If he elects to run, Beto O’Rourke would be forced to catch up to Democrats who have already begun courting donors and political operatives in key primary states. | Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images 2020 Election Beto O’Rourke changes his mind: He’s not ruling out 2020 anymore The Texas Democrat said he would make no decision about running until after he leaves Congress in early January.

EL PASO, Texas — Beto O’Rourke said Monday that he is no longer ruling out a run for president in 2020, a reversal that thrilled his legion of loyal supporters while clouding an already-crowded Democratic primary field.

“Running for Senate, I was 100 percent focused on our campaign, winning that race and then serving the next six years in the United States Senate,” the Texas congressman told reporters after a town hall forum here. “Now that that is no longer possible, you know, we’re thinking through a number of things.”


Asked whether his position on 2020 is different than it was before the November election, when he said he would not run for president, O’Rourke said, “Yeah, yeah it is.”

In his first public event since the midterm elections, O’Rourke said he would make no decision about running until after he leaves Congress in early January. But in a lengthy rebuke of President Donald Trump — on issues ranging from immigration to taxes and military spending abroad — he suggested the early formation of a platform.

Tearing into the Trump administration for its denunciation of refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border — with U.S. authorities using tear gas on migrants near Tijuana, Mexico, over the weekend — O’Rourke cast the unfolding immigration crisis as “our moment of truth.”

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“This one is on all of us, the way that we choose to respond,” he said. “To give in to the paranoia and the hype and the fear and that bullshit that characterizes so much of the national conversation about something that we understand better than anyone else right now. Or for us to stand up and to lead on this issue.”

His remarks from this border town offered a geographically centered rebuttal to Trump, who demanded earlier Monday that Mexico deport caravans of asylum-seeking migrants at the U.S. border.

“Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries,” Trump tweeted, without offering any evidence that the migrants are criminals.

O’Rourke raised more than $70 million and mesmerized Democratic activists and donors with his closer-than-expected run against GOP Sen. Ted Cruz.

But O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, both expressed reservations about the toll a presidential campaign could take on their family, after two years running against Cruz.

“Amy and I have talked a little bit about next steps, and the conversation has started with family, and really has not gotten past that — what’s going to be best for our family,” O’Rourke said. “Our kids are 12, 10 and 8 now, and whatever we do, we want to be together. So being in El Paso makes just a ton of sense to us, just from that basis.”

However, he said, “I’m also, obviously, really interested in the direction that this country takes, want to be as effective as I can making sure that it goes in a positive direction and contributing in whatever way that I can. What form that takes — whether it involves running for office again, whether there’s something that I can do as just a citizen — I don’t know, we haven’t really been able to get our heads around that.”

If he elects to run, O’Rourke would be forced to catch up to Democrats who have already begun courting donors and political operatives in key primary states. O’Rourke has not begun to develop a presidential campaign infrastructure — or even cultivated the seeds of one, famously eschewing consultants and pollsters in his Senate race.

In a move viewed by some Democrats as a sign that O’Rourke may not run, Shelby Cole, who worked on his Senate campaign’s massive digital effort, is joining Authentic Campaigns, the digital strategy firm used by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

Yet major Democratic donors and strategists have been privately lobbying O’Rourke to enter the race, buoyed by his national fundraising network of mostly small donors. O’Rourke raised a staggering $38 million in the third quarter of his Senate campaign, and a series of post-election missives has appeared designed to keep them engaged.

On Thanksgiving, O’Rourke posed for a photograph with his family and said he was grateful for “everyone still committed to, still working towards, still fighting for a more perfect union” — a forward-looking statement in line with the more eyebrow-raising essay he posted just after the election.

Days after losing to Cruz, O’Rourke wrote on Medium about running through Washington and up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, pondering Lincoln’s second inaugural address. O’Rourke wrote optimistically that he “wondered if the winds had changed.”

The historical significance of O’Rourke’s destination was lost on no one. Lincoln successfully ran for president after two losing Senate campaigns.

O’Rourke said Monday that his writings on Medium, the latest of which he wrote the previous night, will be "my venue to talk to you, if you’re interested, as a private citizen” after leaving office.

“He clearly inspired the state and inspired the nation,” said Marc Stanley, a Dallas lawyer and Democratic donor who chaired a political action committee working against Cruz. “But I don’t know. It was a rough two years on him and his family. To jump right back into it, I don’t know."

Stanley added, “On the other hand, his political stock is high right now.”

O’Rourke told MSNBC before the election that he would not run for president, saying, “I will not be a candidate for president in 2020. That’s, I think, as definitive as those sentences get.”

But when asked about a potential presidential run following the election, O’Rourke told the website TMZ on Friday, “I haven’t made any decisions about anything.”

On Monday, Amy O’Rourke, who was instrumental in O’Rourke’s decision to run for Senate, asked with a laugh as O’Rourke was speaking with reporters, “Did he say it was a possibility?”

The family had recently returned from vacationing in Costa Rica, and “we really haven’t had the conversation.” Any decision, she said, will be made with family and friends, not “political strategists chiming in.”

“I think I want to make sure that our family is healthy and happy and strong, and that has always been kind of the backbone of every conversation that we have,” she said. “And so, just laying low for right now and making sure that we’re good on that front.”

Amy O’Rourke said running for president “just seems like you have to give up so much of your private life, including time as a family in the ways that you have been a family up until then. … I don’t know if that’s a line that I or we necessarily want to cross.”

Even the possibility of an O’Rourke candidacy prompted a flurry of interest from donors and operatives — and from the highest levels of the Democratic Party.

Former President Barack Obama, speaking to his former adviser David Axelrod on his podcast last week, called O’Rourke an “impressive young man who ran a terrific race in Texas,” while drawing comparisons between O’Rourke and himself.

"What I liked most about his race was that it didn't feel constantly poll-tested,” Obama said. “It felt as if he based his statements and his positions on what he believed. And that, you'd like to think, is normally how things work. Sadly, it's not."

The town hall meeting, which drew more than 200 people, was the latest of more than 100 that O’Rourke has held since taking office. On Monday, the Democrat elected to succeed O’Rourke in the House, Veronica Escobar, drew a wave of applause when she told the audience of O’Rourke, “I know there’s bigger and better things on the horizon, and we cannot wait to see what happens next.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, called O’Rourke’s deliberations about 2020 “really, really internal.”

“This is a very tough, difficult decision given how close he is with his kids and his wife. It's very tough for him to do it over again for another two years,” Hinojosa said.

Speaking to reporters Monday, O’Rourke said he and his wife have “made a decision not to rule anything out.”

“The best advice that I’ve received from people who have run for and won and run for and lost elections like this is don’t make any decisions about anything until you’ve had some time to hang with your family and just be human.”

He said, “I’m following that advice, and just not making a decision about anything.”

By signaling that he is even open to a presidential campaign, however, O’Rourke continued to generate interest Monday, as he has since the election.

“The buzz is all around Texas about O’Rourke,” said Christian Archer, a San Antonio-based Democratic strategist.

Archer said O’Rourke has “got a window of time to seize that momentum and kind of slingshot himself to the top tier of candidates.”

For O’Rourke, Archer said, “I would go to Iowa tomorrow if you’re really interested. You don’t have to commit. You can go to a town hall meeting in Iowa, and you don’t have to make anything formal. You just have the keep the conversation as intense as it is right now about O’Rourke. That conversation remains intense for a period of time.”

Alex Thompson contributed to this report.