O’Rourke dropping out of presidential race
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas is dropping out of the presidential race, ending a campaign in which he struggled for months to recapture the energy of his insurgent 2018 Senate candidacy on a national stage full of other big personalities and liberal champions.
O’Rourke made the decision to quit the race in the middle of this week, on the eve of a gathering Friday of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, according to people familiar with his thinking. He is not expected to run for any other office in 2020, despite persistent efforts by party leaders and political donors to coax him into another bid for the Senate.
His campaign has been under extreme financial strain, and O’Rourke’s advisers concluded that proceeding in the race might have meant making deep cuts to his staff.
By leaving the race, O’Rourke completes the winding path from his early status as a potential front-runner to his drastic decision over the summer to reframe his candidacy as an activist crusader after the mass shooting targeting Latinos in his home city of El Paso, Texas.
Since then, O’Rourke has campaigned doggedly on issues related to guns and race, calling most notably for federal gun-control policies that would require owners of assault-style weapons to surrender them to the government. That’s a far more aggressive stance than most Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed.
That last phase of his campaign has taken O’Rourke far beyond the early-state circuit and included visits with prison inmates in California and an immigrant community in Mississippi.