What Does Beto Believe?

Just What Does Beto Believe?

The former Texas congressman seems unwilling to place himself on his party’s conventional political spectrum.

By DAVID SIDERS

Is Beto O’Rourke the progressive icon who, during his Senate run against Ted Cruz, talked about legalizing marijuana and impeaching Donald Trump? Or is he the centrist Texan who, during his first run for the House, raised the possibility of making Social Security less generous for future retirees?

It might be the biggest question lingering over O’Rourke as he prepares for a likely run for the Democratic presidential nomination: Just what does he believe, actually?

O’Rourke seems unwilling to place himself on his party’s conventional political spectrum. At the final town hall of his congressional career, the last of more than 100 such gatherings he held, O’Rourke was greeted in December at a local high school by cheerleaders, a mariachi band and supporters wearing T-shirts reading “Beto for President.” In response to a question from POLITICO after the event, O’Rourke would not—or could not—answer if he considers himself a progressive Democrat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels. I don’t get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I’m for everyone.”

O’Rourke’s political identity was shaped by his hometown of El Paso, during his first House campaign seven years ago. While even then he was considered a progressive Democrat, he was also an idiosyncratic political thinker who seemed to think through problems while talking about them aloud—with voters and even junior staff.

During that 2012 race, O’Rourke mentioned to the 19-year-old campaign assistant who was driving him around El Paso in a pickup truck that many people in his West Texas congressional district seemed to be worried about Social Security, the staffer recalled. As it happened, the assistant, Joey Torres, was reading Bill Clinton’s 2011 book, Back to Work.

In it, Clinton discussed a method, suggested by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission, to gradually raise the Social Security retirement age to 69. Few Democrats supported the idea, and since then it has become verboten among progressives, who want to increase Social Security benefits rather than reduce them. But surprisingly to Torres, O’Rourke was intrigued. Soon the candidate was cutting a campaign video in which he said it is possible that “we’ll have to look at future generations … retiring at a later age, paying a greater percentage of their income into Social Security and making other necessary adjustments” to ensure the longevity of the program.

When I asked Torres recently if he often discussed policy positions with O’Rourke during the campaign, Torres said they did so only after canvassing neighborhoods and talking to voters. “The way we developed our strategy was to start block-walking and figuring out the issues that people really cared about,” Torres said.

And what did O’Rourke reveal about his political philosophy during these conversations, with Torres and with voters?

“He’s really fueled by being around people,” Torres said.

To O’Rourke’s supporters, that means he’s a listener who isn’t doctrinaire. To his critics, it means he is a malleable or worse—that he has no political core.

Running against an eight-term Democratic incumbent, Silvestre Reyes, in a heavily Democratic district in 2012, O’Rourke possessed the progressive credentials necessary to challenge Reyes from the left. And in some ways, he did. While serving on the El Paso City Council, he had already called for the legalization of marijuana and championed a proposal—highly controversial at the time—to provide health benefits to partners of gay city employees.

Yet in Texas’ open primary system, with Republicans as well as conservative Democrats deciding between the two candidates, O’Rourke’s advisers saw an opening for O’Rourke to run to Reyes’ right, as well. So O’Rourke criticized elements of the Affordable Care Act, then-President Barack Obama’s signature health care overhaul. His position on Social Security suggested an openness to proposals floated by a group of congressional Republicans. And in one internal campaign upheaval that became so intense it left one of his friends and political allies weeping, O’Rourke considered de-emphasizing his position—the subject of a book he co-wrote—on legalizing marijuana.

The strategy worked. By the end of the campaign, Reyes became the only Texas incumbent to lose a primary in 2012. And O’Rourke won his first race for national office, the biggest credential in his likely presidential campaign less than a decade later.

***

If O’Rourke has a political center, it is geographical, not ideological. He was raised in El Paso, a former garment-making capital of about 680,000 people on the border with Juárez, Mexico, and often recalls a pivotal moment in New York City in 1998, several years after he graduated from Columbia University. During a crowded one-hour commute to his job as a fact-checker at a publishing house in the Bronx, he was “pressed up against the glass of a subway car,” as he described it at an event in El Paso in January. With “sweat pouring down my face, under my shirt, in my pants,” he said, he imagined an alternative: “I could be in an air-conditioned truck in El Paso, Texas listening to 92.3 … maybe the window rolled down, my hair blowing … I knew that I had to get back.”

When O’Rourke returned to West Texas that year, he marveled at the Franklin Mountains, the food, the music and El Paso’s connection to Juárez, sharing a skyline and a culture. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the most exciting, essential, amazing place on the planet,” he said. “Having lived in New York, having traveled through most of the country, this was where it was at … I desperately wanted to be part of sharing our story.”

He started a web design company and an alternative newspaper, saying he “just wanted to be as engaged as I possibly could.”

“The logical conclusion,” he added, “was to run for office.”

