Six or so months ago, Beto O’Rourke was ascendant: young, earnest, eloquent, the perfect antidote to Donald Trump, a former punk rocker from El Paso, Texas, who could woo red-state voters and perhaps teach liberals a thing or two about winning back flyover country, potentially even elbowing out the retirement-age Joe Biden. Or so his supporters hoped. Instead, after two months on the presidential campaign trail, O’Rourke seems to be little danger to Biden, let alone Trump, judging by the number of people not looking to take O’Rourke down. “The requests for oppo on him have completely died off,” a staffer at America Rising, a Republican PAC that does opposition research on Democratic candidates, told the Daily Beast. Requests to the R.N.C. for damaging information on Beto have similarly dried up. Even Fox News appears largely disinterested.

O’Rourke, after all, appears fully capable of damaging himself. Between the gaffes, the corrections, the ill-considered plan to shun national media, the accusations of white male privilege and apologies for said white male privilege, O’Rourke’s poll numbers have collapsed into the low single digits, averaging less than 5 percent across several national polls, and less than 3 percent in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Biden’s entry, for sure, explains some of O’Rourke’s decline, as does the rise of Pete Buttigieg, his Oxford educated, multilingual, gay, Navy veteran rival. But the biggest factor is O’Rourke himself. As recently as March, anxious Republicans were running ads in Iowa attacking O’Rourke’s various intersectional sins (whiteness, wealth, a D.W.I.) with the goal of handicapping his campaign. But despite running an inspiring, if unsuccessful, Senate campaign in Texas, O’Rourke stumbled out of the gate. His decision to campaign just like he did at the state level—small town-hall events, eschewing national press—led to a steep decline in his polling, leading him to express his regrets to Rachel Maddow for not doing “a better job [of] talking to a national audience,” and to the hosts of The View, for “[reinforcing] that perception of privilege” by appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair.

O’Rourke is now trying to pivot, taking policy more seriously and making himself available to more media outlets. He has rolled out a $5 trillion climate-change plan (“better late than never,” quipped rival Jay Inslee) and stated (and re-stated) his openness to appearing on Fox News for a televised town-hall event (“This campaign is about going to where people are”). The reset tour is all about addressing the gap between the way O’Rourke wants to run his campaign, and the way the public currently perceives him. Still, his passion at times runs ahead of more practical considerations. Speaking to reporters on Monday, O’Rourke said it was possible his campaign team had talked with Fox about an event, but he was unaware of any current discussions.

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