This story originally appeared in the January 2018 issue with the headline “What Makes Beto Run?”

It had been two days since Hurricane Harvey made landfall, and the wind and rain continued to lash a wide swath of Texas, leveling houses, flooding cars, and leaving millions without power, clean water, or food. The news reports had gone from bad to catastrophic, with the National Weather Service declaring, “This event is unprecedented and all impacts are unknown.” And Beto O’Rourke was headed toward the storm. When Harvey hit, O’Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, had been in the midst of his month-long “Town Haulin’ Across Texas” tour, introducing himself to voters during the House’s August recess as part of his long-shot bid to unseat Ted Cruz and become the first Texas Democrat to win a statewide race since 1994. But as the reports of the destruction mounted, O’Rourke decided to leave the campaign trail. After speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of some 180 in San Angelo, he’d cancelled his upcoming events in Cisco, Graham, and Abilene and started the journey southeast. His destination was uncertain. Now, on the Monday morning of August 28, O’Rourke’s new Toyota Tundra pickup was driving down Texas Highway 181 toward Victoria, cutting through misty gusts and passing the growing signs of devastation—scattered branches, an overturned tree, traffic lights dangling perilously over intersections, the flat metal roof of a gas station lying on the shoulder. The bed of the pickup was filled with bottled water and Kirkland-brand nonperishables that city officials in Victoria had suggested might make for a helpful contribution. O’Rourke’s chief of staff, David Wysong, was behind the wheel. Another senior aide, Frank Pigulski, called out directions from the backseat, trying to find a navigable route through the cresting rivers and washed-out roads. The congressman himself was sitting shotgun, checking in on new friends from Houston he’d met on the campaign trail. “Miss Ramona, this is Beto O’Rourke, I met you in your living room. I’m callin’ to see how you’re doing!” he said over the speakerphone, greeting Ramona Tennyson Toliver, an 89-year-old neighborhood leader in the Fifth Ward. “I’m doing fine,” she told him. “I do want you to be careful,” she added. “Wear boots, rubber boots, and don’t go out there and be no hero, hear?” O’Rourke promised he wouldn’t do anything rash. “Iván, this is Beto—tell me, how is Houston?” he asked Iván Sánchez, a caseworker in the office of congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Sánchez said he’d been trying to help a family of six with a foot of water in their house, but he’d been struggling to find anyone who could get to them. “I feel useless,” he sighed. Like Sánchez, O’Rourke felt a kind of restless energy. He knew it would be foolish to go barreling into the eye of the storm. He wasn’t a first responder. He probably couldn’t get into Houston anyway, and if he did, it wasn’t hard to imagine the parody-worthy sight of the would-be valiant congressman who needs to get rescued himself. But he couldn’t sit the moment out, either. O’Rourke’s old friend David Guinn told me that the congressman has always been driven by a “let’s make this an adventure” spirit. That was what had guided him on cross-continental punk-rock tours in his early twenties, and it had carried him through his insurgent congressional campaign in 2012, in which he wore out two pairs of shoes walking the streets of El Paso knocking on some 16,000 doors. Sure, O’Rourke was happy to deliver a few supplies to a government office in Victoria that was already receiving items by the semi load. Sure, O’Rourke knew that letting people in Houston know that he cared had value. But the whole reason he’d gotten into politics in the first place was because he wanted to actually do something. So when O’Rourke called Shirelle Franklin, a mother of four whom he’d met at a shelter in Austin, and she told him that her brother, Kerry, and her sister-in-law, Stephanie, were marooned in the town of Cuero, O’Rourke saw a chance to make a difference. The roof of Kerry and Stephanie’s house had caved in, and they’d temporarily moved in with a family friend. They had six children, a dwindling supply of food, water, and toiletries, and, so far, had received no help from local authorities. “Don’t worry,” O’Rourke told Stephanie once he got her on the phone. “We got you covered.” As Pigulski looked up the location of the nearest Walmart on Google Maps, O’Rourke received a text from his district director, Cynthia Cano. “Check it out,” O’Rourke said. “It’s Stephanie’s birthday. We’ll get her a cake.” Two hours later, the Toyota Tundra pulled up to the curb in front of a beige bungalow on Main Street in Cuero. After delivering grocery bags full of supplies to the house, Wysong stayed inside to stealthily ready the cake while O’Rourke went out to the driveway to chat with Stephanie and Kerry about the storm and the challenges of parenting. Suddenly, the familiar “Happy Birthday” melody rang out, all six Franklin children popped out from a side door in song, and Wysong carried the cake to the surprised mother. O’Rourke and his team spent a few minutes in the kitchen, munching on the birthday cake and talking with the family, but they still needed to make the drive to Victoria, so they couldn’t linger. O’Rourke took his leave, as he always did. He told Stephanie and Kerry that he admired their resolve. He scrawled his personal cellphone number on the back of his congressional business card, handed it to the couple, and told them to please call or text him if they needed anything. Then there was the generous handshake, the big smile, and the booming baritone “Adiós!”

