reform.

“He really stands for the people,” Amaya said. “Once I retire, I’m going to stand up and speak for those who can’t.”

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com.

 

 

Q&A with O’Rourke on the campaign trail  

 

By John Austin

CNHI State Reporter

DENTON, Texas – Beto O’ Rourke took time out during his campaign rally here to take questions from the news media, including two German radio reporters.

A condensed version of the question-and-answer session:

Q.  Texas is still a red state. What do you think your chances are going to be? 

A.  I don’t know about that. Texas is probably most accurately defined as a non-voting state. We are 49th in the country — so almost dead last — in voter turnout, on purpose. Some people, based on their race or ethnicity, (have) their voice diminished, their vote diluted. We have to transcend that. That’s why we show up for everyone. No one is written off, no one is taken for granted. This is not going to be a blue wave. This is not about changing the partisan color of this state. It’s about making sure every single one of us, Republican, Democrat and Independent, is represented in the United States Senate.

Q. What do you say about the CNN poll that puts you in the top 10 for 2020 (presidential race)?

A. The only thing we are going to focus on is winning this election and serving each or the six years of a senate term, representing the people of Texas. Not just coming to Denton to campaign, but coming back to Denton to hold town halls, to be held accountable by those I want to serve and represent. So we are all focused on Texas, all the time.

Q.  If you were in the Senate now, would you vote to confirm or deny Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination?

A.  I would not vote for Brett Kavanaugh. Here’s why: this country, and especially Texas, needs a Supreme Court justice that believes in voting rights … because of racism in our voting laws. We need a Supreme Court justice who believes that Rowe vs. Wade is the settled law of the land and that every woman can make her own decisions about her own body. We need a Supreme Court justice that does not believe corporations are people and that money is speech, and that corporations can spend unlimited amounts buying our elections and the outcome of legislation.  And we need a Supreme Court justice who will ensure that in a state where you can still be too gay to adopt a child — that you can be gay enough to be fired from a job  — that everyone’s civil rights are upheld and that the law is applied equally to everyone. Unfortunately, Judge Kavanaugh does not meet those criteria for us in Texas.

Q.  How important is the issue of immigration for you?

A.  We, the people of Texas, are the defining immigrant experience and story of this country. The city that I represent , El Paso, is one half of the largest bi-national community in the hemisphere , maybe the world: three million people from two countries, two languages, coming together in one point, joined, not separated by the Rio Grande River. And El Paso is one of the safest, if not the safest, cities in the United States today, not in spite of, but because we are a city of immigrants. We should proudly pursue something that we know better than anyone else. That is rewriting our immigration laws in our own image to ensure that we see immigration as an asset. The very presence of immigrants makes us more secure, making us more successful and that’s something — because I’ve traveled the state — that Republicans and Democrats agree on. We will make policy not based on fear but on our own experience and values.

Q. What about your do-it-yourself campaign and the decision not to accept political action committee contributions?

A. We don’t wait for a corporation or a label to tell you what kind of song to write or to put your record out or decide if it’s friendly enough for radio. You book your own tour, you write your songs, you start your own label. That’s what brought us to Denton 25 years ago in the back of a Plymouth Satellite station wagon with three other sweaty, smelly guys.

That’s what brings us back here … in a DIY grassroots campaign.

This is all about people; human beings, the people of Texas,  deciding the future not just of this state, but of this country.

 

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