Go low...

When they go low, Beto can too

O'Rourke's supporters point to his 2012 run for Congress as evidence that he can hold his own in a rough presidential primary.

By DAVID SIDERS

Beto O’Rourke says he hasn’t decided yet if he will run for president. But here in his hometown, his supporters are bracing for a combative primary. And they point to a previous campaign — his 2012 run for Congress — as evidence that he can hold his own in an intraparty brawl.

Six years before the high-minded Texas Senate run that lifted his national star, O’Rourke felled an eight-term incumbent House Democrat, Silvestre Reyes, casting him as ineffectual and unethical in a bruising primary campaign. The race pit O’Rourke not only against Reyes, but then-President Barack Obama, who endorsed the sitting congressman, and former President Bill Clinton, who campaigned for Reyes in the West Texas border district. In a stunning result, O’Rourke went to Congress, while Reyes became the only Texas incumbent to fail to win re-nomination that election year.

Among Democrats in El Paso, the race laid bare a rare asset for a Democratic presidential contender: the ability to cut at his opposition, while simultaneously carrying the flush of an idealist.

Knocking on thousands of doors in 2012 – a precursor to his tireless trek across Texas in 2018 – O’Rourke, then a former city councilman, highlighted reports that his fellow Democrat Reyes used campaign funds to pay family members. And he blamed him for long wait times at border crossings from Juárez, Mexico.

“He hit Reyes,” said Steve Ortega, a friend of O’Rourke who served on the El Paso city council with him. “Reyes hit him as well. They went after each other. He wasn’t bashful about exposing some of the negative things that Reyes had done.”

For O’Rourke's supporters, the contest has become instructive ahead of a presidential primary in which he is already taking hits from the left, with progressive activists freshly scrutinizing his House votes and lack of involvement in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. O'Rourke said Friday he does not know if he is a “progressive Democrat,” explaining he is “not big on labels.”

But while Democrats here predict he will be far less likely to criticize rival Democrats in an open primary — as opposed to his campaign against an incumbent in Reyes — the 2012 campaign demonstrated to them that he has the stomach to do it.

The election, said Danny Anchondo, a former chairman of the local Democratic Party in El Paso, "was very tough, it was very controversial, it was very heated.”

By 2012, O’Rourke had already established a strong record on liberal issues while on the El Paso council, calling for the legalization of marijuana and championing a then-controversial proposal to provide health benefits to partners of gay city employees.

In the House race, Anchondo said, O’Rourke effectively outflanked Reyes on the left, withstanding withering attacks on a past arrest for DUI while pummeling Reyes, a Vietnam War veteran, for shortcomings at the local veterans health care system.

Reyes’ inability to secure more federal funding for veterans health services was “not necessarily … his fault,” Anchondo said. Nevertheless, he said, O’Rourke “used that very effectively, and that was one of the key issues that he used.”

O’Rourke also benefited from outside money, with the nonpartisan super PAC Campaign for Primary Accountability spending heavily to defeat Reyes. And he accepted limited PAC money himself, before electing in 2015 to no longer accept such contributions.

The campaign tore at the local Democratic Party establishment, in which Anchondo said Reyes has “been a very loyal Democrat,” raising money for the party and voting “correctly” on partisan issues. During the campaign, Reyes – who did not return calls for comment – called O’Rourke and local allies “pacoteros,” telling the El Paso Times that they had united to “gang up on one person because they can't do it one-on-one."

O’Rourke’s supporters dismissed Reyes’ complaints, and Eliot Shapleigh, a former Texas state senator and longtime friend of O’Rourke, blamed Reyes for negativity in the campaign.

“Reyes was ugly,” Shapleigh said. “Reyes put an ad on TV about Beto’s DWI, and he ridiculed the name ‘Beto’ because he thought he was trying to get the Hispanics to vote for him.”

Still, though Shapleigh walked precincts for O’Rourke, he said he “didn’t really think he could win” because of Reyes’ tenure and institutional support.

“I had no idea he was such a dynamic campaigner,” Shapleigh said. “He was energetic like he was in the Senate campaign. I think he went to 17,000 households in El Paso, which is a lot.”

The race served as a contrast to a Senate campaign in which O’Rourke was reluctant to go negative against a Republican senator, Ted Cruz. And for some observers of the 2012 House campaign, that shift was puzzling. Chris Lippincott, an Austin-based consultant who ran a super PAC opposing Cruz, said O’Rourke “comes from a community … where people pay attention to politics and they’re engaged, and people are not afraid to sharpen their elbows and deploy them.”

“They view politics as a contact sport in El Paso,” he said, and in 2012, O’Rourke “was willing to be tough.”

But in the race against Cruz, Lippincott said, “He didn’t go negative until the last possible second, and I think that cost him … I think the fact that he did not have consultants cost him.”

If he runs again — whether for president or some other office in Texas — Lippincott said O’Rourke should “go negative faster … just do a better job on the attack.”

Speaking to reporters here Friday, O’Rourke maintained that he “never [has] run against somebody or against something,” and will not if he runs for president.

“I’m just not a negative guy,” he said. “I’m not turned on by bringing other people down. I’m excited about the big things that we can do in the future, and how we pull people together to achieve them.”

Asked if he had drawn any lessons from his 2012 campaign about how he might approach the 2020 field, O’Rourke said, “We haven’t really thought much about what our next steps are. I want to make sure that I’m focused on the job that I’ve got today.”

However, he said, “I’ll tell you, any time that I have run for office – for city council, for Congress, for Senate – we’ve just listened to the people that we want to represent and serve, reflect back what we learn, and have the courage of our convictions.”

O’Rourke is in a much stronger position than he was six years ago. He raised more than $80 million in his Senate campaign this year, mostly from a national network of small donors. And after his narrower-than-expected loss to Cruz in deep red Texas, his consideration of a presidential campaign immediately re-shaped the field. O’Rourke vaulted ahead of several more established Democrats in early presidential polls, with many activists and donors awaiting a decision from O’Rourke before committing to another candidate.

But running against the euphoria has come the earliest signs of criticism from fellow Democrats – and a reminder of the intraparty divisions that O’Rourke was forced to navigate in 2012. Blossoming in progressive circles in recent days, a series of critiques have challenged O’Rourke on issues ranging from his membership in the centrist New Democrat Coalition to his 2015 vote granting then-President Barack Obama “fast track” trade promotion authority for a controversial Asia-Pacific trade agreement.

“Certainly, in a race where 30 or more Democrats might run, there’s benefit to some to attack Beto,” Shapleigh said. “His record is what it is … He is as progressive as you can get.” In addition, he said, his politics are “tailor made for Iowa and New Hampshire,” two critical early nominating states that put a premium on face-to-face, retail campaigning.

“If he got going in Iowa in January or February, that place would be on fire,” Shapleigh said, echoing a common sentiment among Democratic activists in the first-in-the-nation caucus state.

A veteran of O’Rourke’s Senate campaign told POLITICO that if O’Rourke runs for president, he will likely adhere to a similarly positive tone that he employed against Cruz. However, the person said, “I think he would hold people accountable for their record and their votes … and whether their ideas are realistic moving the country forward.”

Recalling his 2012 success, Ortega said, “He took out one of the highest-ranking Democrats, someone who had been in office for close to 15 years plus.”

If O’Rourke runs in 2020, Ortega said, “There will not be any candidate in the primary who outworks him … He’s the hardest working campaigner that I’ve ever seen in my life.”