It’s nine P.M. on a Thursday night and Beto O’Rourke is trying to manage a couple of life-altering and possibly world-historical political events while also driving his family home from a Mexican restaurant. Donald Trump will touch down in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso in four days to hold a rally and whip up excitement for a wall along the border with Mexico. O’Rourke’s iPhone is pinging with texts asking what he plans to do about it—and also whether he’s going to run for president of the United States of America.

Henry, age eight, weighs in from the back of the Toyota Tundra.

“Dad, if you run for president, I’m going to cry all day,” he says.

“Just the one day?” asks O’Rourke, hopefully.

“Every day,” says Henry.

Daughter Molly, freckle-faced and clever, astutely observes, “The White House is going to be all wet.” Earlier that day, the 10-year-old declared cheerily, “I want to live in the White House!” O’Rourke’s eldest, 12-year-old Ulysses, named for the hero of the Homeric classic that Beto O’Rourke has said he cherishes, delivers the final word: “I only want you to run if you’re gonna win.”

For a potential presidential candidate, Trump’s visit is a gift, but one that could easily be bobbled or squandered. O’Rourke is trying to organize a counter-rally, but he is meeting stiff resistance from local activists whose big idea is to stage a protest outside Trump’s rally. “They’re insisting on their event. They just want us to come in and support,” he tells me. O’Rourke thinks a protest is exactly wrong and would play right into Trump’s hands. “I gotta think, What does his team want?” he says of Trump. “What are they expecting us to do? Some calculation went into this. So is that what they’re looking for?”

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Characteristically, O’Rourke wants a more optimistic approach, one that doesn’t let the president define the terms. And so he’ll spend the next 24 hours carefully steering allies to his idea of staging an upbeat “March for Truth,” which would just happen to star El Paso’s best counter-argument to Donald Trump: himself.

And it will all work out—if he can just keep his eyes on the road. “Motherfuckers!” he says after darting into a busy intersection while ferrying the brood home from school that day. Then he catches himself: “Sorry, kids.”

Beto O’Rourke’s Mission-style home in the El Paso neighborhood of Sunset Heights is the site of a famous 1915 meeting between Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and U.S. general Hugh Scott. While renovating it, O’Rourke had a wrought-iron fence around the property removed, save for a few feet of it around a pistachio tree. In late February, he came home to find Republican protesters live-streaming video and asking why he still had a fence, mimicking Trump’s remark that politicians like walls when they’re around their own homes. “I said, ‘Come up with me and I will take you to our front door,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘This is just decorative fencing.’ ”

“Why do you have walls in your house?” they retorted. “Why do you have a door?”

Behind the door, in the O’Rourke living room, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf contains a section for rock memoirs (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a favorite) and a stack of LPs (the Clash, Nina Simone) but also a sizable collection of presidential biographies, including Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon B. Johnson. Arranged in historical order, the biographies suggest there’s been some reflection on the gravity of the presidency. But there’s also some political poetry to it, a sense that O’Rourke might be destined for this shelf. He has an aura. Most places he goes in El Paso, he’s dogged by cries of “Beto! Beto!” Oprah Winfrey, who helped anoint Barack Obama in 2008, practically begged him to run at an event in New York City at the beginning of February.

Settling into an armchair in his living room, he tries to make sense of his rise. “I honestly don’t know how much of it was me,” he says. “But there is something abnormal, super-normal, or I don’t know what the hell to call it, that we both experience when we’re out on the campaign trail.”

O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, an educator nine years his junior, both describe the moment they first witnessed the power of O’Rourke’s gift. It was in Houston, the third stop on O’Rourke’s two-year Senate campaign against Ted Cruz. “Every seat was taken, every wall, every space in the room was filled with probably a thousand people,” recalls Amy O’Rourke. “You could feel the floor moving almost. It was not totally clear that Beto was what everybody was looking for, but just like that people were so ready for something. So that was totally shocking. I mean, like, took-my-breath-away shocking.”

For O’Rourke, what followed was a near-mystical experience. “I don’t ever prepare a speech,” he says. “I don’t write out what I’m going to say. I remember driving to that, I was, like, ‘What do I say? Maybe I’ll just introduce myself. I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. Because every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?

There is something abnormal, super-normal, that we both experience when we’re out on the campaign trail.

“There’s something that happens to me,” he says, “or that I get to be a part of in those rooms, that is not like normal life. I don’t know if that has ever happened to me before. I don’t know if that would happen again.”

At 46, O’Rourke is only a couple of years younger than former rival Ted Cruz. But part of the excitement, and the content of his potential candidacy, is generational. Whereas Obama is from the tail end of the baby boom, Beto O’Rourke is quintessentially Generation X, weaned on Star Wars and punk rock and priding himself on authenticity over showmanship and a healthy skepticism of the mainstream. He came of age in a world of crumbling taboos over personal revelation, which has clearly peaked with Donald Trump, whose relentless Twitter habit has basically set the table for O’Rourke’s open-book style. Whether onstage or on Facebook Live or in person, O’Rourke has a preternatural ease. That openness is part of what he loves about campaigning. “I think that’s the beauty of elections: You can’t hide from who you are,” he says. “The more honestly and directly you communicate to people why you’re doing this, the way in which you want to serve them, I just think that the better, more informed decision that they can make.”