O’Rourke’s father, Pat, had served as an El Paso County commissioner and county judge. He co-chaired Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in Texas in 1984 and 1988 before abandoning the Democratic Party to run for Congress as a Republican in 1992. He complained that Democrats had become unsupportive of business, and said at a forum that year that he “found it difficult to identify with actions in Congress and the polarizing going on,” according to the El Paso Times. But in his own campaigns—first for a seat on El Paso’s City Council and later, for a seat in Congress—the younger O’Rourke exhibited less interest in politics than place.

When El Paso Inc. bestowed its “El Pasoan of the Year” award on O’Rourke last month, O’Rourke told about 600 people at El Paso’s Fort Bliss that the award was “the honor of a lifetime, and the pinnacle of what has made me who I am.” Eight years earlier, walking through downtown El Paso to shoot a campaign video, O’Rourke had lauded “a new sense of civic pride” in the city and “the young people and not-so-young people who decided to move back here.” His campaign website featured the slogan, “It’s time for El Paso to take the lead.” And he ran a TV ad entitled, “El Paso is America's #1 ‘Can Do’ City.” O’Rourke would knock on some 16,000 doors during the congressional campaign.

O’Rourke had established himself on the El Paso City Council as part of a group of young Democrats known locally as “the progressives.” But during an on-stage conversation with O’Rourke earlier this year about the through-lines of his political career, Richard Pineda, a communications professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, suggested that O’Rourke had distinguished himself as a councilman and a congressman not by supporting any particular policy but instead “largely by the interaction which you had with constituents.”

O’Rourke nodded. “A lot of it comes from just accepting that I’m not as smart as I want to be,” he said. “I’m more likely than not always not the smartest guy in the room. I haven’t figured it all out.”

Beto O'Rourke is pictured leaving a brochure
Richard Pineda suggested that O’Rourke had distinguished himself as a councilman and a congressman not by supporting any particular policy but instead “largely by the interaction which you had with constituents.” He is pictured above during a walk around Canutillo, a neighborhood in El Paso County, during his 2012 congressional campaign. | Brian Wancho/Beto O'Rourke Campaign

His tolerance for uncertainty—and his preference for pragmatism at a time when Nancy Pelosi has called a border wall “immoral”—was in evidence last month, after he told MSNBC that he would “absolutely” remove an existing stretch of U.S.-Mexico border wall from his hometown of El Paso. Within days, O’Rourke was declining to generalize his remarks for parts of the border he doesn’t know, telling reporters “there is a role for physical barriers in some places.”

“I would work with local stakeholders, the property owners, the communities, those who actually live there to determine the best security solution,” O’Rourke said. “We saw in El Paso a solution in search of a problem imposed on us by people who did not live here.”

While listening to a pianist play late one recent night at a restaurant in the city’s downtown, Steve Ortega, a friend of O’Rourke who served on the City Council with him, tried to sum up O’Rourke’s approach to politics. “In El Paso, he’s viewed as very progressive,” Ortega said. “And El Paso knows him.”

Still, Ortega went on, “I think he’s a pragmatist in many ways. … If I had to peg him as something, I’d peg him as a liberal with a libertarian bent.”

***

By the time O’Rourke announced his run for Congress, he had been openly considering challenging Reyes for nearly two years, beginning with a confrontation between the two Democrats on drug policy. As an El Paso councilman, O’Rourke had pressed for a 2009 resolution that encouraged the federal government to undertake an “open, honest, national dialogue on ending the prohibition of narcotics.” El Paso, which had watched the Mexican Revolution unfold across the Rio Grande a century earlier (the local press ran tips for how to view battles, and businesses hawked binoculars), was now stricken by the deadly drug war raging in Juárez, where more than 1,500 people had been killed in a single year. In 2010, bullets fired from across the border hit El Paso’s City Hall.

Years before many progressive Democrats adopted a similar position, O’Rourke argued that legalizing marijuana could disrupt the business of drug trafficking and help to stem cartel violence. The council unanimously approved the resolution. After the vote, Reyes, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent, warned O’Rourke and his colleagues that they were making a mistake. The provocative measure, Reyes said, could jeopardize federal funding in the area. Enough of O’Rourke’s colleagues were spooked that when the mayor vetoed the resolution, there was no longer enough support on the council to override him.

Although O’Rourke voted to override the mayor’s veto, he considered soft-pedaling his position two years later as he began his primary campaign against Reyes. With Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the U.S. and Mexico, the book O’Rourke co-wrote with his friend and fellow council member Susie Byrd, already in production at El Paso’s Cinco Puntos Press, the campaign discussed halting the book’s publication, according to Torres, the campaign assistant, and Bobby Byrd, the press’ co-founder and Susie Byrd’s father.

O’Rourke’s advisers, Bobby Byrd said, were worried about drawing renewed attention to O’Rourke’s position on marijuana. The book’s cover carried another, unmistakably clear, subtitle: “An Argument to End the Prohibition of Marijuana.”

“He got together all his peeps, and they told him, they said we’d pay back Cinco Puntos,” Bobby Byrd told me at his publishing house in El Paso’s downtown on a recent morning. “Susie came over to our house, and she was weeping.”

