On the day Beto O’Rourke announced he was running for president, Jesus Simental helped him deliver an answer to the skepticism that had been swirling around the Texas Democrat’s presidential run. Simental chipped in $30 or $40 — a tiny piece of the staggering $6.1 million O’Rourke raised online that day, beating out even the first-day total from online fundraising behemoth Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“I’m disappointed in the result,” Simental said. “I don’t know enough about the political sciences to know why he hasn’t caught on. But it’s been disappointing to me.”

If he has to blame someone, Simental said, he blames the media. “They really wanted to damper any little flame that did exist. And then he had the whole rolling out his campaign again, and that’s been disappointing, too.”

BuzzFeed News spoke to more than a dozen small-dollar donors, like Simental, who said they gave O’Rourke money on the day he announced his run for president — in what was, for many of them, their first-ever political donation. Back then, they were excited, energized, and hopeful about the campaign.


As O’Rourke has slipped in the polls and out of the national spotlight, most echoed Simental’s feelings of disappointment, frustration, and confusion, even as they still supported O’Rourke's candidacy. And many share a feeling that O’Rourke’s relative absence from national media at the beginning of his campaign is partly at fault for his struggles.

“Oh my God, I think he needs to get out there more,” said Cynthia Esparza, an El Paso resident who said that O’Rourke was the first political candidate she had ever given money to. “I love his philosophy of running for Senate. He was going county to county, and that’s great — but you keep doing that on a national level, and people are going to take your spotlight away.”

Who was taking O’Rourke’s spotlight? Esparza, who still backs O’Rourke, thought immediately of “Mayor Pete.”

Pete Buttigieg hung like a specter over almost all of O’Rourke’s small-dollar donors who spoke to BuzzFeed News. Two said they were now backing Buttigieg altogether, having switched over from O’Rourke, who had been their top choice when he announced. Nearly everyone else brought up Buttigieg, too.

It wasn’t that they no longer supported O’Rourke, many of his donors said: He was still many peoples’ top choice. It was that they thought he had lost ground to the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“Everyone was so excited when [O’Rourke] got into the race, and now it’s Mayor Pete. I just wish there was a little more coverage, I guess,” said Lisa Cushman, a retired school admissions director from Massachusetts.


“The other day, a friend of mine said, ‘Where is Beto?’ And I said, ‘Clearly you’re not following him on Instagram,’” Cushman said. “But if you don’t follow him, you’re not really sure what’s happening.”

From the day he launched his presidential campaign in mid-March — with the exception of a Vanity Fair magazine cover story — O’Rourke’s team mostly kept him out of the national media spotlight. He didn’t do a CNN town hall until late May, a platform other major candidates took advantage of much earlier.

Instead, O’Rourke focused on a flurry of small campaign stops across 18 states, talking to hundreds of voters — mostly eschewing big rallies favored by many top Democratic contenders, like Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. It was, his campaign has said, a deliberate choice to focus on grassroots organizing and connecting with voters, not the national spotlight.

On his first campaign trip, a phalanx of cameras followed him to stop after stop across Iowa, but O’Rourke avoided giving exclusive time to national press. On the second trip, there were fewer cameras, and then after that, fewer still. A campaign reset of sorts last month has seen O’Rourke making dramatically more cable news appearances, including the CNN town hall and regular interviews on Sunday news shows.

“We’re grateful for the hundreds of thousands of individuals across America who have already made small-dollar donations and joined us as we work to build the largest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen,” said Chris Evans, a spokesperson for O’Rourke’s campaign, in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Refusing to accept a dime from PACs over the last five years, Beto always puts his full trust in people and will continue to run a campaign focused on relentlessly showing up everywhere, for everyone, every single day.”




Matthew Hunt, a manager at an automobile company in Kansas City, had been following O’Rourke throughout his Senate run. He liked “everything he heard,” he said: As someone who considered himself socially liberal and fiscally conservative, he liked O’Rourke’s message of unity and his place outside the political establishment. He saw O’Rourke, 46, as a candidate who could bring “generational change.”

Hunt gave $100 to O’Rourke on the day he launched. But the more he learned about Pete Buttigieg, the more Hunt found his allegiance shifting. He found Buttigieg “more inspiring than Obama.” Hunt, who is gay, loved that Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, was a teacher, just like his fiancé. They drove together to South Bend, a nine-hour drive, to watch Buttigieg officially launch his campaign.

“I’ve always been involved in politics, but I’ve never done anything like that,” Hunt said. “I went to Iowa to see Beto, too, and it’s a different connection.”

It’s not that Hunt would be unhappy if O’Rourke won the nomination, he said. But there’s something different about Buttigieg. “In the Midwest, it’s incredible to see a gay candidate that’s gotten so far,” he said.

Tina Reid, a librarian and military spouse stationed with her husband in Okinawa, Japan, is “wavering” in her support for O’Rourke, she said, after donating to him in the early days of his campaign. It’s not that she doesn’t like him, she says: She loves how he rejects PAC money and the Washington establishment, and she said his "likability" reminds her of Robert F. Kennedy.

But the Democratic field is so big, with so many big names, Reid said, that it has given her pause. “I wonder how he’s going to be able to compete in the long haul,” Reid said. “We have a ways to go, but he’s been falling behind, lately. It’s just too early to tell.”