WASHINGTON -- El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat hoping to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz in November, said Monday that he would support impeaching President Donald Trump if a vote were held today.

Asked by KFYO Radio conservative radio host Chad Hasty in Lubbock if he's "seen enough yet to where you'd vote to impeach the president," O'Rourke said, "The answer is yes."

“I want to be straight with you,” O'Rourke continued. “I’ve seen an attempt, no matter how ham-handed, to collude with a foreign government in our national election. I’ve seen an effort to obstruct justice in the investigation of what happened in the 2016 election.”

And he added he doesn’t think that Trump "has the fitness or competence or judgment to be in that position.”

O'Rourke has previously said he'd support impeachment but didn't view the political conditions as ripe. In an October 2017 interview with The Dallas Morning News, for example, he echoed impeachment calls by Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, but said he wants the special counsel probe led by former FBI director Robert Mueller to first run its course.

O'Rourke, along with the majority of House Democrats, has twice joined Republicans to vote against Green's impeachment efforts, with many Democrats saying the move was premature.

During a campaign event in Sealy, Texas, last December, after he voted against Green’s first push on the House floor, O’Rourke said that the articles of impeachment didn’t “have anything that would allow our colleagues on the other side of the aisle” to vote for impeachment with sufficient political cover back home.

“I want to make sure that when we do this, if we do this, that we do it right and we are successful,” he told the crowd. “Nothing would be worse ... than for us to move forward on the effort to impeach or even to impeach the president and have the trial move to the Senate and to find the president acquitted. It would embolden and strengthen him and it would end the effort to hold him accountable and responsible.”

In a follow-up interview with The News on Monday, O'Rourke said protecting the "independence and integrity of the Mueller investigation" is paramount but that impeachment is not high on his priority list, noting via text message: "I have not co-sponsored the impeachment resolution nor have I brought it up at a single town hall meeting."

Still, “If someone else does, as Chad did today, I tell them that if the vote were today, based on what I know about the president’s effort to obstruct justice, the answer is yes.”

Impeaching a president is a two-step process that first requires the House to adopt articles of impeachment, akin to an indictment, followed by a trial in the Senate.

Asked how he’d approach the issue if elected to the Senate, O’Rourke told Hasty that lawmakers "must await all the facts, all the truth” that could emerge from Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling into the 2016 election and potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Trump has maintained his innocence and repeatedly called the probe a "witch hunt," a word he re-upped on Monday after FBI agents raided the Manhattan office of his private attorney, Michael Cohen. "I have this witch hunt constantly going on," Trump said, according to pool reports, calling the raid "an attack on our country."

Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have been using the possibility of Trump’s impeachment to motivate GOP voter turnout.

In kicking off his general election campaign last week, Cruz reportedly warned that impeachment is on the table if Democrats take back Congress and played a video depicting hypothetical news reports of "Senate Majority Leader Schumer" announcing Trump's impeachment trial.

A Cruz campaign spokeswoman circulated news of O’Rourke’s comments on Twitter on Monday but declined to comment for this story.

Despite his support, political conditions won’t be favorable to impeachment any time soon, O’Rourke reiterated Monday, given that the GOP controls both the House and Senate.

Impeachment “doesn’t make any sense right now," he said, and won't "until you have reached the point that the facts are so compelling” that Republican lawmakers can explain to constituents how they voted to impeach “the president of their own party.

“We are not there yet," he continued. "I'm going to stay focused on the issues that we can make a difference on right now, and we'll leave this until we get the conclusion of that investigation."