It’s not easy to get Beto O’Rourke to speak disparagingly about anyone. I’ve tried. He will condemn divisiveness, injustice, bad policies, inequality, and the corruption of American politics by corporate money. He believes our democracy is in danger. He’s running for the Democratic Party’s 2020 Presidential nomination, so these are not unexpected themes, and yet O’Rourke, who is tall and spare and deep-voiced, delivers them with unusual earnestness. He admits that the line that sparks the most reliable applause from his campaign crowds ends with the phrase “defeat Donald Trump.” But he doesn’t use it much. The big problems—climate change, health care, immigration, hyper-partisanship—didn’t originate with Trump, after all. O’Rourke regularly invokes a vision of national unity as the only way forward. “All of us have a seat at the table. All of us matter,” he says. “I want to show up for everybody.”

What, you may wonder, does that mean? Texas got a preview of this vaulting ambition, this post-partisan show-up politics, when O’Rourke challenged Ted Cruz for his U.S. Senate seat in 2018. No Democrat had won statewide office in Texas since 1994. O’Rourke, who is a youthful forty-six, was an obscure three-term congressman from El Paso, a border town far removed from the halls of Texas power and wealth. He vowed to visit all two hundred and fifty-four counties in Texas, and he did, usually driving himself. “We went to places so red you could see them glowing from outer space,” he says. “Places that went ninety-seven per cent for Trump. Nobody had bothered to visit those people before. I learned so much. If you want to serve people, you gotta listen to them.” He live-streamed his travels on Facebook. He never hired a pollster or a political adviser. He refused donations from political-action committees and corporations. And the campaign gained traction. Volunteers started liking, sharing, leafletting, knocking on doors.

The world beyond Texas took note after a video clip from a town hall in Houston drew forty-four million views in a couple of weeks. O’Rourke got an audience question about N.F.L. players taking a knee during the national anthem. Was that not disrespectful to members of the armed forces? “My short answer is no, I don’t think it’s disrespectful,” O’Rourke said. Not a practitioner of the sound bite, he then gave a four-minute response that soared through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, through Taylor Branch’s book “Parting the Waters” and Rosa Parks. He placed the N.F.L. protests in that civil-rights tradition, an effort to call attention to violence against black youth today: “I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, anytime, anywhere, anyplace. Thank you very much for asking the question. I appreciate it.”

For many Americans feeling battered by Trump, it was an introduction to an eloquent new politician. Small donations poured in; the campaign raised, in the end, nearly eighty million dollars, the largest amount in U.S. history for a Senate race. Ellen DeGeneres invited O’Rourke on her show, as did Stephen Colbert. Celebrities lined up to endorse him—LeBron James, Lin-Manuel Miranda. And he managed to give Cruz a scare on Election Day, losing by less than three percentage points and receiving more votes than any Democrat ever had in Texas. Turnout among young people was up five hundred per cent. The down-ballot effects were dramatic, as Democrats flipped two House seats, made gains in the state legislature, and swept the cities. Seventeen African-American women won judicial races in Harris County, where Houston is situated.

The logic of following a near-miss Senate campaign with a run for the Presidency is not immediately obvious. There is, after all, another Senate seat, currently occupied by John Cornyn, up for grabs in Texas in 2020. But O’Rourke had serious momentum, as well as prominent fans. As he considered a run, Oprah Winfrey practically begged him on national television, “What’s it going to take for you to say yes?” In a straw poll conducted in December by MoveOn.org, O’Rourke came in first among potential Democratic candidates, beating out Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. He decided that this was the year. His campaign raised more than six million dollars on the first day, a record. His early rallies in Iowa and New Hampshire were raucous and packed.

Since that initial rush, however, O’Rourke has steadily sunk into the morass of a race with nearly two dozen candidates. His standing in the polls has tumbled to sixth place. A media consensus seems to have formed that he is a handsome lightweight, an entitled child of privilege who has “failed up” all his life. While O’Rourke has been assailed for a variety of flaws—gaffes, inexperience, tactical errors—Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has displaced him as the fresh young face. O’Rourke, unfazed, carries on with his upbeat, heavily scheduled, literally hard-driving run. By mid-May, according to his staff, he had driven more than six thousand miles, through fourteen states, held more than a hundred and fifty town-hall meetings, visited thirty-two college campuses, and answered more than a thousand questions.

I asked O’Rourke if his emphasis on “everybody,” on a restored social comity, didn’t serve to mask some of the hard realities of a polarized country. We were driving—that is, he was driving—in a rented minivan from Sioux City, Iowa, to Storm Lake, seventy miles east. Two aides tended to their phones in the back seat. It was a foul night, cold and rainy, thick fog. O’Rourke did not dispute the premise: there wasn’t always a win-win to be had.

A stark example occurred to me. In Austin, before an O’Rourke rally, I had encountered five white men milling in the shadows of a deserted bank. They were carrying American flags, Texas state flags, and AR-15 rifles. Their leader, a big guy with a big beard, said they were from a group called Open Carry Texas, and, yes, their weapons were loaded. They were “Second Amendment absolutists” on their way to O’Rourke’s rally. “Like most Democrats, he probably thinks the Constitution is a living, breathing document that needs to be updated,” the big man said. “I don’t agree.”

In Davenport, Iowa, O’Rourke visits the owners of businesses that were damaged in recent flooding. His climate plan has been praised by Greenpeace and the League of Conservation Voters but criticized by other environmental groups for being too modest in its goals. Photograph by Bill McCullough for The New Yorker

In fact, O’Rourke supports universal background checks for gun sales and a ban on the sale of military-grade weapons. In the car, I pointed out that if he got his way on those laws, the Open Carry Texas dudes might not view it as a win-win.

He laughed softly. “Right, yeah—they come see me in El Paso with their guns.” He sounded almost fond of them. Once, he said, they were protesting outside a meeting. “So we invited them in and gave them the microphone. Said, ‘Hey, ask whatever question you want, make your case in front of everybody. We all could stand to learn something. Let’s hear it.’ And we had an exchange, listened civilly, politely. And one gentleman, one of the protesters, came up to me afterward and gave me his card. Said he didn’t agree with me about anything but he was impressed we were there and we listened to him. If folks say, ‘You want to take our guns,’ I say, ‘No way. Keep that AR-15. Continue to use it responsibly. You know what you’re doing with it. I just don’t think we need to sell any more into our communities.’ ”