San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
To win, O’Rourke must do the impossible one more time
There are many different angles from which we can assess the steepness of the mountain that Beto O’Rourke must climb Tuesday
We can start with the most obvious, oft-repeated fact: None of his fellow Democrats has won a statewide race in Texas in 24 years.
We also can consider that O’Rourke is from El Paso, the isolated, New Mexico-bordering edge of West Texas, which has never been a base for political power in this state.
Then there’s the fact that every poll save one — a mid-September outlier from Reuters/Ipsos — released over the past eight months has shown O’Rourke’s U.S. Senate rival, Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, holding a lead, even if some of those leads have fallen within the polls’ margin of error.
But it’s the simple electoral mathematics that make O’Rourke’s challenge so imposing.
Based on early voting numbers in this state, which already have exceeded the 4.7 million total voters who turned out for the 2014 midterm, it seems safe to predict that we’ll end up with a statewide turnout of at least 7 million votes.
It’s also safe to conclude that Gov. Greg Abbott will beat Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez by something close to 20 percent, which translates to a victory margin of about 1.4 million votes.
Based on that premise, O’Rourke would need to convince at least 700,000 Abbott voters to switch sides for the U.S. Senate race and vote for him.
It sounds impossible. Buster Douglas vs. Mike Tyson impossible. Villanova vs. Georgetown impossible. Michael Cohen Getting Invited to Donald Trump’s Next Birthday Party impossible.
But O’Rourke has consistently achieved the impossible over the past 18 months. The congressman turned a suicide mission into a star-making turn. He raised more than $70 million during an election cycle in which Valdez has struggled to reach $2 million.
He attracted more national media attention than any Texas Democrat since Ann Richards, if not Lyndon B. Johnson. He built an ever-growing celebrity fan club that includes LeBron James, Ellen DeGeneres, Lin Manuel Miranda, Willie Nelson, Travis Scott, John Cusack and Robert De Niro. He put a palpable scare into Cruz and the GOP.
He drew wildly enthusiastic crowds from McAllen to Marfa. And he did more for Whataburger than any advertising campaign could hope to conjure.
All along, he based his campaign on a willfully naive optimism, rooted in the notion that he could inspire a million new voters to the polls in a state where Democrats perpetually exist in a cocoon of low expectations and lowgrade demoralization.
He won’t get those million new voters, but he might get closer than any of us imagined.
Tom Bonier, political data cruncher for TargetSmart, determined that going into the state’s final day of early voting, 314,569 first-time voters had made it to the polls, with more than 78 percent of them either people of color or under the age of 40 (or both).
Bonier also pointed out that in 2014, over-65 voters in Texas outnumbered under-30 voters by 10 to 1. Through Thursday’s voting, this year’s margin was only 3 to 1.
At the risk of leaning too much on identity politics stereotypes, those numbers suggest some opportunity for O’Rourke.
Ultimately, the final results Tuesday will not only be a verdict on the wisdom of O’Rourke’s unconventional strategy — repeatedly visiting Republican counties, eschewing pollsters and consultants — but also on the reliability of political polls in a race where a candidate bases everything on changing the definition of a “likely voter.”
Every visit I’ve made to polling sites in Bexar County over the past two weeks has confirmed what I already assumed: A lot of local Democrats are going to the polls purely (or at least primarily) to cast a vote for O’Rourke; that he’s been a one-man turnout machine for the Democratic Party, even as he takes pains to emphasize that party affiliation doesn’t mean that much to him.
This phenomenon underlines the fact that he’s had to carry the Democratic ticket, that he’s received little help from his allies on the statewide ballot.
The laws of political gravity may come crashing down on O’Rourke on Tuesday, but they haven’t touched him yet. Even as recent polls show him down by 5 or 6 points to Cruz, O’Rourke’s faithful continue to believe and the candidate’s exuberance hasn’t waned.
Every other statewide Democratic campaign over the past 15 years — even ones that began with great expectations, such as the gubernatorial candidacies of Bill White and Wendy Davis — has crawled to the November finish line, winding down with a sigh of inevitability.
Win or lose, O’Rourke and his followers are going out with a raspy shout of defiance.