Is Texas Ready for Beto 4.0?
Guy Benson
Robert Francis 'Beto' O'Rourke says he's not ruling out a 2026 Senate run, telling an interviewer that he's busy holding town hall meetings, and urging Democrats to become more "ruthless" in pursuit of power. The man is obviously running for something because he's always running for something. The son of a politician in Texas, the fourth-generation Irish-American has been seeking elective office for two decades. He was a local official in El Paso for years, then ran for Congress, getting elected for three terms. That's when his higher ambitions really entered full bloom. He became Democrats' US Senate nominee against Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, losing a fairly close (and exorbitantly expensive) race in a blue wave year. Four years later, Lone Star State Democrats nominated him as their gubernatorial standard bearer. Gov. Greg Abbott crushed him by double digits. Part of the reason Abbott trounced O'Rourke so handily was the laundry list of leftist positions O'Rourke adopted while he was appealing to national Democratic base between 2018 and 2022.
When he narrowly fell to Cruz, O'Rourke presented himself as a cheerful, energetic, and moderate-to-mainstream Texas Democrat. That schtick wasn't viable by the time he lost the contest for governor because during the interregnum, O'Rourke ran for president. During that campaign, which failed before the primaries even started, 'Beto' staked out extreme positions that certainly don't play in Texas. Among them, he insisted that churches that don't embrace same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status. And not only did this border state Democrat he say he opposed the construction of new border barriers, he said he'd like to demolish the existing ones, too:
The fact that he isn't ruling out another Senate run is likely code for "I'm running," considering that he previously reversed his own hard 'no' to launch a previous campaign. After falling to Cruz, O'Rourke categorically rejected the idea of running for president in the subsequent cycle. It wasn't a probably not. It was an absolutely not because doing so would destroy my family:
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2025/07/23/is-texas-ready-for-beto-40-n2660701
