Former congressman Beto O’Rourke, ramblin’ man, Thrasher aficionado, and former Senate candidate, put 2020 watchers on high alert Wednesday evening when The Dallas Morning News reported that sources close to O’Rourke say he has decided not to run for higher office in Texas again, clearing the way for a likely White House run. “Amy and I have made a decision about how we can best serve our country,” he told the paper in a statement. “We are excited to share it with everyone soon.” Multiple people close to O’Rourke said they expect him to announce a presidential campaign “within weeks.”

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In the months after his narrow loss to Senator Ted Cruz made him a national phenomenon, O’Rourke let off steam with a series of anguished, Dark Night of the Soul-style blog posts. Yet in recent weeks, he has seemed to take deliberate steps back onto the national stage, shaving his post-election beard and holding a massive counter-rally in his native El Paso just a few hundred yards from a Donald Trump rally, possibly drawing more attendants than the president himself. Yet he played coy when Oprah Winfrey asked point-blank whether he would run for president in 2020. “Can I be part of bringing people together in a deeply divided country around things we agree are common—can we have a common conception on what it is to be American?” he wondered aloud. “If I can play some role in helping the country to do that, by God I’m going to do it.” (“By God, when are you going to know the answer?” Winfrey responded.)

Meanwhile, O’Rourke and his allies have been working behind the scenes to build out the infrastructure for a 2020 run, discussing potential hires and speaking to alumni from Barack Obama’s campaigns. O’Rourke already has a massive fund-raising advantage over nearly all of his fellow Democrats (save for, perhaps, Bernie Sanders), having established a massive small-donor machine when he ran for Senate. And according to recent polling, he has some of the highest favorability ratings in an already-crowded field, though his numbers trail precipitously behind those of Sanders and Joe Biden, two better-known quantities among Democratic primary voters.

Biden has more than four decades of public-service experience and a nostalgic appeal, while Sanders can credibly claim to be the godfather of the current progressive kick. But O’Rourke, a back-bencher congressman before he lost a Senate race, nevertheless possesses potent qualities that could give him an edge: a centrist appeal that could resonate with voters famously overlooked in 2016; the ability to trigger Republicans by wearing a dress; and perhaps most importantly, a freshness that the aging top tier of the Democratic Party conspicuously lacks. The hosts of the far-left Chapo Trap House podcast contemptuously called him a “white Obama,” signaling some latent discontent among the progressive wing of the party, which remains suspicious of his “billionaire” in-laws and his acceptance of campaign funds from oil-industry employees. But youth and charisma may have potent aphrodisiacal qualities in a presidential race where the ability to capture media attention is priceless. And O’Rourke’s refusal to kowtow to his party’s ideologues, on either side of the spectrum, has its own skater-punk charm. “I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels,” O’Rourke told reporters in December. “I don’t get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I’m for everyone.”

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