Beto O’Rourke may be a long shot to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. But the Democratic congressman is now a very well-funded underdog.
O’Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, announced Tuesday that his Senate campaign raised $6.7 million during the first three months of the year. That eye-popping total will give Democrats’ new hope that Texas may be a better pick-up opportunity than they once thought as they try to retake the Senate. As it stands, they’ll need to pick up at least two Senate seats nationally, but currently only have three credible openings, not counting Texas, where non-partisan handicappers don’t yet believe the race is competitive. Defeating Cruz would also be particularly sweet for Democrats given the role he has played on the national scene during the past half-decade on everything from health care to immigration to guns.
Federal candidates have until the middle of the month to report their fundraising totals, but it’s going to be difficult for Cruz to top O’Rourke’s first-quarter total. It is more than three times what Cruz raised in the final quarter of 2017, almost half of what Cruz brought in during his entire 2012 Senate campaign, and likely the most money raised in a quarter by a Senate candidate in Texas history (not counting those who self-funded). If Cruz’s first-quarter total is in the ballpark of O’Rourke’s, the Republican would have had good reason to make it public by now given his challenger is currently stealing headlines in the middle of Cruz’s formal re-election launch. (Instead, Cruz will have to be content with stories about his new campaign slogan: “Tough as Texas.”)
Unlike Cruz, O’Rourke has sworn off money from corporations and PACs, but his latest numbers suggest that Bernie Sanders-style play is paying well with the small-donor crowd, both in the Lone Star State and outside it. His campaign says it received more than 141,000 individual contributions last quarter, a little more than 70 percent of which were from Texans.
O’Rourke appears to have momentum on his side. It took him the final three months of 2017 to raise $2.4 million. He nearly matched that total during the first six weeks of this year ($2.2 million), and then almost doubled it during the second half of the quarter ($4.5 million). Cruz, meanwhile, started with a major cash advantage. The Republican had banked roughly $10 million before O’Rourke even got in the race. But Cruz’s cash-on-hand advantage had dwindled to only about $1 million as of mid-February, though the conservative cavalry of special interest groups and super PACs will no doubt come to his defense if things start to get dicey.
The money will help, but O’Rourke still has an incredibly narrow path to victory. Democrats are vastly outnumbered in Texas and haven’t won a statewide election since 1994. While Cruz is never going to win a popularity contest, he’s proved a capable campaigner, despite—or perhaps because of—his willingness to play dirty. The last statewide Texas race to draw national attention was Wendy Davis’ bid for governor against Republican Gregg Abbot in 2014. Like O’Rourke, Davis was seen as a rising star in her party with national appeal and the small-dollar support to prove it. In the end, though, she lost by more than 20 points in what proved to be a banner year for Republicans nationally. The political winds are clearly blowing in the opposite direction this year, but it’s still a long shot that O’Rourke will succeed where Davis couldn’t.