If the message is honesty, the medium is, patently, social media. O’Rourke speaks admiringly of Bronx-born congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he shares some overlapping political convictions but also a talent for the sort of viral disclosures and vignettes, delivered on Twitter or Instagram, that are disrupting national politics. “She does not seem to me to be afraid of making a mistake, or not saying it perfectly,” he says, “and in the process says the most important—I think some of the most important—things anyone can be talking about right now, and she’s freed herself from fear.”

A candidate of honesty and basic decency, à la Jimmy Carter, is in high demand among a lot of Democrats looking for optimal results in 2020, as is that sense of generational shift that powered Democratic campaigns dating back to John F. Kennedy (whose Profiles in Courage is in O’Rourke’s library). But O’Rourke’s radical openness can also look like naïveté, as with his Instagrammed teeth-cleaning, which was quickly clipped, isolated from its context, and made to look ridiculous. Skeptics question whether O’Rourke’s political transcendentalism can sustain the meat grinder of a national election. In a Democratic primary, he will not have the bogeyman of a Trump or a Cruz from which to draw voter energy. He is decidedly not the street fighter many Democrats crave. And in a zero-sum world, his astounding run against Ted Cruz in last year’s Texas Senate race, historic as it was, was still a loss.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

O’Rourke is acutely aware, too, of perhaps his biggest vulnerability—being a white man in a Democratic Party yearning for a woman or a person of color, a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker. “The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he says. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. It’s the only way I know to meet that challenge.

“But I totally understand people who will make a decision based on the fact that almost every single one of our presidents has been a white man, and they want something different for this country. And I think that’s a very legitimate basis upon which to make a decision. Especially in the fact that there are some really great candidates out there right now.”

O’Rourke is careful to pay homage to progressive icons, crediting Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with advancing the national conversation on health care and consumer protections, but sells himself as something slightly different: a youthful uniter, willing to listen and learn from the most recalcitrant right-wing voters and work with Republicans. “If I bring something to this,” he says, “I think it is my ability to listen to people, to help bring people together to do something that is thought to be impossible.

“My sense is, following some success that I had in Congress, and working with Republicans to actually get things signed into law, including both President Obama and President Trump’s administrations, that I may have an ability to work with people who think differently than I do, come to a different conclusion that I’ve come to on a given issue, and yet find enough common ground to do something better than what we have right now.”

A few days before Trump arrives, while meeting with students at the University of Texas at El Paso, O’Rourke compares the battle against Trump to “every epic movie that you’ve ever seen, from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings. This is the moment where we’re going to win or lose everything.” O’Rourke likes to think in such mythic terms. As he quipped on the campaign trail, he named his son Ulysses because “I didn’t have the balls to call him Odysseus.” But in a private meeting with Barack Obama last November, the former president had asked Beto O’Rourke to consider if he had a clear path to the White House. Could he deliver Texas? Michigan? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin?

“I don’t have a team counting delegates,” O’Rourke says, again invoking a politics not readily accessible by reason. “Almost no one thought there was a path in Texas, and I just knew it. I just felt it. I knew it was there, and I knew that with enough work and enough creativity and enough amazing people, if I’m able to meet them and bring them in, then we can do it.

“That’s how I feel about this,” he says. “It’s probably not the most professional thing you’ve ever heard about this, but I just feel it.”

After dueling rallies in El Paso last February—O’Rourke’s “March for Truth” versus Trump’s “Finish the Wall”—Trump was quick to declare his crowd sizes larger and deem O’Rourke an unworthy failure. But Trump’s choice of El Paso for a rally had already created a story line, giving new relevance to O’Rourke and his ideas. His vision of the border—and for America, too—is rooted in the El Paso he grew up in. Before 9/11, the Texas border with Mexico was essentially open. In 1986, his father, Pat O’Rourke, an El Paso politician, told Bill Moyers on CBS: “When I was six and seven years old, I didn’t know I wasn’t a Mexican. When I was a kid, I’d get on the streetcar and go to Juárez and go to the cine, the movie, over there. That’s my community. These people are my friends, they’re my neighbors.”

Nowadays, Beto O’Rourke seems to have embraced his father’s local globalism. But he spent much of his youth trying to escape the influence and legacy of Pat O’Rourke, before returning home to embrace his heritage and redeem his father’s political failures. When I first met O’Rourke, he showed me a framed snapshot of his father standing atop a mesa, a denim-wearing southwesterner who looked a bit like Jimmy Buffett, bald with blond locks and a wild-man grin. An avid outdoorsman and runner, Pat O’Rourke ran a series of small border businesses, or maquilas, that drew on the cheap labor in Juárez. They all failed. What consumed him was politics. O’Rourke became county commissioner in 1978 and, after building a new jail in the 1980s, won a race for county judge (in Texas, a management job rather than a courtroom role). He had married into relative wealth, to Melissa Williams, whose family owned the high-end furniture store in town, Charlotte’s. The O’Rourkes were among the first in El Paso to install a swimming pool.

