"Beto O’Rourke on Long, Hard Road" in Time Magazine, 5--23

Beto O’Rourke Is on a Long, Hard Road

By Nash Jenkins  for TIME Magazine, Benjamin Rasmussen, photographer,May 22, 2018

On a dusty road in southwestern Texas, Beto O’Rourke leans out the window of the Ford Expedition he’s driving and mutters, “You gonna let me pass you, state police?” He speeds ahead of the cruiser while chewing an empanada. 

In the past seven days, the 45-year-old Democratic Congressman has clocked nearly a thousand miles across the state. Tonight, after a town hall in Uvalde, an hour away, he gets to go home.

Small towns have been O’Rourke’s favored terrain since he launched a bid to unseat Republican Ted Cruz as the Lone Star State’s junior Senator nearly 14 months ago. History says O’Rourke is an underdog in November:

Texas chose President Trump by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016 and hasn’t sent a Democrat to statewide office since Ann Richards was elected governor in 1990. But O’Rourke, a former punk-rock bassist who has spent three terms in the U.S. House, talks more about the future.

The town hall meeting.

Benjamin Rasmussen for TIME

“The country had come to this cross-roads,” he says. “We were going to be either a country of walls and Muslim bans and the press as the enemy of the people—all this mean sh-t, all this pettiness and paranoia trying to make us afraid of one another—or we were going to be something better.”

Cruz is a dogmatic conservative who once battled the party establishment, then embraced the President after finishing second to him in the 2016 GOP primary. O’Rourke is an Irish American with a Hispanic nickname (Beto, a diminutive for his first name, Robert, is a child-hood sobriquet that stuck) who spends several hours a week practicing his Spanish. He calls for a single-payer health care system and legalized marijuana

He has certainly galvanized the grassroots left. In the first quarter of 2018, O’Rourke raked in $6.7 million, more than twice the haul of the Cruz campaign and his allied super PACs, which is a fund-raising force in its own right. 

(Cruz pulled in $143 million to his campaign and allied super PACs in 2016, and the two candidates have roughly the same amount of cash on hand.) A mid-April Quinnipiac University poll found the race to be a near dead heat, though independent analysts call the Democrat a long shot.

O’Rourke is betting that it runs through the hinterlands. He has spent more time than any other Democrat in recent memory visiting towns across Texas, including all 254 counties. He says he sees two currents of disaffection that work in his favor:  Democrats are eager for new leadership. 

And some Republicans don’t like the GOP’s direction under Trump. “I mostly vote Republican in national elections, but I’m so disgusted with what’s taking place,” a 72-year-old cattle rancher and self–identified conservative named Bill Martin said after O’Rourke’s town hall in Carrizo Springs. “The body politic is kind of like the human body. 

The liberal faction represents the heart, the conservative faction represents the mind, and the body needs both to stay alive.” Martin said he was leaning toward voting for the Democrat.

TIME | May 22, 2018