A narrow loss in a 2018 Texas Senate race made Beto O’Rourke a political star. He decided to try to ride that stardom all the way to the White House as a fresh face who combines charisma and an outsider persona with a fairly conventional Democratic policy agenda.

But while Beto’s campaign seemed almost painfully meta — he’s the guy who party professionals thought seemed like the kind of guy who voters would like — he’s running on a substantive agenda that in some ways comes the closest to representing the polar opposite of Trumpism.

He’s a NAFTA supporter and a longtime resident of a majority-Latinx border city who’s enthusiastic about immigration. His immigration platform commits him to going further than Trump or Obama in aggressively deploying executive power — protecting not only Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients but also their parents from deportation. He also calls for legislation that would dramatically expand a number of categories of immigration, from refugees to family unification to high-skilled workers.

He has also tried to fight his reputation as an ally of the fossil fuel industry (oil and gas are big in his home state of Texas) by becoming the first 2020 Democrat to release a climate change plan. He’s calling for $5 trillion in new investment and focusing tightly on ways existing law can allow a president to impose regulations that limit emissions.

But it’s really O’Rourke’s fulsome embrace of a politics of cosmopolitanism that makes him stand out from the rest of the field. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren try to out-protectionist Trump and Joe Biden casts himself as an electability champion ready to win back the Rust Belt, Beto is the candidate of a hypothetical future Democratic Party that wins elections in Texas, Georgia, and Arizona powered by voters in the fast-growing suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix.

Who is Beto O’Rourke?

Beto O’Rourke has been the subject of more longform magazine profiles than any other candidate in the race, in part because he’s an interesting guy but in part because he seems to strike artsy writer types as relatable in an aspirational kind of way.

O’Rourke was in a rock band, Foss, in his younger days. The band included Cedric Bixler-Zavala, who later went on to be an integral member of the seminal post-hardcore bands The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In. He had a post-college phase drifting somewhat aimlessly around New York City. He skateboards. He’s a tall, handsome guy with a rich, pretty wife who’s the primary caregiver for their three kids. He’s developed a policy agenda, but he doesn’t have a wonky, nerdy vibe or a populist, table-pounding one. He’s more inclined on a personal level to talk about values and feelings than policy specifics, and comes across a bit more as a soulful intellectual who happens to have stumbled into politics than as a hardcore politics and policy junkie like Warren or Pete Buttigieg.

All that said, his dad was a major figure in El Paso politics serving as county judge, which in Texas is the top administrative position in local government. And after some youthful rebellion, Beto settled into the same career with a seat on the city council and a major local developer as his father-in-law. From that perch, he challenged the incumbent member of Congress, an older Democrat named Silvestre Reyes, mostly from the right. He scored an impressive victory, knocking off a Latino incumbent in a majority-Latinx district based on a mix of charisma, hard work, aggressive fundraising, and an opponent who perhaps underestimated him.

As a backbench member of the minority party in the House, O’Rourke was not particularly influential. His voting record placed him in the more conservative half of the House Democratic caucus, perhaps surprisingly for someone holding down a safe blue seat, but perhaps not surprisingly for someone harboring ambitions to run statewide.

Noticing that Donald Trump performed quite a bit worse than Mitt Romney or John McCain in Texas even while doing better than them nationally, O’Rourke decided to take his chance in the 2018 cycle, launching a long-shot bid against widely disliked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. But he took an interesting approach to it. While hardly running a far-left campaign, O’Rourke also didn’t tack to the right in any particularly noteworthy ways despite running in a red state.

Forceful advocacy of basic progressive values by a charismatic messenger thrilled long-suffering Texas liberals (who are numerous in absolute terms despite being outnumbered), while O’Rourke also proved to be an appealing fresh face for millions of suburban Texas Republicans who’d defected from the Trumpified version of the party in 2016. O’Rourke attracted huge crowds to his rallies, built a massive grassroots fundraising machine (in part thanks to many favorable plugs from Pod Save America), and gave Texas Democrats something to believe in.

He ended up losing but performed very strongly relative to pretty much any historical baseline, and a political star was born.

The vision thing

Beto hopped into the presidential race with a fair amount of media hype and a staggering day-one fundraising haul. But then his campaign sort of stalled.

The race against Cruz required no explanation. O’Rourke was running to beat Cruz and to stop Trump, and everyone in the Democratic Party and left-of-center politics was glad he was out there doing it. A presidential campaign was a different matter.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for O’Rourke among an influential set of Democratic Party pros — including the Crooked Media gang, Jen O’Malley Dillon, who served as his campaign manager, and some key bundlers who described him as “Barack Obama, but white.” But while a sense that it would be tactically savvier to make a cool 40-something guy the face of the party rather than a graybeard like Joe Biden is perfectly reasonable, it’s not exactly a public-facing rationale for a campaign.

Obama, after all, was not white, and a “white Obama” wouldn’t have secured the strong support from the black community that was integral to winning the 2008 primary. And that original primary campaign also had a clear policy contrast argument behind it, noting that Obama had opposed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq while Clinton supported it.

But as O’Rourke has come to fly somewhat under the radar, a fairly clear rationale for his campaign has emerged. Much more so than any of the top three contenders, O’Rourke is one who embraces Trump’s framing of politics as a clash between cosmopolitanism and ethnic nationalism and is prepared to stand and fight in defense of openness.

In his announcement speech, O’Rourke described El Paso as both “the Ellis Island for much of the Americas” and also a city that “represents the best of what this country can be.” The modern-day version of the city, he said, is “part of the largest bi-national community in the Western Hemisphere, and for two decades running, one of the safest cities in America — not despite the presence of immigrants and asylum seekers, but because of them.”

His campaign rhetoric is less nostalgia-oriented than the top three contenders, his politics are more forcefully pro-trade, he’s a more aggressive advocate for legal immigration, and both the substance and style of his campaign point in the direction of Democrats’ future growth opportunity in the booming Sunbelt suburbs rather than “winning back” the Midwest.

It’s a vision that, in appropriate doses, most Democrats clearly find thrilling, but as fodder for a presidential campaign, it can come off as too risky for party regulars and not bold enough for left-wing insurgents. But the basic idea of trying to beat Trump with a sort of anti-Trump has a compelling internal logic that O’Rourke is well-positioned to offer.