HOUSTON, Texas — Legendary liberal satirist Molly Ivins spent her entire career trying to explain Texas and its politics to the rest of the nation. In a 2003 piece titled “Is Texas America,” Ivins instructed her readers: “Here’s the deal on Texas. It’s big. So big there are about five distinct and different places here, separated from one another geographically, topographically, botanically, ethnically, culturally and climatically.”
Now, 24 years after Ann Richards, the last Democrat to win statewide, lost the governor’s mansion to a Republican, another Democrat is attempting to push Texas and all of its competing identities to lead the national conversation on the issues of the moment from immigration, to healthcare, and police brutality.
To do that, Beto O’Rourke argues, Texas needs a new senator. The four-term congressman from El Paso is challenging incumbent Republican Ted Cruz for his Senate seat, and to the surprise of everyone, it’s a real race. The contest perfectly captures everything that makes Texas, Texas. Where the one-term Cruz pushes for limited government and a border wall, boasting the state’s “come and take it” attitude, O’Rourke talks about a Texas that is home to the most diverse city in the country — Houston — and an inclusive Texas whose border towns have formed a deep bond with its Mexican neighbors to the south for generations.
Listening to Cruz and O’Rourke on the stump, you’d think they’re from entirely different planets, let alone states.
Democrats are trying to turn Texas into California with its “tofu, silicon, and dyed hair,” Cruz said at a rally in Humble, Texas.
“What?” O’Rourke said when read the quote the following day, stifling laughter in between bites of his fruit and scrambled eggs. “I have no worry about us becoming anybody else, we’re fiercely independent, we’re proud of who we are but we’re proud of all of who we are, not just some over others.”
“Texas defies anyone’s stereotypes,” he added.
O’Rourke’s vision for Texas is sweeping and ambitious, considering the state prides itself on its rugged individualism. As a Cruz voter, who attended a recent O’Rourke town hall, put it: Cruz “is for the individual and O’Rourke is for the complete unit.” At every town hall and rally, O’Rourke asks voters to picture a Texas that leads on compassionate immigration policies, universal pre-kindergarten, protections for LGBTQ people from job discrimination, and increased wages for public school teachers.
“What if?” O’Rourke asked over and over to some 2,500 people in Houston’s Stampede Event Center.
“We’re not into the walls, we’re not into militarizing the border, we’re not into banning all people of one religion from the shores of a country,” O’Rourke said to roaring applause.
If O’Rourke wins in November, and that’s a big, Texas-sized if, it would reshape the political landscape not just in Texas but the country. It would put Texas in play in 2020. To win, O’Rourke needs Harris County, which envelopes Houston, Katy, and Humble. Though he’s quick to add that every part of Texas is essential. He visited all 254 counties in the state on a nonstop tour during the August recess, a point he makes in every speech. He’s visited Houston repeatedly and will likely return before Election Day.
“There’s nothing sophisticated about this campaign,” O’Rourke told the Washington Examiner. “We’re just going to show up.”
The Texans at O’Rourke’s town halls and rallies are young and old, white, black, and brown. And some who spoke to the Washington Examiner during O’Rourke’s two-day swing through Houston, College Station, and San Marcos, were Republican.
“If you are Republican and you’re here today, you’re in the right place; if you’re a Democrat, you’re in the right place; independents, you’re in the right place,” O’Rourke said.
Wilka Toppins, a 52-year-old Texan of Puerto Rican descent, has lived in the state since 1990, previously residing in Boston, Mass. As attendees at O’Rourke’s Houston rally crammed into the event center, “Suavemente” blaring through the speakers, Toppins sipped on a beer waiting for the candidate to take the stage. She wore an olive green jacket with white, graffiti-style writing on the back, imitating the one worn by first lady Melania Trump on a trip to a detention center housing migrant children separated from their parents at the border.
Melania’s read: “I really don’t care. Do you?” Toppins’ read: “November is coming.”
A “lifelong Republican,” Toppins is supporting O’Rourke “because Ted Cruz has to go.”
“I’ve abandoned the party; it’s become the party of the racists, the corrupt,” said Toppins, who “unfortunately” voted for Cruz in 2012. “It’s really disgusting how the Republican leadership in Washington has totally absconded the responsibility to their constituents and they’re all about power, keeping themselves in power and that offends me to the core.”
O’Rourke says he doesn’t have a grand plan to woo centrist Republicans, but he’s crafted a message that’s meant to appeal to them as well. He’s had some practice, first convincing his Republican mother to vote for him. As he campaigned in Houston, she held town halls promoting his platform in Lubbock and Plains, Texas.
On the trail, O’Rourke runs through the math. Locking up someone who is mentally ill in jail cost the state $400 a night compared to $14.50 for outpatient care. It would cost roughly $10,000 to invest in universal pre-K per student compared to $22,000 to keep someone in prison.
“Not only is this the morally correct approach to take, not only does it allow us to be a more just people but it’s also the fiscally responsible thing to do,” O’Rourke said, speaking to a crowd of Texas A&M students and nearby residents the morning after his Houston rally. “We can claim the mantle of conservatism by taking care of one another.”
During his town halls, O’Rourke fields questions on everything from climate change to impeachment — on the latter he wants to wait for special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.