Pat O’Rourke was a garrulous carouser and a bit of a showboat, a fixture at the Cincinnati Bar & Grill, where local pooh-bahs gathered to debate and drink. (Beto O’Rourke would later use the same restaurant as his informal think tank when he first ran for office.) He came under scrutiny for using government funds to outfit his office with furniture from his wife’s store, and in 1983 he became embroiled in a controversy over a powdery substance—possibly cocaine or heroin—discovered in a condom found in his Toyota Land Cruiser. A sheriff’s deputy destroyed the evidence before it could be analyzed, the incident was investigated by the D.A.’s office, and the ensuing uproar, known thereafter as “Rubbergate,” became front-page news. The controversy tarnished his reputation, but it didn’t dampen his enthusiasm. He became an avid supporter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson during both his 1984 and 1988 runs for president and once held a reception for Jackson at the O’Rourke home. (Young Beto posed for a picture with Jackson, which he still displays in his home.)

Pat O’Rourke was popular with everyone but his son, with whom he clashed from an early age. “My dad was very critical and had very high expectations, without a lot of the details filled in,” says O’Rourke. “It was ‘I expect you to achieve greatness in grades, in athletics, in whatever you do.’” (Beto O’Rourke has two younger sisters, Charlotte and Erin.) When he failed math one semester, “my dad essentially stopped talking to me,” he says. “He made it clear that I embarrassed him. That was just the most profoundly painful thing I had experienced up to that point.”

O’Rourke’s mother tried softening the tension, but Beto felt like an appendage to his father’s public persona. His dad once bought a tandem bicycle and entered them in races without asking him. “I hated it, because it involved a lot of yelling at me, like, ‘Quit leaning to the right, goddammit!’ ” he recalls. “And then just harrowing, just racing through an intersection and he’s got the brakes and the steering and all I can do is just pedal my balls off and hope that we don’t die.”

O’Rourke escaped into early computer chat rooms and made two close friends, Arlo Klahr and Mike Stevens. They drew comic books, read underground fanzines, wrote poetry, skateboarded, and, inspired by the Clash, took up guitar and went to local punk-rock shows. They became devotees of the Washington, D.C., record label Dischord, co-founded by Ian MacKaye, a punk firebrand who influenced a generation of disaffected suburban youth. “I have so much reverence for him and he means so much to me in my life,” O’Rourke says of MacKaye. “He really did represent this super-ethical way, not just of being in a band, or running a label, or putting on shows, but of just living.” (The punk ethos, Ian MacKaye tells me, is for “people who can’t figure out how they’re supposed to fit into society. And I think in many ways they’re the right people.”)

Beto O’Rourke was desperate to escape El Paso. “I wanted out,” he says. “I wanted out of the house. I wanted away from him and his shadow.”

His father tried directing him to the New Mexico Military Institute, but O’Rourke instead applied to a prep school in Virginia called Woodberry Forest, on advice from his grandfather through marriage, Fred Korth, a former secretary of the navy in the Kennedy administration. As soon as he arrived, O’Rourke felt profoundly alienated from the preppy Southern boys and instead made friends with music-heads and international students from Turkey and Korea. “We were the weirdo table,” he said. “We were the rejects who just did not fit in culturally, money, social status.”

He listened to college radio, produced a research report on the U.S. overthrow of the Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán government in Guatemala, and helped found an environmental club called the Terra Interest Society. He ran track and field but also deepened his devotion to punk. On his yearbook page, he quoted the Dischord band Rites of Spring: “I found a hidden wheel and it rolls to reveal that / I’m the angry son, I’m the angry son.”

O’Rourke says he didn’t have his first sip of alcohol until he was 19 while at Columbia University—a school he had never heard of until an older student, Beau Higgins, mentioned he was going. In the East, he called himself Robert instead of Beto. He grew his hair long and majored in film before switching to English. Neither idea pleased his father. “He was like, ‘You could read books on your own time,’” recounts O’Rourke. “‘You can’t learn how to be an accountant or you can’t learn how to be a doctor or an astrophysicist on your own. Use Columbia for that.’”

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

One day a gym teacher saw O’Rourke on the rowing machine and persuaded him to row crew. The sport fed an unmet desire in O’Rourke for discipline and purity. He became a “monk,” he says, moving into a solitary dorm room, getting up at six A.M. to train every day, and drinking protein shakes to gain weight. “I would just start throwing up and just forcing as many calories in, and then rowing in the morning and lifting weights in the afternoon every day,” he says. “I really liked that. I really liked seeing myself get better or seeing the boat get better, learning a skill and a discipline I had never really understood or knew existed. Being good at something.”

He remembered feeling ecstatic when he beat Harvard. “You win the other boat’s shirts and so I brought that shirt home, gave it to my dad,” he says.

His single-minded devotion to crew—and to the purifying energy of punk rock—foreshadowed his future political self. In the summer of 1991, however, when O’Rourke’s father signed him up for an internship with West Texas congressman Ron Coleman, O’Rourke had no interest and did it only to please his father. He used the time in D.C. to see Fugazi, the band fronted by his hero Ian MacKaye. He and his El Paso friends Arlo Klahr and Mike Stevens formed Foss, the Icelandic word for waterfall, and after recording their first album, The El Paso Pussycats, organized a month-long tour, conscripting El Paso drummer Cedric Bixler-Zavala (later a member of a successful indie group, At the Drive-In) and driving across the U.S. and Canada in a station wagon. It was a grand adventure, but also a lesson in scrappy survival. O’Rourke was unusually resourceful: Frustrated by a series of shows that didn’t materialize, he called up a popular rock venue in San Francisco and altered his voice, pretending to be a founder of Sub Pop, a famous indie rock label. He urged them to book Foss as the opening act, claiming the band was about to be signed to a record deal. They got on the bill but were kicked off the stage after two songs.

