BETO O’ROURKE IS ON A LONG HARD ROAD
ON A DUSTY ROAD IN SOUTHWESTERN Texas, Beto O’Rourke leans out the window of the Ford Expedition he’s driving and mutters, “You gonna let me pass you, state police?” He speeds ahead of the cruiser while chewing an empanada. In the past seven days, the 45-year-old Democratic Congressman has clocked nearly a thousand miles across the state. Tonight, after a town hall in Uvalde, an hour away, he gets to go home.
Small towns have been O’Rourke’s favored terrain since he launched a bid to unseat Republican Ted Cruz as the Lone Star State’s junior Senator nearly 14 months ago. History says O’Rourke is an underdog in November: Texas chose President Trump by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016 and hasn’t sent a Democrat to statewide office since Ann Richards was elected governor in 1990. But O’Rourke, a former punk-rock bassist who has spent three terms in the U.S. House, talks more about the future.
“The country had come to this crossroads,” he says. “We were going to be