O'Rourke greets supporters after a speech in Austin in April. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images

Over the next three days, O’Rourke hopscotched the southeastern part of the state, delivering diapers and socks to a hospital in Port Lavaca, helping an elderly evacuee pack up his belongings from the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, spending an evening hanging out with volunteer firefighters in Rockport, and handing out his cell number to just about every single person he met. During this time, O’Rourke never talked politics, contorted himself to avoid the subject of his Senate campaign, and refrained from uttering the name “Ted Cruz,” except in private to his staff. This didn’t prove very difficult: outside of a few supporters in Houston who greeted him with cries of “Beto!” or “We’re going to do this!” no one on the road even recognized the congressman. To them, O’Rourke was just “Beto from El Paso,” the amiable six-foot-four stranger in a blue button-down, designer jeans, and a West Texas A&M baseball cap. Still, for long stretches of those post-landfall days, O’Rourke couldn’t quite decide why he’d come to southeast Texas in the first place. He wanted to act boldly and meaningfully, but he couldn’t avoid the creeping realization that, in the chaotic aftermath of the storm, he could make only a small impact. One afternoon, after visiting the hospital in Port Lavaca, O’Rourke had his team pull the truck over to the side of the road while they discussed where to go next. “I think what we’re doing is the best I can think of,” he said, “but I don’t know what it amounts to.” When O’Rourke announced his Senate candidacy on March 31, the Texas Tribune wrote, “it is hard to overstate how unknown this third-term Democrat is in both Texas and Washington.” Indeed, many longtime Democratic operatives and state legislators only met him in 2017, and the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that the majority of registered voters in the state either have no opinion of him or don’t know who he is. But there are also signs of a nascent Beto-mania taking hold. Since the beginning of 2017, O’Rourke has been profiled in the Washington Post, the Texas Observer, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone. His time playing in punk-rock bands during his high school and college years has proved irresistible for headline writers, who have identified him as “Ted Cruz’s Punk-Rock Problem” and asserted that his “Punk-Rock Past Could Help Him.” An in-production documentary titled Beto vs. Cruz promises that the coming Senate race will be the “most outrageous and consequential political fight of 2018.” O’Rourke’s fund-raising has been robust, with $3.8 million raised in the second and third quarters of 2017—more than Cruz—and his campaigning has been relentless. O’Rourke plans to visit all 254 counties in Texas before the election, and his traveling town halls have drawn surprisingly large crowds in traditional Republican strongholds like Midland, Amarillo, and Tyler, where he attracted so many people to the restaurant Don Juan on the Square that he had to move the meeting out onto the sidewalk to comply with the fire code. (He answered questions for twenty minutes through a bullhorn.) Even if you weren’t at Don Juan, you might have seen this. Like many of his public events, O’Rourke’s staff broadcast it in real time on Facebook Live. O’Rourke’s growing profile has been driven largely by social media. In June 2016, in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, O’Rourke live-streamed a sit-in by House Democrats to protest Republicans’ refusal to bring gun-control legislation to a floor vote. When Speaker Paul Ryan called a recess and C-SPAN’s cameras went dark, the network used O’Rourke’s feed. In mid-March, O’Rourke and Republican congressman Will Hurd, whose West Texas district includes part of El Paso County, were touring VA hospitals and medical centers in San Antonio when an East Coast blizzard cancelled their flight back to D.C. O’Rourke joked that they should rent a car and drive together. Hurd said he thought it was a great idea. O’Rourke filmed 29 hours of the ensuing road trip for Facebook Live, footage that showed the Democrat and Republican singing along to Johnny Cash, stopping at Whataburger, and talking about everything from first girlfriends to Russian electoral interference. The kumbaya bipartisanship proved a hit on the internet, racking up some 2.5 million views. O’Rourke is more than a decade into his political career, but he continues to portray himself successfully as a fresh-faced outsider. Part of this is due to O’Rourke’s approach to the political process: he’s refusing to take donations from political action committees, favors congressional term limits, shuns outside campaign consultants in favor of trusted El Paso friends, and extols the potential of working across the aisle in an era of partisan knife-fighting. But it’s O’Rourke’s charisma that sells his pitch. He is 45 but comes across as a decade younger. He has a full head of hair and a toothy, boyish smile, and evidence suggests that he has the metabolism of a 16-year-old in the midst of a growth spurt. (O’Rourke is trim and athletic, but his campaign eating habits are more Trump than Obama, with meals that can consist of a burger, a full order