Beto O'Rourke says Democrats must deliver quickly after Texas sweep

O’Rourke rules out a 2028 presidential run but says he will stay involved

Former Texas congressman and presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke told NPR’s Rob Schmitz that he was “over the moon” after Democrats won every statewide office in Texas and took a majority in the state House. O’Rourke also said he does not plan to run for president in 2028, though he will remain involved “one way or another.” He described maintaining “this extraordinary experiment 250 years in the making” as his mission, called it “the product of so much service and sacrifice and struggle,” and said everyone must do what they can to keep it going. “Wherever I can be useful or helpful, that’s where you’ll find me,” he said.

NPR presented Schmitz’s conversation as an examination of how past efforts by O’Rourke and other Democrats helped the party win big in Texas in the midterms. Schmitz said Texas’s populist roots may have laid a foundation for Democratic victories, but were not the only factor. He also observed that O’Rourke had been out of the national spotlight for a while, perhaps because he had been hard at work on the ground in Texas mobilizing voters.

After the 2018 Senate race, O’Rourke said he and others asked themselves, “what would it take to win in Texas?” They started Powered By People, which he said had thousands of members, many of them volunteers from that Senate race. The group trains people as volunteer deputy registrars, meets young people in person, registers them and stays in touch with them. O’Rourke said it also helps them overcome obstacles in a state that makes it harder than any other in the nation for young people to register, vote and participate in politics.

Schmitz said young voters “showed up big time for Democrats this cycle,” citing an NBC exit poll that found 79% of voters under the age of 30 voted for Talarico, the winner of the Texas U.S. Senate race. Asked what appealed to the group, O’Rourke said he thought the appeal lay “first and foremost” with James Talarico, who, he said, described the contest as not between a Democrat and a Republican or right versus left, but top versus bottom.

At college campuses and clubs, O’Rourke said, young people he helped register were “absolutely disgusted with the concentration of wealth and privilege and power in this country.” They asked him about the Epstein files, he said, with the question: “How can the wealthiest, most powerful men rape and traffic girls and women with complete impunity?” They also pressed him on foreign policy, asking, “How is it that we’re at war again in the Middle East? Why are we complicit in this genocide in Gaza? Why is no one doing anything about these things?”

O’Rourke pointed to conditions in Texas: a $7.25 minimum wage, a state he described as the hardest in the nation in which to see a doctor, and schoolteachers working two or three jobs to make ends meet. “These aren’t Republican or Democrat issues,” he said. “They’re issues of basic justice.” He said he thought young people have “the most acute sense of what is right or wrong” and are “impatient with excuses or equivocation or blaming it on one party or another.” “They want solutions, and they want people to deliver,” he said.

O’Rourke said he thought it was “incredibly important for Democrats now in power to deliver for the people they represent in ways that they can feel immediately.” He said someone working for $7.25 an hour was “probably working two or three of those jobs to make ends meet,” and that raising the minimum wage would be felt immediately. He said access to a provider through Medicaid expansion would “change your life immediately,” while the ability to afford tuition or a down payment on a home or an automobile would produce what he called “significant material differences in people’s lives.”

Schmitz noted that an earlier guest, Texas author David Griscom, had said economic populism was one of the reasons Talarico and Gina Hinojosa won the Senate and gubernatorial elections. O’Rourke said Democrats had “high expectations” for Hinojosa and Talarico. He said every statewide office had been won by a Democrat and the state House majority gave the party an opportunity to deliver, even as “we’re also understanding there’s accountability, responsibility, and the clock is ticking.”

NPR described O’Rourke as having helped pave the way for Democratic victories. Schmitz noted that O’Rourke had run for Senate and governor and lost time and again, but said “a lot in the background was gained.” O’Rourke’s 2018 bid to unseat longstanding Republican Senator Ted Cruz fell short by just a few percentage points, and his 2022 race against Governor Greg Abbott ended in a loss by only a slightly larger margin.

O’Rourke said that in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency while O’Rourke was serving in Congress, he and his wife, Amy, looked at each other and said, “we have got to do something more.” He said their work in Congress was “insufficient to the task at hand” — “this threat of authoritarianism and fascism and the rise of this oligarchy in America.”

From that came, in O’Rourke’s words, “this crazy snowball’s-chance-in-Texas idea” of running for the Senate in a state that last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1988. He said he was joined by hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of Texans who believed in that dream. O’Rourke rejected the idea that the effort was chiefly about whether he should serve in the Senate or have his name on an office or ballot; he said the question was: “can we change this state? And by extension, given the outsized importance of Texas, can we change this country?”