Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke failed to unseat incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on midterm Election Day Tuesday, marking the third election he has lost in the last four years.
O’Rourke previously lost the Texas Senate election to Ted Cruz in 2018 and the Democratic presidential nomination to Joe Biden in 2020.
He has been campaigning for 1,175 of the past 2,048 days, according to the Washington Post.
O’Rourke has been the Texas Democratic Party’s flag bearer since he went from a relatively unknown El Paso congressman to campaigning across the state’s 254 counties on his way to a narrow loss to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Though he came up short, O’Rourke assisted his party down-ballot, helping Democrats pick up 12 seats in the Texas House, two seats in the Texas Senate and boosting newcomer Lina Hidalgo over longtime Harris County Judge Ed Emmett.
But after the failed runs for senator, president, and governor, his political future is in question.
O’Rourke will have an uphill battle to convince voters that he should launch another bid for a major office.
“With each new race he loses, it becomes more difficult to convince voters and persuade them that he can still win the next race,” Sharon Navarro, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told the Texas Tribune. “That’s a very difficult barrier to overcome for a third-time loser.”
Dave Carney, Gov. Abbott’s strategist, had blunter predictions about O’Rourke’s future when speaking to Politico before Election Day: “If he loses again, that’s it.”
O’Rourke lost by about 11 percentage points to Abbott after losing by four to Cruz. He won only 19 counties after winning 32 counties in his 2018 senatorial race.
Several of the stances O’Rourke took during his failed 2020 presidential run came back to hurt him as Gov. Abbott highlighted them.
O’Rourke’s promise to confiscate semi-automatic rifles by famously proclaiming during a presidential debate, “Hell yeah, we’re going to take your AR-15,” seemingly hampered him in gun-friendly Texas.
Abbott also attacked O’Rourke for his previous statements supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, which the Republican suggested indicated his support for defunding the police and for his position that churches should lose their tax-exempt status if they opposed same-sex marriage.
“This is three statewide failed races,” said Corbin Casteel, a Republican consultant. “He’s a perennial candidate. He hasn’t shown any ability to win outside his hometown, and his ideas are just way too radical for Texas, and he keeps getting rejected left and right.”
O’Rourke addressed his political future in his concession speech Tuesday night in El Paso, saying he would remain involved but did not “know what form that will take.”
“I don’t know what my role or yours will be going forward, but I’m in this fight for life,” O’Rourke said. “Who knows what’s next for any of us, right? But I just cannot thank you enough.”
O’Rourke’s supporters said they did not want him to step away from politics permanently, but they acknowledged he could use some time out of the spotlight.
“I’d honestly like to see him take a break,” said Carolina Machado, a 47-year-old school counselor from El Paso. “I think he needs some time to kind of chill and be a family man for a little bit … but I’d love to see him get back out there and really fight for us as Texans.”
Some observers, like Michael Apodaca, the chair of the El Paso County Democratic Party, predict O’Rourke’s near future in politics will not be as a candidate but as an organizer or fundraiser.
“We really desperately need that,” Apodaca said, referring to O’Rourke’s Powered by People PAC. “He has the resources, he has the organization, and they’re gonna be ready to go when he calls.”
O’Rourke’s fundraising power is unquestionable, breaking records during his 2018 senate campaign and again during the governor’s race this year.
Some political experts believe O’Rourke will step into a fundraising or organizing role but eventually try his hand as a candidate again further down the line.
“For Democrats, you want to ride your fast horse until you get a faster one,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. “Until you find someone better than Beto, what would be the point of exiling him into the wilderness for someone that has the skills and fundraising ability?”
But Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant, believes O’Rourke cannot run a winning statewide campaign in Texas.
“It’s not clear that Beto has learned anything from his three losses,” he said. “He’s learned how to organize, how to raise money and fire up the progressives, but none of those things have delivered victory.”