Subscribe to Off Message on Apple Podcasts here. | Subscribe via Stitcher here.



Beto O’Rourke wants to be a little more Conor Lamb, a little less Jon Ossoff.


O’Rourke, the Texas congressman who is running for U.S. Senate against Ted Cruz, is looking to live out a Democratic fantasy of turning Texas blue by taking down the only Republican who gets Democrats nearly as riled up as President Donald Trump, in a race no one thinks he can win.

But he insists he doesn’t want to become the next national Democratic cause along the way—that kind of attention can create a backlash, and with the background of first winning his House seat despite Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigning against him, O’Rourke doesn’t see the value of outside help.

“It may hurt,” O’Rourke told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “My takeaway is, I don’t know that it ever helps.”

Democrats in Texas and beyond can’t tell whether making O’Rourke into a national rallying cry is the only way to win or if it’s the only way to ensure he never comes close.

“Running in Texas is expensive. I raised $43 million, and I needed another 20,” said Wendy Davis, the former Democratic state senator who became a national cause in her 2014 run for Texas governor after mounting a headline-grabbing filibuster in an attempt to stop a law that would restrict abortion rights in the state.

Davis lost by 21 points. She expects O’Rourke will do “far better,” in part because of the difference in the national political climate between 2014 and 2018—and in part because she expects that the 43,000 people who’ve chipped in a few dollars for O’Rourke will be motivated to help push him to do more.

O’Rourke wants to be seen as a renegade, running against all the conventional wisdom and usual politicking. He claimed victory on primary night in an off-kilter webcam Facebook Live chat from the dining room table of the row house he shares with a few colleagues on Capitol Hill; he’s planning to drive through all 254 counties in Texas (he’s hit 226 so far); he’s refusing to spend money on focus groups or pollsters; he casually curses in interviews—and makes sure he’s doing interviews all the time. He points out that he voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader and insists he got in the race against Cruz without any commitment of help from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

All that can generate some eye rolls in Washington—like from people who point out that the DSCC doesn’t commit to help any nonincumbent a year out, or who laugh at how much press he does—but it’s also been generating hundreds of people showing up at events in parts of the state that haven’t seen a candidate in years.

“I can understand how people think that this is crazy that I think that I’m going to win. But so much of this is crazy. Right? Like, what is this guy doing from El Paso? El Paso has produced precisely zero statewide victories in the history of the state of Texas. Last time a Democrat won was in 1988, for U.S. Senate, Lloyd Bentsen. So why in the world, against Ted Cruz of all people? That guy almost won the Republican presidential nomination,” O’Rourke said. “I think the confidence is borne not out of any kind of mental illness, but out of what I am seeing and hearing.”

“In a state like Texas, you’re not going to win unless you’re fearless. And Beto’s fearless,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, who predicted O’Rourke is on his way to do better than any Democrat statewide since Ann Richards, Texas’ charismatic late governor. “He still has a ways to go to catch up to Ted [Cruz], but he’s a lot closer than anybody ever believed he’d be at this point in the election.”

National help isn’t materializing for O’Rourke, but that’s the way he wants it. Ever since Georgia’s special election for U.S. House last June—when the Democratic candidate, an out-of-district documentary filmmaker, raised $23 million and still lost—Democrats who’ve avoided becoming national causes have been able to compete in elections with bigger impacts and closer numbers.

Of celebrity support, O’Rourke says, Alyssa Milano and others can keep their tweets.

“She is, I am sure, a great person,” he said. “But this is going to be decided by Texas and by Texans.”

Click here to subscribe and listen to the full podcast to hear O’Rourke discuss some of his old punk rock lyrics and why he ends every conversation with “Adios.”

So far, swearing off PAC money and relying on small donors, he’s raised $8 million, including tripling Cruz’s haul in the last quarter of 2017. Democrats got excited: What if Texas becomes the seat that tips them into the majority this year? (They’re so excited, they’re using math that assumes they’ll hold every Senate seat in Trump country and have at least one other pickup.)

Then again, Cruz already has more money on hand, has a national fundraising base from his presidential run to tap, and is assumed to be in line for as much outside money as he could possibly want. A spokesperson for Cruz didn’t respond when asked to make the senator available for an interview.

To date, Cruz’s response to O’Rourke’s primary victory in early March—which he did with less than 62 percent of the vote, worrying Texas Democrats that he may not be able to unite the party in a way that matches his media appeal—has been in the form of releasing a country jingle calling O’Rourke a “liberal man” (in contrast to being a tough and honest Texan); mocking him for going by “Beto,” the nickname he’s used since childhood; and declaring, “he wants those open borders and wants to take our guns.”

O’Rourke responded to the nickname jab by tweeting a photo of himself as a young child in a sweater with “Beto” on it. As for being a liberal, “I don’t know where I am on the spectrum,” O’Rourke says, though he’s fine banning AR-15s, has sponsored only bipartisan bills in the House and was one of the two dozen Democrats who broke with the party to give Obama authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. As for not being tough, O’Rourke said, “I don’t know what that stuff means.”

What he does see in Cruz is a person who’s crumpled on many of his beliefs and principled stands in search of support for another presidential run.

“I don’t know how else to explain the turnabout from asking the delegates at the Republican National Convention to vote their conscience to the picture of him at a phone bank dialing for Donald Trump; from saying that ‘I’m not in the habit of endorsing people who malign my wife and my father,’ to being his most full-throated supporter in the Senate right now,” O’Rourke said. “I don’t know what else explains it.”

He treasures the brief conversation he had with Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who sat in the row ahead of him at the State of the Union and leaned over to tell him, “You can do this.” Trump won Alabama by 28 points and Texas by only 9, O’Rourke noted, and Roy Moore was polling better in Alabama on the eve of that election than Cruz is in Texas today.

Among O’Rourke’s friends in Washington who let themselves believe, even for a second, that he might win, their brains start tap dancing to the next step. The vice presidential shortlist for sure, they say—maybe even president, if he can take Texas with him.

O’Rourke pledges to serve his full six-year term if elected, and to limit himself to two terms, but loops that discussion right back to his big attack on Cruz, who, he complains, became so quickly consumed with running for president after winning (on the same day in 2012 that O’Rourke was first elected to Congress himself) that they’ve rarely talked about anything in six years serving together in the Texas delegation.

That’s held since he announced his campaign.

“The only thing I can remember him saying is maybe the first time we saw each other after I announced, he said something like, ‘It’s going to be an interesting campaign,’ or something. You know, nice, you know, a nice thing. And he had just, for the first time in the five years that he had been in the Senate, had just visited El Paso, which is the sixth-largest city,” O’Rourke said. “And I said, ‘Hey, heard you were in El Paso. We—as an El Pasoan, as a constituent of yours—are grateful that you showed up. Hope it was a good visit.’”