Former girlfriends describe O’Rourke as curious, wry, bookish but adventurous. He usually carried a novel in his pocket, whether Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or The Sun Also Rises. Maggie Asfahani, an El Paso native who dated O’Rourke while he was at prep school and college, said he was somewhat difficult to know. “That’s kind of the mystique of Beto, is that he seems to be accessible,” she says, “but there’s just this layer of protection. I don’t think it’s because he’s hiding anything. I think it’s because he’s keeping a part of it to himself.”

After he graduated in 1995, O’Rourke and his friends moved to Albuquerque and rented a house formerly occupied by a Swedish ski team. They all shaved their heads and declared this their “Revolution Summer,” an homage to the D.C. punk scene of 1985. The idea was to live on part-time jobs and make art. They formed a band called the Swedes, donning motorcycle helmets and waving the Swedish flag onstage. “I didn’t want to make money, didn’t want to be in business,” O’Rourke says. “My dad was so disappointed. He took out [college] loans, he knew that I took out loans. I was like, ‘You know, I wanna make art. I wanna write. I wanna make music. I wanna create things.’”

The collective fizzled out, however, and O’Rourke has said he became “the most depressed I’ve ever been in my life.” After briefly returning to El Paso—during which time he was arrested for “attempted forcible entry” at the University of Texas in El Paso after tripping a campus alarm one night—O’Rourke went back to New York and started nannying for a wealthy family on the Upper West Side. In 1996, he and a group of friends from both Columbia and El Paso moved into a decrepit loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, across from a housing project. O’Rourke worked as an art mover for Hedley’s Humpers and for his uncle on a startup Internet-service provider, called El.Net, building the first Web sites for PEN American Center and the Committee to Protect Journalists. In Brooklyn, he and his friends threw parties, bashed out punk songs, and drank endless cases of Budweiser; on the roof was a trampoline and a perfect view of the Manhattan skyline.

O’Rourke objects to a New York Times story published in February that he believes painted him as aimless and depressed in New York. He describes the time as one of joyous indirection in which he surrounded himself with “some amazing artists and thinkers.” He read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, discovered Bob Dylan, deepened his devotion to The Odyssey, and went through bursts of enthusiasm for bands like Big Star and Guided by Voices. In the parlance of the times, he was a slacker. “Generation X is scrappier and less formulaic,” observes David Guinn, a Williamsburg housemate who’s now a painter in Philadelphia. “Not with the manifest destiny or the heroism of the baby-boomers who believed they were going to change the world. There’s a real humbleness to the whole generation—and to Beto.”

“I was waking up in time to go to work, because I had stayed up so late, playing music, having fun, dancing, just being alive,” O’Rourke says. “And I don’t feel guilty or bad about it, because I’m so glad I did that. It was just such a wonderful time. And I’m so grateful that I had it. But it was not conducive to a career or a discipline or a profession.”

In a phone call one night, he idly mentioned to his mother he was thinking of returning to El Paso temporarily. She was overjoyed. “And she took it as ‘This is a great chance to get you home now,’” says O’Rourke.

He was 25.

Back in El Paso, his father, Pat O’Rourke, was losing his third consecutive campaign for public office, this time for county judge. Friends were still mystified by his switch to the Republican Party, a self-defeating move in a Democratic town. “It was just really kind of heartbreaking, because the entire time you knew he was going to lose,” says O’Rourke. The month after O’Rourke returned, he was arrested for drunk driving, an incident that would become a flash point in his campaign against Ted Cruz, and will likely become one again in a presidential race.

The police report describes O’Rourke driving at high speed and sideswiping a truck going in the same direction, then jumping the median into the oncoming lane at about two in the morning. According to a police witness, he tried to drive away from the scene of the accident. O’Rourke maintains that this isn’t true. I asked O’Rourke to describe the events of that night. He was at home listening to music that evening, he says, when his dad called and asked to meet for a drink at the Cincinnati Bar & Grill. The O’Rourkes drank a couple of Jameson whiskeys and afterward O’Rourke called up a college student in Las Cruces that he had dated once: “And I said, ‘Hey, I know this is really late, or late notice, but any chance you’re free tonight?’ and she was, but she says, ‘I don’t have a ride.’ So I said, ‘I’m happy to come pick you up.’”

He drove an hour to Las Cruces and then an hour back to El Paso to drink with an old high-school friend. O’Rourke was taking his date, named Michelle, back to Las Cruces when the accident happened. He failed a sobriety test and was handcuffed. In his telling, he was pathetic but nonetheless chivalrous: When police left his friend in a gas-station parking lot, a handcuffed O’Rourke asked them to take cash out of his jeans so she could get home. His father posted bail. “I think I walked home from county jail—that [my dad] had helped build—I just got home and you just feel like a total piece of shit, and you kind of are,” he says.

