Beto O’Rourke shunned precision politics in his Texas Senate run last year, running an unorthodox — and often haphazard — effort to turn out hundreds of thousands of Democratic-leaning but previously inactive voters.
But as he begins running for president, O’Rourke is trying something new: a conventional campaign.
After eschewing strategists and pollsters in his Senate run, O’Rourke this week hired a data expert, Jen O’Malley Dillon, to manage his presidential campaign. He recruited Norm Sterzenbach, a veteran strategist with deep knowledge of Iowa’s caucus math and mechanics, to marshal his operations in the first-in-the-nation caucus state.
O’Rourke has advance staffers with presidential campaign experience in place for what are expected to be frequent, road trip-style campaign appearances. And the campaign was organizing more than 1,000 watch parties around the country to coincide with a campaign kickoff event in El Paso on Saturday.
His burgeoning organization is a concession to the unique rigors of a crowded presidential campaign, but it’s also a reflection of the vastly different landscape he faces in 2020. In the Texas Senate race, O’Rourke could focus almost exclusively on turnout as the only Democrat running in a general election against Republican Ted Cruz. And he could afford to visit every one of Texas’ 254 counties in 2018.
Now, however, with more than 3,000 counties in the United States, he faces geographical constraints that will require selectivity in his campaign spending and candidate appearances. And the Democratic voters O’Rourke will confront in Iowa and New Hampshire nominating contests will require more nuanced messaging from the Texas congressman — persuading them not only to vote, but to vote for him instead of any number of other high-profile Democrats.
“They’re making smart hires and building the kind of campaign you need to run for president,” said Scott Arceneaux, a Democratic strategist and the Florida Democratic Party’s former executive director. “Running for president is different than running for statewide office. It’s just a different animal. It’s a lot bigger and it’s multidimensional chess. You’re playing in four, five, 10 states at a time with both national and in-state implications. It’s different. He seems to be building an organization to do that, not just run statewide.”
Middle Seat, a digital firm that worked on O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, remains involved in O’Rourke’s presidential effort, as does the fundraising and consulting firm Katz Watson Group, according to a source familiar with O’Rourke’s operation. Becky Bond, a senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, has been speaking with prospective operatives in early primary states.
Chris Lippincott, an Austin-based consultant who ran a super PAC opposing Cruz in the Senate campaign, said O’Rourke’s early staffing and organizational efforts reflect an understanding that in 2020 “he can’t DIY things like he did in Texas.”
“Clearly, they’ve acknowledged they can’t just re-create their Texas mechanism in Iowa or New Hampshire,” Lippincott said. “This idea of, ‘We’re running against one other guy, Ted Cruz, who’s really unattractive to your average voter, and you’ve got all these people who just don’t vote,’ that’s the terrain in which they just ran superfast and hit every door, bang, bang, bang. You can’t do that … You have to be much more specific with your targeting.”
For months, it was unclear how significantly O’Rourke would elect to adapt. Before entering the presidential contest, O’Rourke told reporters that in “any campaign I run … I would want to run in the same way that I’ve run every race — just as grassroots as possible, powered by people, directly connected to the people that I want to serve and represent.”
In a highly unusual move, O’Rourke announced his candidacy before hiring a campaign manager. Ignoring the advice of many political consultants, he headquartered his campaign in El Paso, far from political and media centers on the East Coast. And dashing across eight states to open his campaign this month, O’Rourke insisted on driving himself to events in a rented minivan — an unheard of allocation of time by a top-tier presidential contender.
“I think part of his appeal is the fact that he’s nontraditional,” said former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who ran for president in 2008.
Richardson, who met with O’Rourke in El Paso for a lengthy lunch before O’Rourke announced his candidacy, chuckled, “I made six recommendations on his campaign, and he hasn’t followed any of them,” including that O’Rourke find someone else to drive his car.
But Richardson called O’Rourke’s recent hires “first-rate talent.”
“You need some structure,” he said. “This is a big campaign, this is a long campaign. You can’t micromanage the campaign with junior aides that so far have been effective. You need an Iowa professional, you need a national campaign professional. So, it’s the right move.”
In hiring O’Malley Dillon, O’Rourke adhered to nonconformity in one significant way — putting a woman in charge of a presidential campaign. Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist, called O’Malley Dillon a “mold-breaker” for that reason.
But O’Malley Dillon is also expected to bring a traditionalist’s sense of order to the O’Rourke campaign. A former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and deputy campaign manager to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, O’Malley Dillon is steeped in field organizing experience and is an expert at using data to target voters.
“This is more than data, it’s also organizational discipline and sort of a deep understanding of what needs to happen to win in Iowa and win in these early states and she’s done tons of presidentials, so it was a huge get for him,” said Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
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Post pointed to O’Rourke’s canvassing for a state Senate candidate in Iowa this month — a mainstay for presidential candidates — as evidence of his understanding of traditional campaign norms. Sterzenbach, a former executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, is an expert in the state’s caucuses.
In 2020, Post said of O’Rourke, “I think he might still be the same authentic, table-standing Beto but with an organization behind him that can collect volunteer sign-up cards and supporter pledges in the Iowa caucuses.”
O’Malley Dillon did not respond to a request for comment, and the O’Rourke campaign declined to provide any information about its staffing.
Despite hiring O’Malley Dillon, O’Rourke remains far behind rival candidates in staffing and organization. On its hiring page, the O’Rourke campaign asks applicants specifically if they have experience in more than a dozen states that come relatively early in the 2020 primary calendar — states where other Democrats already have operations. Multiple Democratic donors, activists and operatives have complained privately that their calls to O’Rourke’s campaign go unreturned or that, once contacted, the campaign has failed to follow up.
“I think there’s a lot we don’t know about what Beto’s candidacy is going to look like,” said Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster. “I mean at some point they get beyond the kitchen counter, or the tables and the cafe, and then what does that look like?”
Boyd Brown, a former South Carolina lawmaker and former Democratic National Committee member, helped to organize O’Rourke’s trip to South Carolina last week as a volunteer, after working on a “Draft Beto” effort to encourage O’Rourke to run.
Like other supportive Democrats, Brown said many staffing and organizational decisions appear to have been delayed until a campaign manager was in place.
“I think they were waiting on Jen to ramp up,” he said. “Anybody who’s been involved with Democratic politics over the last decade knows [O’Malley Dillon] is about a good a hire as you’re going to make, if not the best hire I’ve seen made this cycle.”