2020 elections Slumping O'Rourke looks to regain mojo at prime-time town hall A candidate who fell victim to 'great expectations' faces a big moment of his reboot on CNN Tuesday night.

DAVENPORT, Iowa — No candidate entered the presidential race with loftier expectations than Beto O’Rourke — or fell back so quickly afterward.

Stalled at about 5 percent in national polls, O'Rourke acknowledged recently that he needs to “do a better job” reaching a national audience. When he landed in Iowa this week for his fourth visit to the state, he was met by only a smattering of the press corps that once feasted on everything he said or did.


Yet despite all that, O’Rourke is quietly assembling a robust staff in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state. His campaign announced Monday that it's added seven more staffers in early-voting South Carolina. He is offering more detailed policy proposals, eliciting waves of applause at a town hall meeting here Monday.

And in a shift in media strategy, O’Rourke is now aggressively courting national TV. Tonight, he'll participate in a televised town hall on CNN — his first of the campaign and a big moment in his attempt to regain his charm.

For O’Rourke, the town hall is an opportunity to reassert himself in the Democratic primary. For everyone else, the reintroduction — coming barely two months after his campaign launch — serves as a reminder of how tumultuous the 2020 landscape remains.

“It’s fluid,” said Karen Hicks, a Democratic strategist in New Hampshire. “Everybody’s still trying to find their footing.”

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For a candidate who catches a spark, she said, "The question is minimizing the fade: Can you build an organization that has the capacity to capitalize on those moments?”

O’Rourke said the CNN town hall is only “a version” of the many untelevised town halls he's held. “It’s just going to be broadcast to a lot more people than we have on our Facebook Live stream,” he said Monday.

The importance of the event to the former Texas congressman was apparent as soon as he arrived in eastern Iowa. In addition to Chris Evans and Cynthia Cano, close advisers who regularly travel with him, O’Rourke was accompanied by his campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, and longtime adviser David Wysong.

O’Rourke’s supporters insist they're not worried about his current polling. They say many voters are still undecided, donating money to or volunteering for multiple candidates. And like other candidates running far behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, O’Rourke remains relatively little known to the electorate, leaving time to make an impression.

Nearly 45 percent of voters nationally have never heard of O’Rourke or have no opinion of him, according to the latest Morning Consult poll. Pete Buttigieg is polling 1 percentage point higher than O’Rourke, at 6 percent, and Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are at 8 percent.

“Great expectations can be deadly in politics,” said a Democratic strategist who spoke with O’Rourke about joining the campaign earlier this year and who is still considering it. “It’s a free media campaign right now, and his free media has been shitty.”

However, the strategist said, “As I hear it, Jen is moving her entire family to El Paso. You don’t do that if the campaign is losing steam. I just don’t think it’s falling apart … If he’s raising at a clip similar to that with which he started, he’s one of three or four candidates right now, maybe five, who are going to be up in multiple states on television two months out [from the Iowa caucuses].”

The $9.4 million O’Rourke raised in the first quarter of the year has allowed him to plant a flag in Iowa, hiring 16 staffers. With turnout expected to be massive next year, his advisers believe O’Rourke can replicate his success courting new voters in last year’s Texas Senate run to elevate him here, as well.

Recalling his closer-than-expected race against Republican Ted Cruz, O’Rourke told about 250 people at a town hall event in Davenport on Monday night, “We helped to take a state that was 50th — dead last — in voter turnout, to a state that today is a contender in our national politics.”

Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Polk County Democrats, said that while Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have bigger teams in Iowa so far, “Beto has put together a pretty impressive ground game, and pretty impressive outreach in the limited time that he’s had.”

O’Rourke is also sharpening his message — and honing parts of it specifically for Iowa.

After releasing a $5 trillion plan to address climate change that was widely praised by environmentalists, he recently supplemented his plan with ideas tailored to Iowa. He called for federal investment in infrastructure projects along the Mississippi River to protect flood-prone areas. He said he would work to streamline government approvals for wind energy projects and expand federal crop insurance to cover climate-related risks to stored grain.

Touring flood-damaged businesses in Davenport on Monday, O’Rourke scrawled in a notebook as he asked local officials about where water rose and how barriers failed. Then, turning to broader issues at his town hall, he vowed to appoint judges who support abortion rights and to reverse some tax cuts passed by Republicans. Asked by a voter if he had a “specific plan for criminal justice reform,” O’Rourke responded with Elizabeth Warren-like precision, “I do.”

“Step one,” he said. “End the war on drugs and the prohibition of marijuana, expunge the arrest records of those who are serving time for possession of a substance that is legal in more than half the country right now. End for-profit prisons in the United States of America. End the cash bail system in the United States of America.”

O’Rourke told reporters on Monday that his tactics today are “much the same as what you’ve seen me do from the beginning of this campaign.” He has held more than 60 events in Iowa and more than 150 across the country. But O’Rourke, who had done relatively little national television until recently, acknowledged he is now “complementing the strategy that we’ve employed from the outset with a little bit more national presence.”

Before the CNN town hall tonight, O’Rourke made multiple appearances in recent days on MSNBC and ABC’s “The View.” He said he's interested in participating in a town hall on Fox News.

O’Rourke has paid a price for waiting to embrace national television so completely. In addition to missing opportunities for exposure, his emergence now has forced him to relive missteps he first apologized for more than two months ago — including a Vanity Fair cover story in which he said he was “born to be in it” and comments he once made about his wife, Amy, raising their children “sometimes with my help.”

“Would you say those are mistakes — being on the cover of Vanity Fair?” host Joy Behar asked O’Rourke last week. “It looks elitist? What?”

“Yeah, I think it reinforces that perception of privilege,” O’Rourke replied, explaining that he was “attempting to say that I felt that my calling was in public service. No one is born to be president of the United States of America, least of all me."

The line of questioning put O’Rourke on the defensive. And it did not go unnoticed in Iowa, where O’Rourke was photographed by a Bloomberg News reporter signing copies of the Vanity Fair cover on Monday for a town hall-goer.

Recalling the excitement that greeted O’Rourke when he first announced his campaign, Tom Courtney, a former Iowa state senator and now co-chairman of the Des Moines County Democrats, said “Beto really did good when he was here first. He did good, and he looked good, and everybody liked him.”

“But he’s not wearing well,” Courtney said. “I don’t like the way he seems to jump to apologize for things … That’s something they’ll use on a debate stage against him. They’ll use that against him right away. I can just imagine what Trump would do with that.”

But O'Rourke still has opportunities to reverse his trajectory, not just tonight's CNN town hall. “Running with Beto,” a documentary chronicling O’Rourke’s Senate race last year, airs on HBO later this month. The first Democratic debate comes a month later.

“Just like a baseball season, it is impossible to humanly internalize how long a campaign really is,” said “Running with Beto” director David Modigliani, who closely watched O’Rourke’s campaign last year. “The people who are going to decide this election are barely paying attention to it right now. ... Discussions of restarts and re-introductions will be things that even by the summer will be entirely forgotten.”