His license was suspended, and he had to take a bus to his job working at his mom’s furniture store. O’Rourke continued playing music—briefly playing in the Sheeps, the YouTube-notorious punk band who wore sheep masks and long underwear onstage—but he also came into tighter focus. At the apex of the dot-com boom, he launched his own Web-design company, Stanton Street Technology Group, with two friends from New York who had followed him to El Paso. To satisfy his creative itch, he also launched an online news magazine focused on El Paso. His father used the site to publish a diary about a cross-country trip on his recumbent bicycle in 2000.

One night in July 2001 the two had what Beto O’Rourke says was “the best conversation we ever had,” ranging over family, politics, personal history. “We just ate leftovers and drank a bottle of wine in the backyard,” he recalls. The next morning, his father was cycling along a quiet route outside El Paso when he was struck by a car and thrown 70 feet to his death. “I was at work and my mom called me and I just knew,” he says. “Because her voice was shaken and said, ‘Something’s happened with your dad. You should come to the store.’”

Two months later, terrorists struck the World Trade Center, and in the ensuing national alarm the border between El Paso and Juárez, which his father had crossed freely his entire life, was closed and permanently altered. O’Rourke’s father had always dreamed of turning El Paso into “the Hong Kong of the border,” a nexus for trade and culture. It was a vision that O’Rourke and friends his age in El Paso were starting to talk about in 2001. That year, O’Rourke decided to launch an alternative weekly newspaper, citing his father as the inspiration. Stanton Street died after 15 issues, but it gave him a view into local politics, and Beto O’Rourke began to dream bigger after attending a workshop in Austin organized by Howard Dean. In 2004, he started considering his own run for office. His very first idea was to run for the seat his father had tried and failed to regain—county judge. Instead, O’Rourke was persuaded to run for city council.

While plotting his campaign, O’Rourke met Amy Sanders, the 23-year-old daughter of wealthy real-estate magnate Bill Sanders. Amy Sanders had grown up in Santa Fe and studied psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, after which she spent a year teaching kindergarten in Guatemala City. She returned to El Paso, where her family had previously moved, to bide her time while she applied to grad school but then met O’Rourke through her aunt. They went on a date to Juárez and drank at some of the famous watering holes. “He was giving me reasons 1 through 10 of why I needed to stay in El Paso,” Amy O’Rourke recalls. “And I quickly learned that he just is an ultimate El Paso salesman.”

O’Rourke knew about her father because his mother had once dated him in the 1960s—a double date with Pat O’Rourke, whom she met that same night and eventually married. An entrepreneurial wunderkind as a teenager, Bill Sanders left El Paso in the late 1960s for Chicago and made millions as the “Godfather of the REITs” (real-estate-investment trusts) and then moved to Santa Fe to build and sell another company. In 2001, O’Rourke heard Sanders give a talk about forming a new business organization called the Paso del Norte, which focused on downtown El Paso. The group “totally captured my imagination,” recalls O’Rourke. He was invited to join the group but didn’t, perhaps because he was allied with a mentor, Mayor Ray Caballero, who was suspicious of the largely white and Republican business class. David Crowder, a veteran reporter in El Paso, says Bill Sanders “was sort of a great white father coming into town, with all this money and ideas for the big-boxing of El Paso.”

In 2005, O’Rourke won his race for city council, advocating for tax abatements to spur development. He married Amy a few months later at his father-in-law’s ranch in Santa Fe. Overnight, O’Rourke became the bright, optimistic new face of the El Paso renaissance, and he supported a real-estate-redevelopment plan that Sanders and his allies had dreamed up, envisioning a gentrified downtown that could attract more people like Beto O’Rourke. The development plans were met with passionate opposition because Sanders wanted to use eminent domain to clear out an impoverished barrio and build a Walmart or a Target.

O’Rourke, fluent in Spanish like his father, went door-to-door trying to convince residents the city would build affordable housing elsewhere. A local historian and activist, David Romo, accused O’Rourke and his allies of destroying buildings of historic significance to Chicanos and driving immigrants from what he deemed the “Ellis Island” of the border (a phrase that O’Rourke would later use to defend El Paso against Trump’s wall idea). They pointed out that his father-in-law stood to profit from the plans—and indeed, Sanders had formed the Borderplex Realty Trust for just that purpose. The city opened an ethics investigation, and though O’Rourke was cleared of wrongdoing, he recused himself in the public debate and from voting on it.

In the end, the plans collapsed because the economy cratered in 2008 and capital dried up. But the controversy stuck to O’Rourke, his original sin. O’Rourke says perhaps his biggest mistake was making an enemy of David Romo, who has become the source for a wave of negative stories in the national press, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. “I didn’t bring David any closer to my point of view, you know, permanently alienated him,” he says, “and it was also stupid because I wasn’t listening to him.”

In 2011, O’Rourke teamed up with a fellow council member, Susie Byrd, to publish a political tract titled “Dealing Drugs and Death,” arguing for drug legalization to curtail the cartel wars that had de-stabilized the border. The tract was nobody’s idea of a great political move—drug legalization was still on the fringes of mainstream politics in 2011—but it set the stage for a run for Congress against the eight-term incumbent, Silvestre Reyes, a former border-patrol guard who supported the War on Drugs and made his name advocating for border fencing. The odds against beating an incumbent were long, but O’Rourke and his new campaign manager, David Wysong, a local health-care executive who had never run a congressional campaign, tabulated the voter turnout they would need to win—which for O’Rourke translated to numbers of doors he needed to knock on. “How many doors? How many people behind each door?” Wysong recalls.