of chicken nuggets, and a brownie.) O’Rourke seems to relish saying “fuck” on the stump. He speaks fluent Spanish. He looks like a Kennedy. (Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III, Bobby’s grandson, jokes that O’Rourke is “known as being the best-looking Kennedy in Washington.”) Add to this the fact that O’Rourke’s wife, Amy, is nine years his junior, that his three children are all elementary-school-aged, and that he chose to name his oldest son Ulysses (stump speech joke: “We named him Ulysses because we didn’t have the balls to name him Odysseus”), and O’Rourke overwhelms you with a sense of his vigorousness. O’Rourke is more than a decade into his political career, but he continues to portray himself successfully as a fresh-faced outsider. But politics, despite the old adage, isn’t a popularity contest, particularly not in an era when party identification is so entrenched. O’Rourke could have the personal appeal of Jesus, J. J. Watt, and Sam Houston rolled up in one, and he’d still be a Democrat running in Texas, which would make him the heavy underdog and the inheritor of the longest statewide losing streak of any Democratic party in the country. As Texas’s senior senator John Cornyn told Politico: “I know Beto, and he’s a good guy, but I think this is a suicide mission.” Since the Democrats last won a statewide race more than two decades ago, hallucinations of a coming restoration have been frequent and fantastical, with a series of would-be saviors vanquished by consistently large margins. Key to this cycle has been an ability to forget and a repeated hope that this time it’s different. And going into the last big Texas election, in 2014, Democrats seemed convinced that they finally had a chance to stage a real comeback. “After crawling on its belly for two dismal decades, the Texas Democratic Party has suddenly found a spring in its step,” Robert Draper wrote in this magazine in August 2013. Barack Obama had won reelection. San Antonio mayor Julián Castro had delivered a widely praised keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Jeremy Bird, field wizard of Obama’s 2012 race, had decamped to Austin to turn Texas blue, forming a political action committee called Battleground Texas. The Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, Fort Worth state senator Wendy Davis, was amassing some of the same hype as O’Rourke is now. In the end, Davis lost to Greg Abbott by a 20-point margin, and Democrats took to calling Bird’s organization Battlescam Texas. Talk to political scientists, pollsters, operatives—both Democratic and Republican—around the state and you’ll hear plenty of reasons why, despite the surprising crowds in places like San Angelo and Tyler, O’Rourke is almost certain to go down in defeat, even if he manages to improve on Davis’s numbers. O’Rourke’s first problem is that he’s the only high-profile Democrat running for any statewide office, which means that he won’t be able to count on, say, the Joaquin Castro for Governor campaign to help mobilize volunteers and turn out new voters. His second problem is that the national Senate map in 2018 will force the Democrats to defend 26 seats, including 10 in states that Donald Trump won. The priority of the party’s Senate campaign committee and its major donors and super-PAC financiers will be to save vulnerable incumbents. Their choice will be easy: they can either fund a Lone-Star Hail Mary or—for the same price—help sitting U.S. senators in Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Indiana. O’Rourke’s third problem is simple arithmetic. As of the 2016 election, Republican voters still significantly outnumbered Democratic voters in the state. Trump performed terribly in Texas, posting the worst results for a Republican presidential candidate since Bob Dole, in 1996. Trump did particularly poorly with the kinds of suburban, college-educated voters who helped turn Texas into a Republican state in the first place. But he still won by 800,000 votes. O’Rourke knows all of this, and he can’t tell you exactly how he’s going to beat the odds. When I asked him about what it would take to put together the kind of winning coalition that Obama did nationwide, the congressman said, “I’m not that smart or strategic, I’m not very tactical, I’m not into carving up the state. I think there’s a lot of energy right now everywhere in Texas.” There are three phrases that O’Rourke repeats at nearly every campaign event: The first is “Texas isn’t a red state or a blue state, it’s a nonvoting state,” which is O’Rourke’s way of saying that he needs a lot of first-time voters to come to the polls in order for him to have a chance. The second is “There’s clearly something happening right now,” which reflects O’Rourke’s belief that the Trump presidency and the radicalization of the Republican party are initiating a tectonic shift in the state’s political orientation. The third is “I’m here,” and it’s O’Rourke’s game plan: if he shows up everywhere that he can, he will convince voters—even longtime Republicans—that he cares, that he’s capable, and that he might just deserve a shot to represent them. Eric Benson Hurricane Harvey didn’t pause O’Rourke’s campaign for long. He had too many people to meet, too much money to raise, too many traveling town halls in Mexican restaurants and middle-school