Bidding farewell to Beto, Abrams, Crist — really, you can go now.
Bidding farewell to Beto, Abrams, Crist — really, you can go now.
T exas has around 250 miles of border wall with Mexico, but it seems like the state’s most impenetrable barrier is the one keeping Beto O’Rourke out of statewide office.
Even though Republicans performed well below expectations on Tuesday night, O’Rourke was once again resoundingly rejected by voters, making 2022 his third humiliating flop in four years. Three years ago, O’Rourke dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, recognizing that consistently polling in the 4 percent range was not exactly a freeway to the presidency.
And four years ago, the former three-term congressman lost a U.S. Senate race to Ted Cruz, one of the most embarrassing Republican politicians of this generation. (When Democrats point out how bad Republicans are, they appear unaware of their self-own; for every absurd Republican that’s elected, there’s always a Democrat who lost because they were even less palatable.)
Yet despite disgusted voters fleeing O’Rourke as if he were a thrift-store toothbrush, he continues to make running, and losing, his permanent occupation. To perennial candidates such as Beto, politics is like an electoral pyramid scheme: Each unsuccessful run builds up fame and name identification for the next unsuccessful run, and thus it continues.
The perpetual-candidate-as-career path wasn’t always as lucrative as it is today. Candidates who lost big races often suffered humiliation after being rejected by voters, limping off into the wilderness, unable to parlay their name identification into cable-news and social-media opportunities.
Take former speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who took his 2012 loss as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate so hard he ended up sitting in a frozen tree stand in his native Wisconsin for months contemplating his life.
“I found myself in a bit of a funk,” Ryan recounts in his book. And although he returned to Congress, he said during his first six months back he was “going through the motions.”
He said his supporters were asking him to gear up for a 2016 presidential run, but “that course of action wasn’t really appealing” to him. Of course, the party shifted underneath him, and not only was there no presidential run, he bailed on Congress altogether in 2018.
By comparison, O’Rourke was just one member of the Democrats’ “Can’t Take a Hint Caucus,” joining other prominent members like gubernatorial candidates Charlie Crist in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
Crist, whose only governing philosophy appears to be “Charlie Crist needs a job,” was bludgeoned by Republican Ron DeSantis, who, as voters are fully aware, will spend the next two years running for president in 2024. Floridians would rather be governed by a guy scarfing down mass-produced chicken dinners at events in New Hampshire for the next year than have Charlie Crist making laws in Tallahassee.
In August, Crist told voters that if they supported DeSantis, he didn’t want their vote. They happily obliged.
It’s not as if the voters of Florida don’t know who Crist is. Despite a successful run for governor in 2006 (as a Republican) and a spot in Congress since 2016 (as a Democrat), he now has four unsuccessful races for U.S. Senate and governor under his belt. Voters be warned: If Charlie Crist lasts more than four failed statewide elections, you might want to see a doctor.
The voters of Georgia similarly hit national-media darling Stacey Abrams with a restraining order, handing the incumbent governor, Republican Brian Kemp, a nearly eight-point victory.
Abrams, of course, lost to Kemp in 2018 by 54,000 votes but claimed she had actually won because of a nefarious vote-suppression scheme by Republicans. She was able to ride her conspiracy theory to national fame, with progressives even anointing her “United Earth President” on Star Trek.
But back on this earth, Abrams was a terrible candidate, at one point suggesting the key to fighting inflation is for women to have more abortions. (If conservative parents want to keep their teenagers from having sex, they should simply make them read portions of Abrams’s erotic novels, which include such gems as, “He thrust deep, control broken, shattered. Again and again, deeper and hotter and further than fantasy.” Ew, gross, Mom.)
Sure, Abrams has now lost twice, but there is zero chance we have seen the last of her. Based on the wave of undying support she has received from her target demographic — the national media — she now routinely shows up on lists of people Democrats would like to run for president if Joe Biden decides not to go for a second term. One Berkeley-based poll conducted in August this year showed she was the first or second choice of 7 percent of potential California Democratic voters, just below Hillary Clinton and Senator Elizabeth Warren, and tied with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Abrams has all but said she will be running for president in 2028, based on a spreadsheet of her career she put together when she was 18 years old.)
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Of course, as long as there have been elections there have been perennial candidates, who run either to keep their own name or a pet issue in the news. But these candidates are normally seen as quixotic, confused-uncle types. Take Harold Stassen, former Minnesota governor who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency nine times; by the end of his life, he was simply a punchline.
Beto isn’t even the most interesting perennial candidate Texas has had to offer. That award may go to Johnnie Mae Hackworthe, a “prophetess” who ran for governor four times beginning in the late 1960s. Hackworthe was once sentenced to time in a mental hospital for threatening the life of President Dwight Eisenhower. At one point, she tried to pay her campaign filing fee with a cow.
And yet in the end, Hackworthe will have held statewide office in Texas exactly as many times as Beto O’Rourke.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of candidates know how to take a hint. According to a review by FiveThirtyEight, since 1998 only 33 of 121 candidates for governor, senator, or president won an election after having previously lost. Only one person in the group won a race for governor, senator, or president after having previously lost twice. (Congrats, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana!)
Yet we now live in the era of the celebrity candidate, where citizens either come to the race already famous in some other arena (Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, J. D. Vance, Donald Trump) or try to use their office to become a celebrity after winning (AOC, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz).
But there is a third category — the person who maintains fame simply by being a candidate. Whereas losing was once a painful, humiliating experience, it is now simply a launching pad for a cable-news show, a glowing profile in Vanity Fair, or social-media stardom.
And that is where Beto, the modestly talented, Ivy League Gen-Xer, now finds himself. His fame is dependent on being able to run for office, but he has run out of offices. Perhaps his best chance at a career is for Texas to deport him to his ancestral home at MSNBC.
Editor’s note: This article has been emended to correct the chronology of Beto O’Rourke’s political failures.