Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, seen here on Election Day 2018, tells his friends and people he meets on the road that he has not made up his mind on running for president. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 2020 Elections Beto O’Rourke’s road trip drives home his message His musings might be mocked but he’s generating a torrent of media coverage.

Beto O’Rourke is five states into his stream-of-consciousness road trip across the American Southwest, unaccompanied as he drops into a small-town diner for cobbler, washes his face in a lake and journals about the need to “clear my head.”

All of which is unfolding as the rest of the Democratic presidential field has broken into a sprint — Elizabeth Warren to New Hampshire, Kirsten Gillibrand to Iowa, and Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker to South Carolina.


O’Rourke’s potential rivals are courting donors, assembling staffs and scurrying to early primary states, while the former Texas congressman is at the Pancake House in Liberal, Kansas, some 500 miles from Des Moines.

His absence from the fray has been noted — and his introspective writing style has been mocked. But amid much snickering, there is also evidence to suggest that if he does run for president, it could help him politically, advancing his off-beat brand.

“Beto is able to drive his own message," said Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign manager. In a political environment where “the person is the message,” Mook said, “what makes him snacky for [the media] inevitably makes him refreshing and different for voters ... The press writes about what Beto decides to do on his own, not in the context of Trump. That's a big deal."

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With his online following, O’Rourke remains close to the 2020 conversation regardless of his location. And in the span of several days, he has generated a torrent of media coverage that — unlike Democrats in more public settings — he alone can control.

Officials at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, in Goodwell, said they only learned about two hours beforehand that O’Rourke was coming to campus, when an aide called to alert them. The school prepared a room, and several dozen students turned out, said Ryan Blanton, the university’s vice president of outreach.

Blanton, busy with telephone calls after the visit, said, “It got a lot more attention than we were hoping.”

Yet to O'Rourke's benefit, there was no major media outlet on hand to cover the event in the moment — just as there were no reporters shouting questions at O’Rourke at the university or in Tucumcari, New Mexico, or at the Starbucks in Pueblo, Colo. The story has become whatever O’Rourke makes it — “Over-the-top, authentic, refreshing,” according to Slate. “Epic, rambling,” said Fox News.

The Denver Post, sniffing out O’Rourke’s turn into Colorado on Thursday, wrote simply, “Beto O’Rourke stopped by Pueblo on secret road trip across America.”

Even when the analysis has been critical — a sharp-edged CNN story Thursday asserted O’Rourke’s meandering trip “drips with white male privilege" — it is keeping O’Rourke in the news.

“Beto’s social media personality rivals cult-like status,” said Michael Ceraso, a Democratic strategist who worked on the presidential campaigns of Sanders and Barack Obama. Instead of embarking on a book tour or visiting early nominating states, he said, O’Rourke has “mastered the art of anticipation to mitigate political risks and elevate his persona.”

And for O'Rourke, who has little traditional campaign infrastructure and will rely on a network of small donors, maintaining such attention is critical. Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California, said, “American politics is a Broadway show: You either get a lot of people on the second night, or the show’s closing. O’Rourke knows the show will close if he’s not putting out some kind of speculation.”

O’Rourke is leaning toward running for president, according to at least four sources who have spoken to him or his advisers, and his former advisers have been quietly sketching the outline of a potential presidential campaign. The former Texas congressman will participate in Oprah Winfrey’s “Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations from Times Square,” a live event on Feb. 5.

But O’Rourke tells his friends and people he meets on the road that he has not made up his mind, and his Medium posts — his preferred method of communicating from the road — reflect an emotional vulnerability that is rare for a top-tier presidential contender. O’Rourke writes that he has been “in and out of a funk” lately and that on his road trip, he is hoping to “break out of the loops I’ve been stuck in.”

Larry Smith, owner of the Motel Safari in Tucumcari, said that when he asked O’Rourke why he chose to stay at his motel, O’Rourke said “he was attracted to the fact it was a mom and pop business.”

Then, noting the winter rate of $59.95, Smith added, “He said he’s on a budget because, how did he put it, he’s in between jobs.”

For a politician who is already popular — but lacking an extensive record of governing experience — O’Rourke’s road trip runs the risk of accentuating his popularity, but not necessarily conveying him as presidential, said former Rep. Tony Coelho, who was chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. And Ed Rendell, a former governor of Pennsylvania and DNC chairman, said logistics alone make O’Rourke’s road trip “insane.”

“I think some of his friends ought to look at a temporary commitment,” he said.

Most politicians have at least one junior staffer join them on trips to collect contact information from potential supporters or donors — and actually do the driving.

“If you get into a car crash, if somebody gets hurt, forget about running for senator or running for governor or running for mayor or whatever,” Rendell said. “That’s rule No. 1.”

If O’Rourke is not pre-campaigning, Rendell said, but genuinely reflecting, he suggested that O’Rourke stop posting about it online.

“He’s posting because obviously he wants people to know he’s doing this,” Rendell said. “He wants people to say, ‘Oh my God, that Beto, he’s so unusual, a common man.”

There is precedent for politicians taking to the road. Former Florida governor and Sen. “Walkin’” Lawton Chiles walked for months across Florida in his 1970 Senate campaign. In the last presidential election, Clinton saved her journey — a beefier spectacle, complete with her security detail — for after she announced her candidacy. “Road trip!” she wrote on Twitter before setting off in a van nicknamed “Scooby” from her home in New York to Iowa.

That trip was meant, in part, to persuade Americans that the candidate could be unscripted and relatable, with a stop at a Chipotle in Ohio that — after security footage confirmed her presence — resulted in a flurry of coverage.

For some politicians, the purpose of a road trip is “to kind of get out of the bubble, and just go out and meet real folks,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist who sent one of his candidates, Alex Seith, on a road trip across Illinois in his 1978 race for U.S. Senate.

The purpose, South said, was not to “impact voters in any kind of massive way,” but to help the candidate.

“What it did for the candidate was, it gave him great raw material to talk about on the stump. You know, ‘I met a woman the other day, on her doorstep, in such and such a town, and here’s what she said to me’ …. Politicians die for those kinds of stories.”

O’Rourke himself spent much of his closer-than-expected campaign against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz last year traversing the roadways of Texas. Now that O’Rourke is mulling a presidential campaign, said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster, “I think it’s way too soon to say any of this is good, bad or indifferent.”

For any candidate at this still-early stage, he said, “I think the biggest thing is what it means to any of them personally … There is nothing quite like going out and being a candidate for national office.”

“If it’s good for him, then that’s a good thing,” Maslin said. “That’s the biggest thing, is how they themselves get ready to do this, because there isn’t a lot of margin for error.”

In O'Rourke's case, Mook said, "Unorthodox is a viable strategy."

"I think he's being really genuine," he said. "Going into the proverbial wilderness to figure out what his purpose is."