From Bang to Whimper: Beto O’Rourke’s Exit and The Specter of What Might Have Been

In an alternate universe envisioned by Beto O’Rourke’s fan base about a year ago, this weekend might have witnessed his breakout performance at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Liberty and Justice Dinner on Friday, followed by the release of a University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll showing him leading the Democratic presidential primary field in his home state, poised to make a strong showing in Iowa and turn Texas blue while on the way to changing the Electoral College map for 2020 and beyond as he rid the country of Donald Trump and swept into the White House. 

The real world looks a little different today.

O’Rourke, in a short speech outside the dinner venue before the event started – how’s that for symbolism – pulled the plug on a presidential campaign that never generated the charge of the 2018 Senate campaign against Ted Cruz that made him a national figure  even though he lost the race. The Democratic primary trial ballot in the UT/TT poll released today, conducted before he dropped out (thanks, man!), had O’Rourke in third place with 14% behind the decidedly non-Texan Joe Biden at 23% and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren at 18%.

So once their sorrowful tears dry, where might O’Rourke’s supporters turn? There was a special UT/Texas Tribune survey in September of potential Democratic Primary votes. That poll found the same share of Democrats as in the October poll, 14%, supporting O’Rourke (26% said Biden and 18% said Warren, rounding out the top 3). That poll, designed as a drill down into the attitudes of Texas Demcoratic primary voters in the runup to the presidential primary debate in Houston also asked about second choices, as well which candidates Democratic voters couldn’t support in the general election. 

Among O’Rourke’s supporters, Joe Biden stood the most to gain by O’Rourke’s exit from the presidential contest – he was the second choice of 27% of Beto’s supporters, followed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at 18% and 17% respectively. No other candidate received more than 4% of his supporters’ second choice endorsements. So in the short run, expect the rich to get richer as more Texas polls seek to shed light on the state of the Democratic contest in delegate rich Texas – though O’Rourke’s lack of a significant presidential fan base in his home state makes for slim pickings for the top three. 

On the negative side of the ledger, 8% of O’Rourke’s supporters said that they would be unable to support Joe Biden, 11% said that they couldn’t cast a vote for Sanders, and another 16% said that they couldn’t support Warren. It’s difficult at this early stage to know how solidified those attitudes are and whether any Democratic candidate, once nominated in the current environment, wouldn’t garner the support of the vast majority of Democratic and Democratic leaning voters. But the differences in the head-to-head match-ups on the October poll – in which Trump finished ahead of the top four candidates and the two Texans by 4-13 points – and the Trump re-elect item, which simply asks whetter respondents would vote to re-elect Trump or vote for an unspecified other (which Trump loses 48-52), suggest that all Democrats and most independents are not quite ready to throw their vote to anyone-but-Trump. Warriness -- perhaps weariness --  of Trump has not yet translated into fixed determination to vote against him among a stable majority of Texans. The election, it should be remembered, is still a year away, and there is a competitive Democratic primary with no clear frontrunner.

The unsettled nature of the Democratic primary O'Rourke has exited is evident in the Texas polling. The candidate with the most support in both September and October polling, Joe Biden, has experienced some recent difficulties at this stage of the campaign with respect to fundraising and expanding beyond his established baseline of support in comparison to some of the other top-tier candidates. So picking up some of O’Rourke’s supporters could act as a much-needed shot in the arm to his campaign. If voters break the way they said they would in September, we might see Biden’s share increase by 3 to 4 percentage points in Texas, to between 26% and 27% (which is where he was back in September), and Warren’s and Sanders’ vote shares increase by approximately 2 points each, but given O’Rourke’s low-standing in non-Texas polls, it’s unlikely that his exit will do much to shake up the race beyond Texas’ borders -- or to clarify it, either.

Whither Beto now? While O’Rourke has signalled that he has no intention of running for U.S. Senate in Texas in 2020, he would very likely enter that race as a sudden front-runner among the Democrats currently seeking their party’s nomination. However ineffectual his presidential run, his close loss to Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 and his high name identification relative to the candidates currently in that race make it hard to imagine that he has so damaged his brand as to not be instantly competitive in a field of much lesser known candidates. The 14% support he was earning in a Democratic Presidential Primary field with far better known and more politically established contenders would make him the frontrunner in Senate primary polling if he were to pick up only the same share of voters in the Senate primary. The field is currently led by former Congressional candidate M.J. Hegar, with 12%, in a race in which the October poll found over half of Democratic primary voters saying they hadn’t thought enough about the race to have an opinion or were undecided, and the most well known of the candidates with 24% name recognition. That candidate, former Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Chirs Bell, was the choice of 3%.

O’Rourke’s ability to upend the race based on his name recognition alone isn’t a warrant for him to get in it, nor does it reduce the likelihood that his efforts to break out of the pack in the presidential race probably damaged the potential he once had to be a 2020 general election candidate able to amplify the efforts of whoever winds up at the top of the presidential ticket. Recognizing the political capital he retains in comparison to the comparatively weak field in the Senate race illustrates just how much he – and the Democrats – may have lost as a result of his presidential ambitions.