At the wheel with the Democrat who’s trying to turn Texas blue.
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 country had come to this crossroads,” 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 childhood sobriquet that stuck) who spends several hours a week practicing his Spanish. He calls for a single-payer health care system and legalized marijuana.
This story is from the June 4, 2018 edition of Time.
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This story is from the June 4, 2018 edition of Time.
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