I am loath to admit it, but I had a huge crush on Beto O’Rourke last year. A charismatic former punk rocker from Texas with a flair for floral patterns, his rise to national prominence presented a tall and compelling candidate with a capacity for knowing how to crack a joke and when to be serious.

But the thirst-trap politics that made former representative O’Rourke (D-Texas) a national sensation in a 2018 midterms race against Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) seem less likely to make mouths like mine water in a crowded and complicated Democratic primary for the 2020 election.

This is partly because context matters: O’Rourke is no longer a foil to a nationally recognizable Republican in a political race that could swing an infamously red state to blue. The skateboarding Texan is now up against candidates who have spent years establishing and refining their roles on the national political stage, mostly playing for the same team. In the Democratic presidential primary, O’Rourke won’t look like such a scrappy darling next to them, the way he did up against Cruz, and their ability to pick apart his candidacy will be far more potent than Cruz’s, who blasted O’Rourke’s supposed support for hair dye and tofu.

In the 2018 midterms, O’Rourke had the chance to remove a notoriously conservative and opportunistic member of Congress from his position of power. O'Rourke's victory, which became a very real possibility, could’ve created a huge break in Republican control of the state of Texas — that's part of why O’Rourke’s campaign generated so much attention. O’Rourke didn’t win, but he also didn’t lose by much: about 200,000 votes in a race with over 8.3 million votes cast.

Despite his loss, I was still extremely thirsty for his political future, since his campaign had made him a national star who could rival a campaign by Texas’s other Republican senator, John Cornyn, in a reelection race.

The prospect of a second Senate campaign for O’Rourke in 2020 was tantalizing, especially given how he energized left-leaning voters in a state where Democrats hadn’t won a Senate race since 1988 and hadn’t won a statewide election since 1994 — and especially against Cornyn, who polled at lower approval percentages than Cruz in every Morning Consult senator popularity poll from late 2016 to 2018. On average, Cornyn elicited “Don’t know/no opinion” responses from 13.8% more people than Cruz, a sign that he may also have lower name recognition.

Whether or not O’Rourke could build on the groundswell of his 2018 campaign to beat Cornyn is apparently a question that won’t be answered in 2020. Instead, if he succeeds in the primaries, the El Paso punk rocker will leave challenging Cornyn, who recently tweeted a quote from Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, to someone with far less star power and, I believe, potentially waste his impressive political capital by trying to challenge perhaps the best-recognized Republican in the country: President Donald Trump.

O’Rourke and Trump have already gone toe-to-toe in dueling El Paso rallies, hosted on the same night in February. O’Rourke hadn’t yet officially announced his candidacy and was there to serve as a rally leader for the town’s rebuke of Trump, a chance to show off his oratory skills on one of the president’s key issues: the border wall.

El Paso is O’Rourke’s home turf. He was the U.S. representative for the Texas district that includes the city, and as Dara Lind wrote for Vox, serving as a congressman for an area on the border meant his office had to be involved in immigration cases. At the rally, he showed that he understands life on the border better than Trump by making El Paso a symbol of the potential of America’s southern border, not a symbol of the threat that the border represents, as Trump so often does.