Beto O’Rourke failed to become the governor of Texas. While he had a good run, he still fell short by around 11% of the votes. It’s not even worth trying to contest when you lose by nearly 1 million votes.
Beto has been actively trying to be a part of the political scene for a while now. He failed in a senator run, a presidential run, and a gubernatorial run. His messaging continues to change, which is one of the reasons why he can’t seem to grab ahold of an audience well enough to win.
There are only pockets of Texas where he’s popular – Austin, Houston, El Paso, and Corpus Christi. Wherever there’s a largely liberal audience, people flock to him. Elsewhere in the state, you run into conservative Texans that want nothing to do with Beto and his attitude of “I’m coming for your guns.”
So, with three failed election cycles, what’s next for Beto?
Many Democratic Texans still feel as though he’s the hope for the Party. The problem is that he’s experienced three electoral losses in a row. And if he’s not careful, he’ll be lumped with many of the other political failures out there.
How much money can be spent on flashy ads before he realizes that he doesn’t have what it takes to appeal to the masses?
It’s the question that everyone seems to be asking.
The Texas Tribune caught up with Sharon Navarro, who is a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She explained, “With each new race he loses, it becomes more difficult to convince voters and persuade them that he can still win the next race. That’s a very difficult barrier to overcome for a third-time loser.”
It is already expected that Governor Abbott will be using the election results to prove that Beto has exhausted his future in politics.
When looking at how he performed in Texas, he won 32 counties when he ran against Ted Cruz as senator. And when he went up against Abbott for governor, he only won in 19 counties.
It’s clear that Beto is becoming less successful, not more.
A Republican consultant by the name of Corbin Casteel paints the truth with his comment: “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.”
Perhaps that’s the harsh reality of it all. If Beto O’Rourke weren’t trying to push his liberal agendas in such a red state, he might have a chance to win. However, the state is simply too conservative for his radical ideas – and he can’t get enough people to go for it.
Beto has been surprisingly quiet on social media since Election Night. He said that was the “honor of my lifetime” to be in the race. Since losing, he hasn’t said anything. That means that he likely sees the writing on the wall, too – his political career is over.
The only way that we’re likely to hear his name again is if he decides to move to a liberal state. Perhaps if he were to go to California, he may find that people are more likely to vote for him. Or, perhaps people won’t want anything to do with him since they’ve seen his failure streak growing in the state of Texas.
Either way, it’s unlikely we’d see him run again – at least not for any major political office.
