Bye Bye Beto

It's over.

Beto O'Rourke, once seen as the great hope for Texas Democrats, ends 2022 with a brilliant political future behind him.  The man who came so close to winning a U.S. Senate seat from Texas in 2018 lost his bid for the state's governorship to incumbent Republican Greg Abbott by eleven percentage points.  This was in spite of the infamous statewide blackout during the February 2021 cold snap, the Uvalde school shooting, and a state abortion policy that makes Florida's own severe abortion policy seem as liberal as New York's. 

Some people will blame Texas state legislature and U.S, House gerrymandering in the Republicans' favor, arguing that, despite the fact that a vote for statewide office can't be gerrymandered, the shutting out of Democrats locally discouraged Texas Democratic voters from voting even in a statewide election for the governorship or a U.S. Senate seat, on top of the state's voter restriction law.  But O'Rourke defined his positions and sharpened his rhetoric to the point where he fell out of favor with moderate Texas voters, and not only did he hold positions unpopular in Texas - like confiscating guns - he came across to many Texans as pulling tasteless political theater stunts like challenging Abbott in the middle of a gubernatorial press conference on the Uvalde shooting.  Texans just didn't like him anymore.  Many never did.  

Now the awful truth can be told.  O'Rourke was nominated for the simple fact that Texas Democrats had no one else to run a credible gubernatorial campaign against Abbott.  O'Rourke lost his own credibility as a result,, but so did Texas Democrats; even more so than Florida Democrats, they're token opposition to a state Republican juggernaut.  Beto may have captured the imagination of Texas Democrats, but so did Wendy Davis when she ran for governor in 2014.  So did Ron Kirk when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002.  Maybe Texas Democrats should stop falling for candidates who capture their imagination and start thinking realistically about how to win.  

All that said, O'Rourke did run a better gubernatorial campagin in 2021 and 2022 than he ran a presidential campaign in 2019.  For one thing, he became more poised and less animated, and the media didn't ridicule him so much.  But the truth is that he's someone who needs to find a way to make positive change other than through elective office.  Beto O'Rourke may have been the right man to reinvigorate the Texas Democratic Party - and he's wealthy enough to help fund the future campaigns of Texas Democrats - but, as a candidate, he's been the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Nevertheless, I don't feel sorry for O'Rourke supporters for setting themselves up for disappointment.  After all, I set myself up for disappointment - time after time after time after time - as a Martin O'Malley supporter.  (And now that O'Malley isn't running for President or anything else ever again, I'm going t ohave to stay away from Pop-Tarts.)  I do feel sorry for Beto, as his sister Erin recently died, and at Christmas time in the aftermath f his own political defeat n top of that.  I also feel sorry for him and the thirty million other people who call Texas home, as they have to live under a Republican legislature and  four more years of Gregory Wayne Abbott as their governor.   

As for Abbott, he just did a victory lap by sending a bus of migrants from O'Rourke's hometown of El Paso to Vice President Kamala Harris's official residence. 😠