auditoriums to attend. On a Wednesday in mid-September, O’Rourke was making the rounds of college campuses in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. After a morning kaffeeklatsch with Texas Christian University’s fledgling College Democrats, O’Rourke drove east to address a crowd of about two hundred in an auditorium at the University of Texas at Dallas. His jacket was off, his shirt sleeves were rolled up, and after he strode onto the stage to hearty applause, he spoke clearly and concisely, with nary an “um,” forgoing notes and occasionally dropping his g’s in a folksy cadence. O’Rourke’s standard stump speech checks off all the boxes for a liberal politician in the aftermath of the 2016 election, which is to say it’s the kind of speech that you’d expect to slay on a college campus. O’Rourke is pro–universal healthcare, pro–universal background checks, pro-Dreamer, anti–border wall, and in favor of restraint in foreign policy and a clear end to America’s decade-and-a-half-long wars. (His most heterodox position for some on the left is his support of free-trade agreements.) He rarely mentions Cruz, but when he does—to criticize his hyperconservative rigidity, to skewer him for running for president from his first day in office instead of representing the people of Texas—the senator’s name is sometimes met with audible hisses. But the heart of O’Rourke’s appeal to Texas voters—and the reason he’s running—is grander than policy positions or political attacks. As he spoke to the students, he framed the coming election as an epochal moral choice. “Everything that we care about is on the line for this country today,” O’Rourke said. “We know exactly what direction we’re headed in when the president of the United States of America says he wants to ban all people of one religion from coming into this country. We know where things are going when, given our relative security and safety on the border, he wants to spend $25 billion of your money building a thirty-foot-high, two-thousand-mile, pure-concrete wall to separate us from Mexico. We know where things are going when he attacks the press as the enemy of the people.” We needed to think about how the future would judge us, O’Rourke said, and he painted a scene. One day, he imagined, when his three children were old enough to understand the full weight of this historical moment, they would ask, “Dad, when all this stuff was going on, where were you? What did you do? Did you stand up? Were you counted?” O’Rourke suggested the students imagine themselves in a similar scenario and ask themselves those questions. Would they be part of the so-called resistance? Or would they stay home and watch as Cruz and Trump continued to impose their will on America? After O’Rourke finished, more than one hundred audience members lined up to come onstage and get their photo taken with the candidate. The procession took over 45 minutes, with O’Rourke turning each interaction into a short conversation. He heard the concerns of a disabled veteran and told him that the G.I. Bill owed him more. He thanked a John Kasich supporter for pledging his vote. He recommended Elvis Costello’s song “Alison” to a girl named Allison. O’Rourke is savvy enough to know that these interactions can have a compounding effect. “When we take a picture, share it on Facebook,” he told more than one student. “Let them know why you were here and what you heard.”

Finishing a three-mile race in Washington last spring. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call Via AP

One thing O’Rourke doesn’t talk about in detail during campaign appearances is his life story. He can’t offer an inspirational, up-from-his-bootstraps tale, like Wendy Davis, nor can he point to the grueling journey of an immigrant parent, like Ted Cruz. Instead, at UT-Dallas O’Rourke championed the border city in which he was born and has lived for most of his life, an “incredibly magical place” that forms a “truly binational community” that he frames as a metaphor for everything Trump’s vision of America is not. O’Rourke has grown into this deep appreciation for El Paso over time. He was born in the city in 1972 as Robert Francis O’Rourke, but despite his Irish American heritage, he was known from infancy by the Spanish nickname Beto, a way to distinguish him from his maternal grandfather, Robert Williams, and a nod to El Paso’s biculturalism. O’Rourke’s mother, Melissa, ran a high-end furniture store that her own mother had opened in 1951. O’Rourke’s father, Pat, was an entrepreneur who served a term as El Paso county judge in the mid-eighties. Pat, who was killed in 2001 when a motorist struck his recumbent bicycle, was an instinctual politician, and when O’Rourke was growing up, his father offered him an education in his future career. Pat would bring his son to election night parties and invite famous friends over to the house, among them Governor Mark White and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. (Pat was Jackson’s Texas co-chair.) Dinners out often meant watching Pat, the small-city macher, make the rounds to each table, shaking hands, telling jokes, promising to follow up. “There was no one he did not know or who did not know him,” O’Rourke told me about his father. “I can’t tell you how many people since he died have told me, ‘I was your dad’s best friend.’ ” Pat’s gregariousness made him fun to be around, but he wasn’t always an easy father to have. He was brash and opinionated, and he didn’t soft-pedal his high expectations for his son. After spending his freshman year at El Paso High School, O’Rourke transferred to Woodberry Forest, a traditional all-male boarding school in Madison County, Virginia. Woodberry offered rigorous academics, but, O’Rourke told me, the move was also driven by a desire to defuse growing tensions with his father. “It was a way to get some distance from someone who was so dominant.” As O’Rourke left El Paso for Woodberry, he was in the midst of discovering a new passion that would dominate his life over the next decade: punk rock. O’Rourke’s immersion into the music began as a fan. He and two El Paso friends, Mike Stevens and Arlo Klahr, would pore over issues of the subculture fanzine Maximumrocknroll, send away for albums from Washington, D.C.–based Dischord Records, and, when O’Rourke was home on breaks, attend shows at a ramshackle club called Sound Seas. They occasionally got out instruments and made their own music, but, Stevens remembered, “We spent most of the time designing flyers and coming up with band names.” O’Rourke championed El Paso as an “incredibly magical place” that he frames as a metaphor for everything Trump’s vision of America is not. By the time O’Rourke entered Columbia University, in the fall of 1991, he and his friends had learned to play well enough to get gigs, particularly after they recruited a younger El Paso musician named Cedric Bixler-Zavala as their drummer. (Bixler-Zavala would go on to be the front man of the popular rock groups At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta.) The summers after O’Rourke’s sophomore and junior years, the quartet, known as Foss, staged North American tours, driving in Klahr’s father’s Plymouth Satellite station wagon to play dates in the U.S. and Canada. During the school year in New York, O’Rourke was playing music too, mixing with a scene that produced the bands Jonathan Fire*Eater and the Walkmen. But O’Rourke wasn’t a typical punk rocker. He was clean-cut, wore button-downs and slacks, and captained the Columbia rowing crew. During the season, he would wake up at 4:30 a.m. to pick up the team’s van and drive his fellow rowers the six miles from campus to the boathouse at the top of Manhattan. O’Rourke graduated with a degree in English in the spring of 1995, and for the next several years he lived a kind of artsy, aimless post-collegiate existence. While Cruz, his future Senate opponent, was completing prestigious judicial clerkships, including one for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, O’Rourke was holding down a series of entry-level and temp jobs. He did a few-month stint as a live-in, part-time nanny for a family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, helped his maternal uncle grow a small internet-service provider, and worked as an art mover for a company called Hedley’s Humpers. (“We’d have a Picasso or marble or an ancient samurai sword,” O’Rourke remembered. “I can’t believe they trusted us with that stuff.”) Not long after O’Rourke graduated, he’d fallen into a funk, feeling lonely and struggling with what to do next. “I was the most depressed I’ve ever been in my life,” O’Rourke told me. But that period wasn’t long lived. In early 1996, Stevens and Klahr moved to New York, and along with O’Rourke’s college friend David Guinn, the three former Foss bandmates found a two-thousand-square-foot factory loft in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that cost each of them only $130 a month. The space needed work, but that was the fun of it. They erected walls to create bedrooms, installed the toilet and appliances, and cleared out stacks of waist-high debris. O’Rourke’s ambition at the time was to write fiction, essays, maybe something else—“I had a vague notion that I wanted to be in publishing”—and he got a job as a proofreader for the H. W. Wilson Company, a publisher of reference books for libraries, to get his foot in the door of the industry. In his off hours, he worked on short stories and jotted stray thoughts and song fragments into notebooks. But after a few years, O’Rourke felt restless once again. The long commute to his publishing job in the Bronx was getting to him, and so was the DIY Brooklyn loft, where nothing quite worked. The air-conditioner-less summers were humid and sweaty. The winters were cold and harsh. O’Rourke often woke up to what he called “breathe it and see it” mornings, when the building’s landlord hadn’t turned on the heat. When O’Rourke left El Paso for Woodberry in tenth grade, he hadn’t imagined that he’d ever return. By the summer of 1998, he was ready to go home. “I think by that point, it really came into focus for me how exceptional El Paso is. I missed family, the way of life in El Paso,” O’Rourke said. “And it was becoming clear to me that I was not a New Yorker.”

Backpacking in the Pecos wilderness with his father, Pat, in the late nineties. Courtesy Beto O'Rourke O'Rourke (center) during his days rowing crew at Columbia. Courtesy Beto O'Rourke Left: Backpacking in the Pecos wilderness with his father, Pat, in the late nineties. Courtesy Beto O'Rourke Right: O'Rourke (center) during his days rowing crew at Columbia. Courtesy Beto O'Rourke