Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign

Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is dropping out of the 2020 Democratic presidential race.

O’Rourke launched his campaign to great fanfare following an unsuccessful — but competitive — campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). He burst onto the scene of the 2020 primary declaring he was “just born to be in it” and subsequently raised $6.1 million in his first day of fundraising. Some early supporters characterized him as “Barack Obama, but white.”

Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke is, most likely, not going to be the Democratic nominee. But for some on the right, even while O’Rourke is seemingly flailing in the polls, he is newly representative of the “quiet part of the progressive agenda” — what every Democrat believes but never says out loud.

Case in point: During an LGBTQ town hall hosted by the Human Rights Campaign and CNN last week, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called for religious institutions that oppose same-sex marriage to lose their tax-exempt status.

CNN’s climate crisis town hall on Wednesday night was an unprecedented seven hours of discussion on climate change with 10 of the Democratic 2020 presidential contenders. It was also the most substantive discussion of climate change policies ever broadcast on primetime television.

Each candidate was given a 40-minute segment, meaning they could provide long, nuanced answers to hard questions on the most far-reaching issue of our time. There was a lot that could have gone wrong, so it’s remarkable so much went right. The town hall easily outshone the muddled discussion in the paltry half-hour or so devoted to climate change across eight hours of official Democratic debates.

A narrow loss in a 2018 Texas Senate race made Beto O’Rourke a political star. He decided to try to ride that stardom all the way to the White House as a fresh face who combines charisma and an outsider persona with a fairly conventional Democratic policy agenda.

But while Beto’s campaign seemed almost painfully meta — he’s the guy who party professionals thought seemed like the kind of guy who voters would like — he’s running on a substantive agenda that in some ways comes the closest to representing the polar opposite of Trumpism.

Presidential candidate and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) commemorated Pride Month on Wednesday by putting out a comprehensive LGBTQ rights plan.

The plan details many steps O’Rourke would take as president. That includes executive actions he could enact on his own, including the repeal of President Donald Trump’s ban on openly serving transgender troops in the military and religious exemption expansions that could be used to justify anti-LGBTQ discrimination. O’Rourke also calls for the passage of legislation, like the Equality Act to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination and criminal justice reforms to address LGBTQ-specific concerns. And he calls for international action, including reforming the asylum process to help LGBTQ people find a safer place to live.

Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s campaign proposal on immigration — which came out earlier this week, joining Julian Castro’s as the first detailed immigration plans in the Democratic primary field — is an acknowledgment of an important truth that leading Democratic candidates have been loath to acknowledge: Immigration, right now, is an executive-branch issue rather than a legislative-branch issue.

O’Rourke’s plan focuses on curtailing immigration enforcement — in particular, all but eliminating immigration detention — and focusing instead on building up immigration courts and case management systems for newly arriving asylum seekers, while returning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations of immigrants already living in the US to the constraints of President Barack Obama’s last years in office. None of these are things he claims he needs Congress to do, or at least to start doing.

Beto O’Rourke came in for widespread criticism in March when he said that his wife Amy was raising their three children, “sometimes with my help,” while he ran for president.

He later apologized, but the comment exposed a deeper reality: While male candidates can often count on a partner to take the lead on child care while they campaign, women rarely can do the same.

Former Democratic Texas representative, 2020 presidential contender, and table-stander Beto O’Rourke on Monday released a new policy proposal, what he called “the most ambitious climate plan in the history of the United States.” While not entirely aligned with the Green New Deal resolution, the broad framework introduced to Congress in February, it’s the most comprehensive climate policy proposal put out by any 2020 contender to date.

O’Rourke is pitching big numbers and ambitious targets: $5 trillion in new investments, halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and net-zero emissions by 2050. It’s his first major policy proposal and it’s a stab at distinguishing himself from the crowded field of 2020 presidential candidates on a major issue for Democratic primary voters. An April Monmouth University poll of Iowa Democratic voters showed that climate change was the second-most important issue to voters after healthcare.

Beto O’Rourke quite literally drips with authenticity; he’s the cool punk rocker dad on the campaign trail. Joe Biden’s love of trains and off-color jokes has earned him the affectionate nickname Uncle Joe. No one doubts Bernie Sanders’s passion for democratic socialism.

But some candidates have a harder time proving they’re the real deal. When Kamala Harris told the Breakfast Club radio show she listened to Tupac and Snoop Dogg, she was accused of lying about her musical taste, in an apparent questioning of her blackness. Elizabeth Warren has been called “aloof” for her focus on policy, and the scandal around her claims of Native American heritage earned her a comparison to Hillary Clinton.

Beto O’Rourke likes to stand on countertops while campaigning for president.

It’s not a totally unreasonable thing to do. Normally at a political rally, the featured speaker would be up on an elevated stage just like any other kind of performer. But campaigning in the early primary states often features a lot of appearances in more intimate settings — house parties hosted by supporters or local notables, restaurants or coffee shop appearances, etc. There’s no stage in these kinds of places, but there generally is a countertop — so why not hop up and make your own stage?

It’s easy to find clips of presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke talking about health care. He posts about it on Facebook. It comes up at multiple town halls that he held during his 2018 Senate campaign.

What’s a lot harder is figuring out exactly what type of health care system the former Texas Congress member supports.

Beto O’Rourke lost the Texas Senate race in November. Four months later he’s running for president — and early polling shows there’s a not insignificant percentage of people who seem to be on board — or at the very least know who he is.

O’Rourke has spent the last several months traveling the country, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, trying to get out of a self-described “funk” and researching a possible 2020 bid. He lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz by just over 2 percentage points — the closest Senate race in Texas since 1978. Since his loss, he has polled among Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) in early 2020 surveys, which really say more about name recognition than actual long-term support.