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Beto O’Rourke Raises (and Spends) a Record Amount
The UT Football News (AKA The Austin American Statesman) occasionally does non-sports coverage. On December 7th, in fact, they reported that Robert “Beto” O’Rourke raised $80.4 million in his race to lose the Texas US Senate seat to Rafael “Ted” Cruz. Of course, being primarily college sports reporters, they don’t have quite the skill to either properly analyze the numbers relating to that contest or conceal damning information about the candidate they were obviously gaga for during the entire campaign.
Beto O’Rourke spent $77.6 million of that $80.4 million, almost twice what the Cruz campaign spent. He did end up with 822,924 more votes than the generic Democrat NPC who ran against Cruz in 2012, but spent $76.9 million more to do it. That means every extra vote cost more than $93. And that doesn’t include all the free publicity he got from the fawning national media. The Football News calls those numbers “eye-popping” and “record breaking,” but they can also be called “inefficient” and “wasteful.”
Of course, Cruz spent more money to get fewer votes than in 2012. Maybe you should spend a little more time in Texas, Rafael.
I also note that $1.3 million of the donations to BO* had to be returned because they were from foreign donors and exceeded contribution limits. Now I know that for most of you, $1.3 million is a rounding error, chump change. Still, that was more than the Democrat NPC spent on the campaign in 2012. If a reporter had some skill beyond analyzing the effect of a groin injury on next week’s game, they might ask some questions about this. Questions such as “Who was exceeding the limits and by how much?” and “Who are all these foreign donors?” Instead, the story just mentions it like it’s no big deal and goes on.
Also, they leave out the little detail about returned donations when comparing Cruz’s finances to O’Rourke’s. Of course, there could be a number of legitimate reasons for this:
- “Oopsie, we forgot.”
- “Cruz didn’t have any illegal donations.”
- “The numbers for Cruz were so small that they made our preferred candidate look ridiculous by comparison.”
- “A breaking story about the UT mascot’s hay consumption didn’t leave us enough space to put in those numbers.”
Beto has received some (muted) criticism for taking money and attention away from other candidates who might actually have won. For instance, assuming that a certain candidate was at least as inept at turning money into votes, $5.1 million would have made the difference in the governor’s race in Georgia. And only about $4 million would have turned both the senate and governor’s races in Florida. But it was very important for BO to lose by an amazing 2.6% instead of a less-amazing 3.3%.
And it worked! BO is now in third place in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. (Behind Joseph “Joe” Biden and Bernard “Bernie” Sanders.) And those losers in Georgia and Florida are nowhere to be seen, despite doing much better than our Beto. So, after consulting with his ego family, BO has decided to renege on the promise he made during the campaign and “look at” running for president.
I think that “cultural appropriation” is hogwash,** but it seems to be a very important concept to Democrats. I therefore find it odd that Beto is allowed to appropriate the name of a Hispanic. When he jumped to third place in the running for 2020, he pulled ahead of people like Elizabeth “Liz” Warren, Cory “Spartacus” Booker, and Kamala “Kamala” Harris. By the Democrats’ own standards these three are real minorities and/or women, as opposed to being a fake Latino. They have also each won at least one statewide election, ahead of Beto’s zero. I will admit that BO does a better job of awkwardly riding a skateboard and playing chords on a guitar. And man does he look sharp wearing a backpack!
* Wow, he has the same initials as another empty suit poser with presidential ambitions despite having limited accomplishments. Quel coincidence!
** Duh, just look at my nom de plume.
Published in Humor
Hm. You throw that UT around pretty loosely.
So, you’re saying that the three top contenders for the Democratic nomination are all white guys?
You heard it here first!
We need to have a serious conversation about race in America.
Beto is a as much a real woman as Liz or Kamala.
That’s it! In an earlier post, I suggested a name change. If he goes all the way and becomes Señora Roberta “Beta” O’Rourke-Estrada, she’ll be the perfect Democrat candidate.
OK. Right after the national conversation on getting money out of politics.
So true. So amusing. Thanks for breaking down the numbers for us.
Ha! When I moved to Tennessee from Texas many years ago, I didn’t understand why Tennesseans were so obsessed with UT (University of Texas) football. It took me a few months the to shake my Texas-centric thinking.
Now I’m back in Texas, and it’s taken about the same time to adjust to the “other” UT.
It doesn’t help this non-college-football fan that both teams wear orange (though different shades).
Texas joke:
Why did the University of Texas put astroturf in their football stadium?
To keep their cheerleaders from grazing.
Ha!
In the case of Robert O’Rourke, I think it is appropriate to turn a classic Leftist tactic against them.
When a Leftist is appalled (and they are so easily appalled) by extravagant wealth, a favorite tactic is to say something like, “Just imagine how the poor could have been helped with all that money.”
Well, let’s just imagine for a moment how the poor in Texas might have benefitted from that $80 million: All the food it could have purchased; the rents it could have paid; medical procedures it might have covered; job training it could have provided. After all, $80 million is a whole lotta money. And O’Rourke lost. That was $80 million down the proverbial drain.
Ironically, if O’Rourke had directed every penny of that $80 million to aid the poor, and spent zero on TV ads, he might have actually swayed more voters and won the election.
