5 Tough Questions Beto O'Rourke's Campaign Will Have to Answer

After two years of speculation about which of them is best suited to bring the Trump era to a merciful end in 2020, Democratic politicians who have been spending their free time forming exploratory committees, soliciting donations, giving inspiring speeches, and hanging out in Iowa diners are at last announcing formal bids to become the next president of the United States. Over the next few weeks, we'll take a look at each of the front-runners: Who are they? What do they stand for? And in order to have a shot at winning the nomination they seek, what tough questions will they have to answer first?

Previously, we looked at Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Joe Biden. Next up: former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke.

1. Does he have the experience required to do this job?

O’Rourke has far more political experience than the current president did before ascending to the Oval Office: seven years on the El Paso City Council, and six more representing Texas’s 16th congressional district in Washington. Prior to 2016, however, it had been more than 70 years since a candidate who had never before served as a senator, governor, or vice president won the White House. (Dwight Eisenhower, first elected in 1952, was merely the former Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II.) When it comes to traditional “qualifications,” Beto inarguably comes up short.

The good news for his supporters is that the most recently-elected president not named Donald Trump had logged only twelve years in elected office: eight in the Illinois legislature, and then a partial term in the U.S. Senate. Barack Obama was able to win the Democratic nomination and then the White House despite this relative dearth of experience, however, thanks in part to the grassroots enthusiasm his candidacy was able to generate, especially among minority voters and young people.

There are signs that O’Rourke could replicate that particular aspect of President Obama’s success. He raised an astonishing $80 million in his bid to unseat Ted Cruz, and has a knack for delivering stirring speeches that dependably go viral. Although he lost, he managed to take home more votes than any Democrat in the state’s history. The “rock star” descriptor works as both an allusion to his nascent celebrity and to the fact that he was literally in a band. (Foss, a post-hardcore outfit whose lead singer, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, went on to become the frontman for At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta.) People like Beto, in other words, which is why whispers about his hypothetical presidential prospects began before his defeat even became official.

The debate over the sufficiency of “experience,” really, is shorthand for the simple fact that voters want to back someone who will take the job seriously and knows how to govern. Evaluating what a candidate has done in public office is a sensible-enough place to start. But Obama’s winning hope-and-change campaign—and, if we’re being honest, Trump’s drain-the-swamp message—shows that the length of one’s tenure in Washington is not the only way to make that pitch.

2. Why the presidency, and why in 2020?

Given that he almost won a statewide election in Texas, where no Democrat has accomplished that task since 1994, it’s fair to wonder why O’Rourke wouldn’t want to put that streak to an end. There are plenty of opportunities on the horizon: The state’s senior senator, John Cornyn, is up for re-election in 2020, and a February Quinnipiac poll had them in a dead heat. Even after O’Rourke ruled out a challenge, Cornyn still sent out an email in early March urging his supporters to contribute to a “STOP BETO FUND.” Governor Greg Abbott, a likely GOP presidential hopeful, would be seeking a third term if he were to run again in 2022.

This is not just an oblique way of critiquing O’Rourke’s lack of experience; as Matt Ford argues at The New Republic, if strong candidates in winnable races choose to chase the 2020 nomination instead, the party as a whole will be worse off because of it. “It’s entirely possible that [O’Rourke] will break through a crowded Democratic field, become the party’s nominee next summer, and topple Trump in next fall’s presidential election,” Ford writes. “But it’s more probable that he fails to secure the nomination, and he will have given up the Democrats’ best chance to capture a key Senate seat and potentially retake the chamber.”

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 Senate majority, which means that Democrats need a net pickup of four seats in order to retake control of the upper chamber; if a Democratic vice president is able to break ties, that number goes down to three. Earning a majority would allow the party to impose an additional constraint on President Trump’s agenda—or, again, if a Democrat wins the White House, prevent Mitch McConnell from resuming his Obama-era brand of legislative obstructionism. The Senate map in 2020 is far more kinder to Democrats than it was in 2018, with potentially-vulnerable GOP incumbents in Colorado, Maine, Arizona, Georgia, and (applying a more generous definition) in North Carolina and Iowa. Every seat counts, and losing a very good candidate for one of them hurts.

This is tricky, because it isn’t anyone’s position to tell a candidate what they “should” do based on their subjective opinions about what’s best for the party’s future. (Again, it’s hard to imagine Obama running in 2008 if Democratic Party elders had had their way.) Asking O’Rourke to take one for the team also assumes his road to victory in 2020 or 2022 would be easier than this last go-round, when he benefited from low non-presidential-election-year turnout and an opponent whom even many Republicans loathe with all their hearts. Nevertheless, among this crop of candidates, he bears the heaviest burden of explaining why he is the right person for this job, this time.

3. Can he convince primary voters that Texas is in play?

Let’s start with the important caveats: Texas hasn’t gone blue in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter took home its 26 electoral votes in 1976. Hillary Clinton nearly halved Barack Obama’s 2012 margin of defeat, and still lost by more than nine points. Thanks to decades of Republican hegemony, “mainstream” political discourse in the state has shifted so far to the right that even moderate conservatives stand little chance of holding public office. Democrats have long hoped that Texas’s shifting demographics were on the verge of pushing into their column for good, and they’ve been disappointed on each successive Election Night.

