Politico has a profile piece out about Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D. TX) U.S. Senate campaign. The piece confirms that Beto-mania is real and that the grassroots campaign enthusiasm is paying off:
I got my first taste of Beto-mania on a Wednesday evening in late June on the second floor of Yard House, a generic sports bar in Washington’s Chinatown. The average age in the room hovered in the low-30s as attendees munched on mini cheeseburgers and lined up to exchange drinks tickets – obtained by making a campaign donation – for booze. The event, called “Beers with Beto,” was heavy on Texas expats.
The first attendee I spoke to, 29-year-old corporate lawyer named Brian Nistler, said he had convinced his parents, lifelong Republicans, to attend an O’Rourke town hall at a middle school in Amarillo earlier this year and that, come November, he expects them to cast their votes for a Democrat in a statewide election for the first time in their lives.
Melanee Derenzy, a 39-year-old fitness trainer originally from Dallas, told me she had never been involved in politics before hearing about O’Rourke. “I found out about him, and I loved him, and felt I had to help out,” said Derenzy, who has volunteered to enter data and send text messages for the campaign. “I love how open he is. I love the Facebook Live.”
O’Rourke has made abundant use of that platform, livestreaming all of his campaign events on it. Last March, he and a Republican House colleague, Will Hurd, created a social media phenomenon by live-streaming their road trip from San Antonio to Washington when a cancelled flight forced them to drive to work. This January, when O’Rourke live-streamed his life on the campaign trail for 24 hours straight on Facebook, Derenzy said she tuned in for about three hours of it.
It’s that kind of passion that has fueled the formerly obscure O’Rourke’s remarkable turn in the national spotlight. By the time the candidate arrived, a couple hundred supporters packed the second floor, making it difficult to move. The crowd spilled out the door and onto the second-floor landing.
O’Rourke, who has pledged not to accept money from political action committees, co-hosted the Wednesday event with End Citizens United, a campaign finance reform group. Before he spoke, the group’s president, Tiffany Muller, warmed up the crowd by razzing his opponent.
“A beer with Ted Cruz?” she said, raising her arms in an incredulous shrug. “I don’t think the bartender would even show up!” She went on to note that O’Rourke had recently completed his pledge to campaign in all 254 Texas counties. “The only counties Ted Cruz have been to are in Iowa,” she said, voicing the dig that Cruz has been tending to his national ambitions rather than his constituents.
With his youth and magnetism, O’Rourke, 45, draws comparisons to Barack Obama, but he projects a gawkier sort of charisma than the former president’s. His delivery is faster and jerkier. He sprints through his stump speech. Speaking without a mic, his unoccupied left hand constantly wanders to his solar plexus, while he repeatedly points down forcefully with his right hand, as if making an emphatic point in a rap battle.
A fluent Spanish speaker, O’Rourke is especially emphatic when he talks about immigration. In Chinatown, he led off by relating the story of the Voyage of the Damned, the saga of a boatful of Jewish refugees from pre-World War II Europe who were refused entry to Cuba and the United States and ultimately returned back to the continent, where more than 250 of them later died in the Holocaust. He compared their plight to those of the migrants coming to the Southern border, and urged his audience to do all they could on the migrants’ behalf.
Sweat stains formed around the collar of his shirt as he spoke and the tendons in his neck protruded. As he wound his way through his stump speech, he leavened his talk of migrants with a vulgar crack about Congress’s approval ratings: “Just below communism, just above gonorrhea.”
The whole piece is worth a read. They interview former gubernatorial candidate, Wendy Davis (D. TX) and former Obama national field director, Jeremy Bird. Both Davis and Bird provide a lot of good insight into why Beto’s chances are great this year. It’s reassuring because the enthusiasm from the grassroots movement is helping draw huge crowds and raise a lot of money. Cruz, on the other hand, seems to be having some problems with the FEC about his fundraising:
Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate campaign committee has received three letters from the Federal Election Commission this election cycle for accepting campaign contributions that exceeded federal limits.
The FEC sent the “Ted Cruz for Senate” committee letters in September, April and June. The letters were first reported by the Houston Chronicle.
Cruz’s campaign has received the most notices of excessive contribution out of 32 Senate campaigns, according to an analysis by the Chronicle.
Brett Kappel works on FEC compliance cases as an attorney, and said it is rare for Senate campaigns to receive repeated notices of contribution limit violations. However, he said the letters to Cruz’s committee have been from the FEC’s reporting analysis division, not its enforcement division.
“Normally it’s not a significant factor, but in some cases it can become an issue,” Kappel said. “They’re not there yet.”
The letters named dozens of individuals and one political action committee that gave to the Cruz campaign above the $2,700 individual contribution limit per election and the annual $5,000 PAC limit.