Opinion: How Beto O’Rourke Could’ve Defeated Donald Trump

Jayson Frascatore
4 min readNov 11, 2019

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned in recent years within the political atmosphere, it’s that polls aren’t always the most accurate. After the political upset of Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, polls have almost become obsolete to many voters. We also saw this happen during the 2018 midterms when then-Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum went from polling second to last, to first place just days before the Florida primary election for Governor. Andrew Gillum pulled off a historic political upset in the primary. But what does this have to do with Beto O’Rourke? If the former Texas Congressman stayed in the race at least until Iowa or the Texas primary, and was able to win those states, gain traction, then pull off a political upset in becoming the nominee, he very well could have beaten Donald Trump in the general election.

In the 2018 midterm election, we saw Congressman O’Rourke run a Senate campaign that went to all 254 counties across Texas including the occasional Whataburger stops that were live streamed on his Facebook page. Beto drew the attention of national media when he was within striking distance from unseating Senator Ted Cruz. His campaign managed to capture the vote from Democrats, Independents, and over 400,000 Republicans. Texas, which was a non-voting state before his campaign, he was able to raise the voter turnout by 500%. While he only lost by a slim 2.6%, Texas is officially in play for the 2020 race.

On March 14th, 2019, O’Rourke officially launched his campaign for President of the United States. In the beginning, his polling landed him in the top five. That excitement transferred over from the Texas race, but sadly it didn’t last very long. Surprisingly, the polling for O’Rourke sunk to a national average of 2% in most polls before he left the race. However, the fact that the 38 electoral college votes in Texas are in play for the first time in decades, is unprecedented. Beto O’Rourke is often called “fearless” and “relentless”, or a “Bobby Kennedy reincarnation”. If he was able to get the attention of 400,000 Republican voters, win the Independent vote, and receive the most votes of any Democrat in Texas history, it may have been likely in a hypothetical general election that O’Rourke could have flipped Texas blue, ensuring Donald Trump would not serve a second…

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Jayson Frascatore

I write about languages, politics, current events, and climate change | Curated 25x | Buy me coffee beans https://ko-fi.com/jaysonfras