2020 Democrats

Beto “Gave Away the Game”: Will O’Rourke’s Hell-Yes Moment Cost Him Back in Texas?

A big debate moment briefly enlivened Beto’s presidential campaign, but some politicos wonder if he blew his shot at the Senate.

By Tina Nguyen

September 20, 2019

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke addresses people in a town hall style meeting on the front steps of the...

For a brief shining moment, Beto O’Rourke’s decision to wage holy war on assault weapons—“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR15!” he declared in the middle of the last debate—launched him back into national headlines. His competitors heaped praise on him, his rallies swelled with new voters, and reporters spilled digital ink on how he no longer gave a flying “fuck” about decorum, so passionately did he care about mandatory assault weapon buybacks. Then an NBC/WSJ poll came out, revealing a post-debate crash: O’Rourke had officially joined the 1 percenter’s club, behind even oddball candidate Andrew Yang. Republican pundits, lawmakers, and President Donald Trump gleefully set forth the narrative that “Dummy Beto” had done himself in with his gun-control zealotry. Even Democratic leadership distanced themselves from O’Rourke’s position, perhaps fearing electoral guilt by association. “I don’t know of any other Democrat who agrees with Beto O’Rourke, but it’s no excuse not to go forward,” said Chuck Schumer on a phone call with reporters this week.

Back in Texas, political strategists have been carefully monitoring the fallout from O’Rourke’s self-immolation. After nearly defeating Senator Ted Cruz last year, local Democrats urged the former El Paso congressman to try again with Senator John Cornyn, who is up for reelection in 2020. Forget the presidential campaign, the thinking went, and help Democrats retake the Senate.

Now, however, some wonder if Beto has blown his shot at a successful homecoming. “When people start talking about mandatory buybacks for a whole range of reasons, it gets really personal for people really fast,” said Republican strategist Liz Mair, especially in the Lone Star state. “For those who are motivated [by gun control], they’re really passionate about it,” she added. “The problem with it is there are not enough of them for this to actually work for Beto, and there are a hell of a lot of people who are very, very strongly motivated who are on the other side of the issue.”

Zac McCrary, a Democratic consultant who’s run several polls in Texas over the years, disagreed. A gun buyback policy is “somewhat to the left of the electorate in Texas,” he conceded. “But I’d also say that Beto’s position in the mainstream today is closer to the mainstream of where Texas is on guns, than where most of the Republicans are—where John Cornyn is, where [Texas governor] Greg Abbott is—when they can’t cobble together support for something basic like background checks, basic like the red flag law. So Beto should not be judged in a vacuum.”

Indeed, a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll from 2018 found that 51% of voters in Texas want stricter gun control laws, while only 31% wanted to keep them as they are. (Thirteen percent said they wanted less strict gun control.) But drawing conclusions from the data can be complicated. Only 17% of Texans said that a lack of gun control laws is the primary cause of mass school shootings, pointing instead to poor parenting (18%), a lack of mental health resources (14%), and bullying (13%). Slightly more than a third of Texas voters said that fewer guns would make the country less safe. “A lot of people don’t think these incidents have a lot to do with guns,” said Josh Blank, manager of polling and research at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, to the Texas Tribune. “The emphasis on personal responsibility, whether that’s parents or decisions made under psychological duress, is still there.”

Texas is changing, of course, with an influx of Asians and Hispanics into larger and larger suburbs slowly threatening to turn the state blue. The state is also grappling with the psychic trauma of recent mass shootings in El Paso, Odessa, and Midland, that could move the needle in ways other tragedies have not, though those impacts have yet to be quantified.

Still, there are real questions about whether Beto—already a candidate with no small number of vulnerabilities—has shot himself, and the Texas Democratic Party, in the foot. “When people ask how Republicans won so many seats in blue districts over the years, the answer is almost always guns,” said Republican strategist Rick Wilson, who is an avowed Never Trumper. “Democrats were smart enough to say in the old days, quote, No one’s going to take your guns away, [and] Beto, like a big dummy, gave away the game.”