This was the first look at Beto O’Rourke the endurance-athlete campaigner, tirelessly knocking on roughly 16,000 doors. O’Rourke was not without vulnerabilities. Endorsed by both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Reyes attacked O’Rourke by underlining his alliance with his father-in-law, launching a video ad called “Billionaires for Beto.” Hoping to retain his positive image, O’Rourke was loath to counterattack Reyes, but an outside super PAC, underwritten by Bill Sanders and other business leaders, did it for him, strafing Reyes with $240,000 in TV ads that painted the congressman as corrupt and thereby indirectly lumped him in with several prominent El Paso politicians who had gone to prison for corruption.

The ads worked. O’Rourke won by drawing a large number of white Republican voters to his cause, which deepened suspicion from left-leaning Chicano activists. “Race begins to play a role in there somehow,” recalls Bob Moore, a former El Paso Times editor. “So when people talk about Beto’s Republican connection, there’s a ‘there’ there.”

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

One of O’Rourke’s campaign promises was to limit the number of terms he served. Term limits were an issue O’Rourke believed in, but it weakened his hand as a freshman in Congress, where long-term ambition translates to seats on powerful committees. Whereas Reyes had been a leading member of the Armed Services Committee, O’Rourke was initially downgraded to Veterans Affairs. He would come to dislike Washington. O’Rourke tried defining himself as an independent voice in Congress, willing to buck party orthodoxy. He co-sponsored a bill with John Cornyn, Republican senator from Texas, to increase border security at ports of entry, and he didn’t always vote alongside liberal Democrats. The Guardian, citing analyses on O’Rourke’s voting record, concluded that he’d voted with Republicans 167 times over six years, and roughly a third of the time in the last two years alone.

David Wysong calls the story a “hit piece” from the Bernie Sanders camp. O’Rourke says it was hard to get legislation passed in a G.O.P.-controlled House, but he’s proud of bills he helped pass benefiting veterans at Fort Bliss in El Paso, his constituents, and sponsoring legislation to legalize marijuana and to expunge arrest records for people convicted of marijuana possession.

O’Rourke voted to let President Obama negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or T.P.P., which Bernie Sanders attacked as damaging to the working class. O’Rourke now says he would have voted “no” on the ultimate agreement. But in 2015, he traveled with Obama on a trip to Asia to help build support for the deal. It was his first time on Air Force One. “You could make calls from your seat,” wrote O’Rourke in a Medium post about his trip. “I called Amy and my mom and a good family friend.”

In Vietnam, O’Rourke witnessed hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets of Ho Chi Minh City for Obama’s motorcade, the biggest crowds that had ever greeted the then president. Ben Rhodes, a former White House speechwriter who was also on the trip, wagers that it made a big impression on O’Rourke. Rhodes recalls how Barack Obama once told him that his first foreign trips had opened his mind to the possibilities of the presidency. “I do believe that could put a spark into somebody,” Rhodes says. “You’re a backbench House member, waiting your turn for questions at hearings, and suddenly you’re looking at a hundred thousand people in Vietnam—you’re like, Huh, maybe there’s a more impactful thing for me to do.”

When I mention this to O’Rourke, he seems slightly put off, remarking that White House staffers would hardly have remembered him. He recalls thinking of Ben Rhodes, “He probably thinks I’m an intern.”

O’Rourke drew a distinct lesson from Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016. He recalled Bernie Sanders joining Clinton for a meeting with congressional Democrats in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when Sanders was still withholding his delegates from Clinton and infuriating party elders. “He said it’s not enough to remind America how bad Donald Trump is, it’s just not going to do it,” O’Rourke recalls. “You’ve got to give people something to be for, it cannot be who we are against.

“I think he was so prescient,” he continues. “That moment sticks out to me so much, because it was so dramatic. He was so hated really—it’s not too strong of a word—when he was in there, and he said the most important thing that I’d heard during that entire campaign.”

When he decided to run for Senate in Texas against Ted Cruz, O’Rourke planned a purist campaign much like Sanders’s—no PAC money, no corporate donations, no pollsters, no negative ads, only a revival-tent optimism focused on an unabashedly left-wing message. He even hired two forward-thinking field strategists from the Sanders campaign. O’Rourke drew inspiration from punk rock, everything stripped of artifice. “I haven’t seen a candidate who has just shared what’s on their mind and spoken as honestly and directly, without interference from consultants and pollsters, as we’re doing right now,” he told documentary filmmaker Steve Mims early in the campaign.

“It may be a brilliant strategy,” O’Rourke said. “It may be an incredibly stupid strategy.”

Promising to visit every county in Texas, he ran his campaign as a marathon of live-streamed political performance art—road-tripping with a Republican congressman with an iPhone on his dashboard for 36 hours; air-drumming to the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” while waiting for burgers at a drive-through the night he debated Ted Cruz at Southern Methodist University. O’Rourke came off as free of political calculation, as if his charisma were a mere side effect of Beto just being Beto.

You can probably tell that I want to run. I do. I think I’d be good at it.