Past performance, though, does not guarantee future results. In what is certain to be a close general election, nominating a politician with the proven ability to appeal to both dependable Democratic voters and historically tough-to-reach demographics is a smart choice; if they come from a large state that the party really wants to win, even better. If O’Rourke ends up becoming the pick, maybe he could help facilitate this long-awaited breakthrough.

MAYBE. Whether this is at all realistic depends a lot on—you guessed it—Democrats’ efforts to mobilize supporters as the electorate continues to get younger and more diverse. Historically, Republicans have been very good at thwarting these efforts by—again, you guessed it—instituting labyrinthine voter registration processes and onerous voter ID laws, none of which are going to get any more manageable in the next 18 months. And no matter how efficiently the party organizes itself, enthusiasm tends to be higher across the board in presidential election years; turnout in Texas dropped from nearly 60 percent in 2016 to 53 percent in 2018, and in the most recent non-Beto midterm contest, it was only 37 percent.) This means more of the state's Republicans are likely to show up for Donald Trump in 2020 than they did for Ted Cruz last fall.

But if it looks like O’Rourke has even a fighting chance at swiping Texas—a state he lost by only 2.6 points, and in which he was down by a single point to Donald Trump in that February Quinnipiac poll—the breathless headlines that follow could run together into a siren song that some Democratic primary voters will find hard to resist. For the same reason, even if he ends up bowing out of the race early, look for O’Rourke to be discussed frequently as an appealing potential running mate for whoever comes out on top.

4. How will he address the controversy over his acceptance of fossil fuel money?

Before the Texas election, O’Rourke signed on to the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, which is exactly what it sounds like: participants promise not to knowingly accept donations of over $200 from PACs, executives, or front groups associated with companies whose primary business is extracting, processing, or dealing in oil, gas, or coal. After the Texas election, it turned out that O’Rourke had accepted the second-most money of all 2018 candidates—$476,325—from this particular constituency. (Cruz, with $633,911, was the runaway winner.) Whoops.

This number isn’t as bad for O’Rourke as it might seem at first blush; it doesn’t include corporate PAC money, for example, since O’Rourke didn’t accept any donations of that type, and it does include smaller donations from non-executive, non-front group Texans who just happen to work in that industry. Even so, an exhaustive investigation conducted by Sludge’s Alex Kotch found that 75 percent of the oil-and-gas donations exceeded $200, and 30 of them were for the maximum legal amount of $2,700. The Pledge’s organizers—a coalition of 16 environmental groups—removed his name from the list of signatories for non-compliance.

How poorly you think this episode really reflects on O’Rourke probably depends a lot on how enthusiastic you are about his 2020 candidacy. But as Kotch notes, Beto is a moderate Democrat with a history of being friendlier to fossil fuels interests than, say, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders; for example, he was among just a handful of Democrats to join House Republicans in 2015 in voting to end America’s ban on crude oil exports, which critics argued would cause global increases in carbon dioxide emissions. On the campaign trail, he argued that exporting Texas natural gas to coal-burning countries like China and India would be “a great job opportunity and an environmentally responsible opportunity.”

In a state in which oil is as important as it is in Texas, it makes sense for a candidate competing for votes to not alienate the people who depend on it to make their living. But for voters looking for assurances that Beto is good on the table-stakes issue of climate change, his No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge flub is not particularly encouraging, and “BETO TOOK BIG OIL MONEY, GOES BACK ON HIS WORD” is a damning headline for any politician to contend with. O’Rourke will have to figure out a succinct way to put these donations in context, while also convincing voters that he’ll adhere more scrupulously to campaign promises in the future.

5. What does he believe about health care?

O’Rourke’s record in Congress is not exactly robust. In six years, he was the original sponsor of exactly one bill that became law, and it renamed a federal building. And while every major Democratic hopeful (other than the still-not-yet-officially-announced Joe Biden) currently holds public office, thereby affording them plentiful opportunities to weigh in on the record on key issues, O’Rourke is traveling the country and writing blog posts on Medium. If opponents want to portray him as a flashy upstart with little substance, the path for them to do so is a pretty clear one. “Basically, he’s a rich frat boy from West Texas,” an advisor to a Democratic candidate told Vanity Fair’s Chris Smith earlier this month. “He’s never really been hit from the left before.”

Like many of his opponents, he has endorsed a Green New Deal and has opined that Americans needs single-payer health care, but unlike many of his opponents, he has not announced his support of the Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All proposal. During the Senate campaign, O’Rourke declined to sign on to a House version of the bill, H.R. 676, ostensibly on the grounds that he didn’t think it went far enough. In his stump speeches, he often eschewed that phrase and the more generic “single-payer” in favor of the even more generic “universal, high-quality, guaranteed health care for all,” which sounds nice and means nothing specific.

If O’Rourke doesn’t believe Medicare for All is the best method of reaching that goal, fine. This is why primaries exist: to allow politicians to make their respective cases for why they should be the party’s winner-take-all standard-bearer. But on an issue this important—and in a race in which multiple front-runners are unambiguously in favor of Medicare for All—he can’t compete by critiquing a proposal voters love without offering a clear alternative of his own. Beto’s challenge is to determine what he’s for, because fame, by itself, isn’t going to be enough.