Cruz has launched a number of TV and digital ads against O’Rourke, including ones making fun of the Democrat’s name, attacking him for a 20-year-old DUI, and pointing out his time in a punk band. Another recent ad questioned O’Rourke’s patriotism after the Democrat said he supports the NFL players kneeling in protest of police violence.
“I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up or take a knee for your rights anytime, anywhere, anyplace,” O’Rourke said when asked last month if he thought NFL players were disrespecting the flag by taking a knee. The video went viral and has been viewed more than 44 million times.
That’s what drew Erin Russell in. Russell “blindly” followed her Republican family for years, but she says she’s awake now, in part due to her 4-year-old daughter, Kelcie.
Russell, 37, is white. Her daughter Kelcie is half-white, half-black, with a head full of tight brown curls that were pulled back into a ponytail on the day they saw O’Rourke speak at College Station.
Russell started paying more attention to politics because of the national conversation around police violence toward black people and the treatment of immigrant children. Not satisfied with her answer, Russell sent a text message 20 minutes later to clarify why she thinks O’Rourke is “everything we need.”
“I was talking about the killing of the unarmed African-American men and kids,” she said in a text. “Being a mother of a biracial child, I have seen the unfair treatment. There is an undeniable injustice here and we need help.”
After people in her community saw O’Rourke’s comments on NFL players protesting police brutality, Russell said, support for him increased. The issue has become a flashpoint in the race. “I am praying he wins,” Russell said, adding three blue hearts to the end of her message.
A recent Emerson College poll put O’Rourke 1 point behind Cruz. Election forecasters like Cook Political Report have the race rated “lean Republican.” Jennifer Duffy, who runs the ratings, is torn about Texas. She wants to see hard evidence that Republicans are flipping for O’Rourke.
Without those centrists, many believe O’Rourke can’t win. There simply aren’t enough Democrats in the state that will vote. Still, Republicans have raised alarm about Cruz’s prospects. President Trump is planning a campaign stop in what has long been considered a deep red state to help Cruz. (O’Rourke isn’t asking former President Barack Obama to come to Texas.) Last week, the New York Times reported White House budget director Mick Mulvaney doubted Cruz’s likability, saying it’s within the realm of possibility that Cruz could lose his re-election bid.
And fellow Texas Sen. John Cornyn is planning a fundraiser in D.C. to help Cruz, who has been outraised by O’Rourke 2-1. Cruz’s camp, however, insists the junior Texas senator is on solid ground.
But something is happening in Texas, says O’Rourke. He doesn’t have proof, it’s just a feeling.
“Since I don’t have a poll that tells me this, it’s more about what I feel and what I see and what I hear,” he said.
“Not because of me and not because of the party that I’m a member of, I don’t buy into the blue wave stuff,” said O’Rourke. “I think that there’s something really special, unprecedented that defies labels.”
Driving across parts of east and central Texas, from Houston to San Marcos, from Austin to Katy, one thing was constant: Everyone had heard about O’Rourke.
Pat Settle, 80, a lifelong Republican who stopped to chat outside Hruska’s bakery in Ellinger, said she’s voting for Cruz and will vote for Trump in 2020. But she knows who O’Rourke is and admitted she’s a bit unsettled by the multiple yard signs that have popped up in her La Grange neighborhood supporting the Democrat.
Two days earlier, O’Rourke and Cruz boarded the same Southwest flight to Houston, headed to the county that will likely determine their fortunes in November. Shuffling through the aisle, O’Rourke stopped to shake Cruz’s hand.
“Looks like we’re headed to the same place,” he said.
Moments later, O’Rourke sat down with the Washington Examiner for a spontaneous 15-minute interview onboard the flight. Cruz declined a similar offer, instead enjoying a TV show on his iPad.
As Cruz sat 14 rows ahead, O’Rourke explained why he decided to enter a race 18 months ago that by all conventional wisdom he cannot win.
“It’s never been about Cruz,” O’Rourke said somewhere over Tennessee. “It wasn’t so much a desire to run against him but very much about where this country is and where I think Texas can lead this country going forward, knowing that this will be a defining year and moment.”
“Whether we are walls, a Muslim ban, the press is the enemy of the people, whether we’re taking kids away from their parents at the border, whether the president can defy the rule of law and the public interest in favor of his personal and political prospects — I just, I know that we are better than all this,” O’Rourke added.
O’Rourke’s motivation stems in part from the moment and from his kids, who he feared would ask why he did nothing as Trump fought to build a border wall. There’s also a frustration, O’Rourke expresses on the trail, that a state as grand as Texas leads the country in maternal mortality and incarceration rates.
O’Rourke agrees with some of the language used by Trump and progressive darling Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that the systems in place are “rigged” against those without privilege.
“The truth is things are getting worse for some people in this country, not better,” O’Rourke bellowed at his San Marcos town hall. And so he’s on a quixotic mission to oust a Republican with far greater name-ID in a state as ruby red as can be.
But as Ivins mused in 2003, “politics are probably the weirdest thing about Texas.” The Democratic populist movement, “born in the Texas Hill country,” Ivins wrote, is “not gone, but only sleeping.”