The tipping point was when O’Rourke gave an extemporaneous monologue defending black N.F.L. players who took a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Now This News packaged it into a viral video, and it rocketed O’Rourke to the national stage. CNN broadcast one of his town-hall meetings and O’Rourke’s crowds ballooned. Donor contributions poured in, peaking at $80 million, the most for any Senate campaign in U.S. history. The expanding press pack became more aggressive “to the point where they were knocking the kids and I out of the way to get to Beto,” recalls Amy O’Rourke.

“They were cresting a wave that I’m sure was difficult to stay on,” says Emmett Beliveau, a former White House operations staffer whom O’Rourke hired to organize an Austin rally co-starring Beto supporter Willie Nelson. Beliveau, who produced Obama’s Election Night rally in Chicago in 2008, was astounded to discover that O’Rourke’s campaign apparatus was mainly just O’Rourke and his cell phone. “I kept waiting to get the call from the advance guy and it never came,” he says. “That person literally didn’t exist.”

By this time, the idea of O’Rourke as a possible presidential contender was already in the air. Beliveau held a fund-raiser for O’Rourke in Chicago, introducing him to former Obama staffers and raising $75,000 for his campaign. Earlier that year, David Wysong had managed to quash a press story saying O’Rourke might run for president if he beat Ted Cruz.

Cruz, of course, wasn’t empty-handed. By this time, O’Rourke had sold Stanton Street and his mother, Melissa, had transferred partial ownership of a shopping center to him before shuttering the furniture store. (O’Rourke is said to have a net worth of $9 million.) The closure of Charlotte’s came after an unusual event: In 2010, O’Rourke’s mother’s business was indicted for tax fraud, accused of restructuring more than $1 million in cash sales to avoid taxes. The store was forced to pay a $250,000 fine. O’Rourke would blame an accounting error and his mother never admitted guilt. Friends said it was a simple matter of wealthy Mexican customers paying in cash. But the details were hazy because the indictment was sealed. The Ted Cruz campaign would refer to his mother’s store as “Charlotte’s Web” and suggest to reporters that a $640,000 cash sale from a single Mexican customer was related to drug cartels.

On Election Night, O’Rourke and his wife were certain they were going to beat Cruz, even if polls showed other-wise. One man had flown home from Seattle to vote before polls closed. How could they lose? Recalls Amy O’Rourke, “So many of the stories that we had heard, especially in the weeks leading up to the election, you’re like, How can you not win when there is that level of just dedication and passion from so many people that we had met?”

On Election Day, Beto and Amy O’Rourke were leaving their house for a packed El Paso stadium when the race was called for Ted Cruz with only 25 percent of precincts reporting. “I couldn’t process how that was possible,” says Amy.

She managed to maintain her composure until after it was over. The next day, she finally broke down: “I couldn’t stop crying.”

The first time I meet Beto O’Rourke, he’s lounging on the front veranda of his house on a Sunday afternoon, barefoot in blue jeans and T-shirt, talking on his cell phone. O’Rourke had stopped speaking to the press—he was still kicking himself for giving a damaging interview to The Washington Post, which quoted his prescription for immigration as “I don’t know”—but he nonetheless waved over a prying reporter and invited me inside to meet his wife and children. His son Henry had a fever, and Amy had fallen asleep on the couch while Dora the Explorer flickered on the TV. There was a Stan Getz LP on the turntable and a plate of homemade scones in the kitchen.

O’Rourke experienced a post-election depression like the one he had when he beat Reyes in 2012. He had lost weight, his joints ached, and a stress fracture in his foot curtailed his running regimen. He exercised on his rowing machine and went on his somewhat infamous road trip to interact with regular Americans, trying to work his way through a self-described “funk” over his loss. Amy bristled at a CNN essay that chastised him for taking an “excellent adventure” while leaving his wife and kids at home. (“I was a little insulted because it implied that I couldn’t support our family.”) His stream-of-consciousness posts, which Amy edited, were mocked on Twitter, an outlet that O’Rourke criticizes as “mean.” “No human, least of all me, is strong enough to completely withstand the impact that has on you, and it can’t be healthy,” he says.

The week O’Rourke lost, Barack Obama called him and congratulated him: “He just said, ‘Hey, you ran a great race. If you are interested, I’d love to sit down and talk with you.’ ” During their meeting, at Obama’s office in Washington the next week, it was O’Rourke who brought up the idea of running for president. “I raised it with him—‘Some people who I really respect have asked me to think about running for president,’ ” O’Rourke recalls. “He asked about: What will this do to my family? Is this the right thing for the country? Do I see a path to win? Do I see something that I uniquely can provide, for what the country needs right now?”

Photographs by Annie Leibovtiz.

By the time I met O’Rourke again in February, he had nearly found his answer. Concerns about his family had abated, despite Henry’s protestations. “I’m not as concerned about our ability to make it as a family as I might have been three months ago,” says O’Rourke. The week before he was to appear onstage with Oprah Winfrey in New York, he had what he describes as a breakthrough conversation with his wife. He stayed up until three A.M. to plot his future: “I was excited to think it through,” he recalls, “and ‘Well, if we ran, what if we did it like this?’ or ‘We could do this.’ ” He got up three hours later and went running.

