Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke is leaning toward running for president, according to at least four sources who have spoken to him or his advisers, but he has kept a relatively low profile since leaving Congress earlier this year. | Loren Elliott/Getty Images 2020 elections Beto skips town while his brain trust sketches 2020 plans A decentralized, Bernie Sanders-style campaign model is being discussed.

EL PASO — Beto O’Rourke has left Texas, decamping for a highly anticipated road trip, but his former advisers are quietly sketching the outline of a potential presidential run that would replicate — and on a national scale — the grassroots-driven organizing model O’Rourke employed in his Texas Senate campaign.

Becky Bond, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and an adviser to O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run, has been talking with operatives in recent days about potential jobs on a 2020 campaign, two sources familiar with those conversations told POLITICO.


The effort is preliminary, and the imprimatur of O’Rourke was implied — not stated, the sources said. Unlike many candidates-in-waiting, who have PACs or other organizations to assemble staff, O’Rourke is not yet assembling a campaign team.

But in talks with Democratic strategists, Bond and David Wysong, O’Rourke’s former longtime chief of staff, have discussed ways for O’Rourke to expand the “distributed organizing” form of field operations used by Sanders in 2016 and replicated by O’Rourke last year — with the campaign training low-level staffers and volunteers to orchestrate their own, phone banking, text and email operations.

O’Rourke’s closer-than-expected run against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year was supported by the creation of hundreds of “pop-up” offices across Texas, which served as decentralized hubs for volunteers and get-out-the-vote operations.

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O’Rourke, who had been lying low in El Paso since leaving Congress earlier this month, posted on Medium on Wednesday that he had left the state, traveling through New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. Far from reporters who have been trickling into El Paso, he said he spoke with a motel owner, a waitress and a community college student, among other people he encountered. He also went on his first run in more than a month.

“Have been stuck lately,” he wrote. “In and out of a funk. My last day of work was January 2nd. It’s been more than twenty years since I was last not working. Maybe if I get moving, on the road, meet people, learn about what’s going on where they live, have some adventure, go where I don’t know and I’m not known, it’ll clear my head, reset, I’ll think new thoughts, break out of the loops I’ve been stuck in.”

O’Rourke is leaning toward running for president, according to at least four sources who have spoken to him or his advisers, but he has kept a relatively low profile since leaving Congress earlier this year. He is scheduled to appear in New York for a live, one-on-one conversation with Oprah Winfrey on Feb. 5.

Wysong has been speaking privately with Democratic strategists since November. In late December that Bond was quoted as saying she wanted to be part of O’Rourke’s presidential campaign. “I don’t know if Beto is going to run, but if he does I’m all in,” she said.

Bond, an online organizing specialist, was instrumental in helping to build Sanders’ national organizing operation in 2016, a juggernaut that helped to keep the Vermont senator competitive during the 2016 primary. Noting the limited supply of staffers for 2020 contenders at a gathering of progressive donors and activists in the Los Angeles area last month, Bond urged “movement leaders” and donors to “really consider going into that vacuum, joining a presidential campaign early, and you can actually bend these campaigns towards the agenda that you really care about.”

Jody Casey, who managed O’Rourke’s Texas Senate run, is not expected to join the 2020 effort, according to two sources familiar with her plans.

Bond referred questions to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign spokesman, Chris Evans, who declined to comment.

O’Rourke, who raised more than $80 million in his Texas Senate campaign, is polling in the top tier of 2020 contenders and is widely expected to be able to raise money quickly if he joins the race. But he will start at an organizational disadvantage, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and other candidates already locking down talent in early nominating states.

In an effort to prepare groundwork for O’Rourke, two separate “Draft Beto” campaigns have intensified their efforts in recent weeks, adding strategists and hosting meetings in early primary states. On Wednesday, organizers of one of the efforts began a social media campaign with a video of O’Rourke supporters urging him to run.

Will Herberich, a New England-based strategist co-chairing the group behind the social media push, said, “Our whole idea has been to be able to start to identify grassroots activists who can be helpful to him, especially while other candidates are announcing or reaching out.”

He said, “We want people to have a place to go who are Beto supporters … My hope is that we’re able to hand over a list of those people when we’re done on the draft side for him to tap into.”

If he runs, O’Rourke would enter the race in a far different position than he has held in previous campaigns, when he ran as an insurgent for Congress in 2012 and again last year in his race against Cruz. With recent polling putting O’Rourke near the top of the 2020 field, he would join the Democratic primary as one of a handful of frontrunners.

“It’d be a position that he has never run from, but his campaigns have always been grounded on getting out and speaking to people and listening,” said Steve Ortega, a friend of O’Rourke who served on the El Paso City Council with him. “What will change is that everyone’s arrow will be pointed at him.”

He said that O’Rourke, who famously eschewed political strategists and pollsters in his 2018 race, “will always be at the forefront of his campaigns.”

“He is the manager, he is the strategist,” Ortega said. “And if he runs, it will be the exact same way.”

Distributed organizing is not without limitations: Relying on volunteers can result in clunkier execution, with less oversight leaving doors unknocked and campaign messaging less controlled. But even O’Rourke’s critics saw its value in his Senate campaign — and in a potential 2020 run.

“They had a lot of flaws,” said Jeff Roe, who was Cruz’s chief strategist. “They had distribution problems, they had execution problems, they had engagement problems. But they had a good, fervent group of people hustling. And hustle makes up for half of that problem.”

As for scaling the distributed organizing model for a presidential campaign, Roe said that for a Democrat, “That’s a great model for a national campaign.”