Bobby Byrd recalled a long conversation with O’Rourke on the telephone. O’Rourke told him, he said, “all of my [campaign] committee is against it.”

“At the end, I said, ‘You know, there are a lot of supporters, people like me, who are left wingers … if you take it off the market, they’re going to think of you as just another politician,’” Byrd said.

He recalled that O’Rourke told him, “You’re right.” The book’s publication went forward as scheduled. (Chris Evans, an adviser to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, said in an email to POLITICO that O’Rourke in the 2012 congressional campaign “proudly advocated for ending the prohibition of marijuana.”)

“When we left the conversation off, I felt really good about Beto,” Byrd said. “The interesting thing about Beto is he talks to people.”

Yet if O’Rourke recognized the political liability of backtracking, he also saw the pitfalls of plowing ahead. With Reyes running advertisements criticizing him for proposing legalization, O’Rourke told the website PolitiFact in 2012 that although he favored the legalization of marijuana, it is “not a priority of this community; it doesn’t reflect the desires of people I seek to represent as my constituents.”

In a public opinion poll conducted by the El Paso Times one day after O’Rourke entered the race, nearly 30 percent of voters were undecided between Reyes and O’Rourke. And O’Rourke was doing especially well among more moderate voters—those who had voted in both Democratic and Republican primaries in the past.

El Paso’s congressional district is safely Democratic, so it is not unusual for Republicans there to vote in the Democratic primary. Russell Autry, whose company conducted the poll for the El Paso Times, told the newspaper at the outset of the campaign that O’Rourke “has to count on those voters.”

With the Democratic Party’s establishment squarely behind Reyes, O’Rourke ran at his fellow Democrat less for his ideology than his incumbency. He highlighted reports that Reyes used campaign funds to pay family members. He blamed him for long wait times at the city’s border crossings with Juárez. And he blamed Reyes, a Vietnam War veteran, for deficiencies in the local veterans health care system.

While Obama, the sitting president, endorsed Reyes and former President Clinton came to the district to campaign for Reyes, O’Rourke tilted against the Democratic Party’s leaders. He wrote on his campaign website that although Obama’s federal health care overhaul “seeks to address some important problems when it comes to accessing health care in this country,” it failed to address problems “specific to El Paso and the border,” including Medicare reimbursement rates and an inadequate supply of medical professionals. O’Rourke said he would “consult with the community before voting on legislation this significant,” while faulting Reyes for failing to do so.

Reyes lit into O’Rourke, saying at a news conference that he “recently told insurance brokers that he would have voted against the health care bill, which helps our seniors pay for their prescription drugs and provides free preventative services,” according to the El Paso Times. Reyes added, “I wonder. Is that a Democrat?”

Tactically, O’Rourke’s campaign carried many of the markings of his larger, near-miss Senate run against Cruz, in which O’Rourke relied on a “distributed” form of organizing that put low-level staffers and volunteers in charge of their own voter-outreach operations. Similarly, O’Rourke’s 2012 campaign used an in-house program to connect supporters with friends and family members, inviting supporters to manually upload lists of their contacts into an internal file.

“They would come into our campaign office and they would just like start finding their friends and family, and basically marking them down,” said Matt Sutton, who worked on the campaign and in O’Rourke’s congressional office. “When it came time for early voting, you were responsible for those people. They were your people that you needed to encourage to get out and vote.”

Sutton said the network did not amass “a humongous amount of people.” But he estimated that between 3,500 and 5,000 people were signed up. And in a race decided by less than 3,000 votes, he said, “Had we not had that, there is like a pretty good chance that we probably wouldn’t have pushed it over the finish line.”

Before swearing off super PAC money later in his career, O’Rourke also benefited from spending against Reyes by the nonpartisan super PAC Campaign for Primary Accountability, which received $18,750 from a partnership with ties to O’Rourke’s father-in-law, William Sanders. O’Rourke also took a small amount of PAC money himself. Reyes at the time called O’Rourke an “opponent who deliberately ran a nasty, dirty campaign.” But even Reyes’ supporters have acknowledged the incumbent was surprised by the strength of O’Rourke’s challenge, and that O’Rourke outworked him.

Autry, the pollster, worked for O’Rourke during his City Council days, although O’Rourke would later say that he doesn’t rely on focus groups or polls. When an O’Rourke campaign volunteer went door to door, Autry recalled, he or she would ask voters if they had any questions for O’Rourke. If they did, the volunteer offered to put O’Rourke on the phone or call him to the house on the spot.

“He was the hardest worker we ever saw,” Autry said.

In El Paso in 2012, he added, many Republicans disenchanted with Reyes found an alternative. “Many Republicans voted in the Democratic primary, and the majority of them voted for Beto.”

The reasons, Autry suggested, had less to do with O’Rourke’s ideology than his charisma.

“If you do your homework and you vote for what you think is best,” Autry said, “you’re going to be all over the map.”