When O’Rourke blurted out to Oprah that he’d make a decision on whether to run or not “before the end of this month,” the answer surprised even him. “I did not intend to say that,” he tells me. On the flight home from New York, O’Rourke learned that Trump was coming to El Paso. Amy was reading Becoming, by Michelle Obama, absorbing the former First Lady’s account of her trials living through a toxic presidential race with her husband. By the time the O’Rourkes touched down at El Paso International Airport, Amy’s stomach was in knots. “She was kind of pissed at me when we got home,” recalls O’Rourke. “Almost like ‘You fucker.’ ”

She knew he was running.

Beto O’Rourke will have to define himself against a crowded field of Democratic candidates, but he doesn’t feel the need to draw blood to define himself. “I just don’t get turned on by being against,” he says. “I really get excited to be for. That’s what moves me. It’s important to defeat Trump, but that’s not exciting to me. What’s exciting to me is for the United States to lead the world, in making sure that the generations that follow us can live here.

“What’s exciting to me is figuring out something that has eluded us for so long: How do we make sure every single person can see a doctor in this country?” he adds. “That’s really exciting to me.”

Pressed on his national-policy positions, O’Rourke says he wants to shore up the Affordable Care Act and make Medicare part of the health-care marketplace, and eventually make “health care for all” a reality. He would also make climate change a top priority. “Keeping the planet from warming one-half degree Celsius, for me, is the most important for humanity,” he says. He supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in spirit, if not every letter. “The goal of converting to 100 percent renewable energy within a decade, I love,” he says. “It’s ambitious. It captures your imagination.”

As if to rebut the inevitable accusations that he’s a socialist, he proclaims himself a proud capitalist—among the few Democratic candidates, he points out, who have been small-business owners. “The ingenuity and innovation that you only find in America and in capitalist systems, the ability to harness the power of the market,” he says, “it’s hard to argue against pricing carbon and allowing the market to respond to that.”

He also believes in a version of Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a higher top marginal tax rate, though he doesn’t volunteer the 70 percent number, and he makes a different sort of argument. “If you’re trying to mobilize this country to meet an existential threat, as we did against the Nazis in World War II, then you’re going to have to ask everyone to sacrifice,” he says. “If you don’t see a shared interest or shared opportunity to advance, then we’ll no longer see ourselves in this together and this country will truly break apart. This level of gross income inequality cannot persist, and if there’s a better way to get there, I’m open to it. But it’s definitely going to involve higher marginal rates on the very wealthiest in this country.”

His biggest strength, of course, is his unique credibility as a voice on immigration. O’Rourke wants to end the War on Drugs, raise the cap on work visas, find a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and create a system with the Mexican government that would track who was in the country. “In my opinion, that includes citizenship for Dreamers, a legal path to citizenship for their parents, and the ability to get right with the law, and work legally, and pay taxes, and pursue a path to citizenship for millions of others who’ve been working the toughest jobs here.”

For some, O’Rourke can still seem politically indistinct, even slippery, but that may be part of his strategy. When asked if he’s a progressive, a question that will surely dog him in the weeks to come, O’Rourke hedges with the aplomb of Barack Obama circa 2008: “I leave that to other people. I’m not into the labels. My sense in traveling Texas for the past two years, my sense is that people really aren’t into them either.”

Positions on issues matter, of course, but they aren’t everything. Indeed, in the Trump era it may well be that harnessing intense voter passion is more important when facing a bombastic cult of personality who draws on Fox News rage-ratings. Beto O’Rourke is selling the idea that he can unite the country by playing nice with the kind of people he met in rural Texas on his Senate campaign: middle Americans who had barely met a Democrat, let alone considered voting for one. But O’Rourke also sells a kind of cult of personality of his own, offering himself as the David to Trump’s Goliath, a folk hero for our time. He acknowledges that what has made Trump successful is also what has made him successful—an outsider who “bent the media to his campaign,” as he puts it.

Photographs by Annie Leibovtiz.

But unlike Trump, O’Rourke can appear almost too innocent to be a politician—too decent, too wholesome, the very reason he became popular also the same reason he could be crucified on the national stage. I tell O’Rourke that perhaps he’s simply too normal to be president. “Whether you meant it or not, I take that as a compliment,” he says.

It’s 10:30 P.M. and Amy is now curled up on a chair next to Beto, scrolling through e-mails. The kids are asleep. I ask O’Rourke if he could see himself among the presidential biographies on his shelf—Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he says. “I think, ego-wise, we’re going to be O.K. if we don’t run. Where we won’t be O.K. is, if we don’t run and come to the conclusion later on, if we had run, man, this wouldn’t have happened. Things would have been a lot better. Or—”

“You didn’t do everything you could,” Amy says, completing his sentence.

“We didn’t do everything that we could,” he says.

Beto O’Rourke seems, in this moment, like a cliff diver trying to psych himself into the jump. And after playing coy all afternoon about whether he’ll run, he finally can’t deny the pull of his own gifts. “You can probably tell that I want to run,” he finally confides, smiling. “I do. I think I’d be good at it.”

“This is the fight of our lives,” he continues, “not the fight-of-my-political-life kind of crap.

But, like, this is the fight of our lives as Americans, and as humans, I’d argue.”

The more he talks, the more he likes the sound of what he’s saying. “I want to be in it,” he says, now leaning forward. “Man, I’m just born to be in it, and want to do everything I humanly can for this country at this moment.”

A month later, Beto O'Rourke announces his run for the White House.

This article has been updated. The quotation in the headline reflects the quotation in the story.

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