No, O’Rourke could not even be persuaded to share his donated wealth with other struggling Democrat candidates, let alone the needy Texans he purportedly cared so much about. He is a nothing but a run-of-the-mill politician, preaching one message while practicing quite another. That he is now considered as potential presidential material says volumes about the true values and the emptiness of the Democrat Party.
Wisconsin joke:
Why doesn’t Iowa slide down into Missouri?
Because Minnesota sucks.
Glad I live in New Jersey. There are no jokes about New Jersey.
Um, right…
But don’t lose sight of the reality that so much of political fundraising is just money laundering amongst friends and family masquerading as advisors and vendors. Dems particularly adept at it.
Didn’t Democrats do well in in House races through out Texas too? Are we sure Betomania didn’t help all those urban Democrats running for congress? Plus isn’t Beto supposed to have been building a machine for making Texas competitive? If he did then that crazy amount of money he spent now could pay off down the line for him and other Democrats. But maybe Cruz is just a bad candidate over all. And it would have been close either way. Anyway, if you can raise the money why not spend it? Democrats fell in love with the guy and they showered him with dollar bills. If you don’t have to work so hard for it, I say flaunt it and spend it.
Plus who wants to be Senator from Texas if you can be US president? Third place in the Democratic primary? That’s not bad for a Congressman no body ever heard of until six months ago. Plus he is the essence of the Democratic party a middle aged white guy from a long line of “privileged” white guys desperately trying to be cool by pretending he isn’t white. He seems friendly, he has as much experience as Trump did when he ran, they could do worse than him.
Don’t underestimate Beto. More important than whether he spent the money effectively is that he was able to raise an enormous amount nationally. Democrats like charismatic hip candidates with a limited track record and, as we saw in 2008, so do a lot of other people.
And Beto is moving quickly on a 2020 run. According to Buzzfeed, he’s meeting with the noted Jew-baiter and, in Buzzfeed’s words “key advisor in Obama’s orbit”, Al Sharpton, to talk about mounting a campaign in 2020.
I was reading an article in the Statesman yesterday and they actually misspelled “Statesman”. I don’t think it can get worse for a newspaper, than to have a typo on their own name.
Beto will rock it in 2020. He has a lock on the college crowd and suburban moms.
Going by the other state ballot races, being a controversial candidate, either due to more outspoken social conservative beliefs or due to ethics problems, was the difference of about 200,000-300,000 votes, and Beto’s $77.6m flipped about another 100,000 votes from R to D in his race with Cruz. Some of those suburban/urban voters did stay with the Democrats on the down-ballot races, so for Texas Dems, the $776 per voter O’Rourke spent was worthwhile. But in 2020, he’d have to run for Senate not against Cruz, but against Cornyn, who is more likely to get Greg Abbott level of votes due to him being non-controversial. That’s what Beto’s facing and why it makes running for president a better option.
Beta has already said she’s not going to run against Cornyn. Of course she’s broken other promises.
Did someone say cheerleaders?
That’s a good point. Although the Democrat I wrote about in this post lost, she did better than any previous D contender. She also had a lot of contributions from outta state; Natalie Portman even campaigned for her. Overall, two Republican seats flipped in Texas, but they were both in districts where Hillary beat Trump in 2016. I have a feeling that the Dems would have won both seats no matter who challenged Cruz.
O’Rourke’s race with Cruz sort of hid the fact that there was a battle between outgoing House Speaker Joe Straus and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick over how conservative the Legislature should be, and suburban voters essentially sided with Straus, in that they didn’t simply flip from R to D, but voted for GOP candidates who were seen as closer to Straus, either ideologically or temperamentally. That accounted for the 600,000 vote gap between Patrick’s re-election and Abbott’s Nov. 6 win, and why House members recently favored Straus ally Dennis Bonnen as Speaker and also why a few of Patrick’s allies in the Legislature have been indicating they plan to moderate their positions when the next session starts in January.
It wasn’t all about Beto. But the national media wants to make it that way.
They need a simple narrative for their simple and lazy minds.
They’re so infatuated with the idea that Beto as Democratic nominee in 2020 would turn Texas Blue, they completely factored out the other statewide races, where three other candidates won re-election by 400,000-450,000 votes, and three besides that won their races by 800,000-1 million votes. That shows that the voters — mainly the suburban ones — didn’t simply robotically flip from R to D, but chose their candidates based on them being not as hard core conservative as the Dan Patrick wing of the state GOP, but also not being Democratic converts. If that wasn’t the case, Abbott, George P. Bush and Hegar would have only won by 200,000-450,000 votes.
A Beto running in 2020, who has to woo Blue State primary voters in a crowded Democratic field by going hard left on things he kept quiet about during the recent election cycle (abortion, fracking) isn’t going to simply be a favorite son candidate in Texas if he happens to get the nomination, even though Texas isn’t all that wild about Trump. O’Rourke did a better job this year of avoiding the Wendy Davis trap of campaigning to please the media and raise funds in New York and California by openly sounding more like he was running for Senate in New York or California than he was in Texas. But it’s hard to see him pull off the same thing in 2020 — if he downplays the issues that will cost him votes in Texas in November of 2020, he gets pounded by the other primary candidates for being weak on those issues, and doesn’t win the base Democratic voters in the deep Blue states (who don’t want a kinder, gentler guy or gal going after Donald Trump).
You can’t have a serious conversation about race in America. The SJW’s won’t allow it.
We’ve had serious conversations about race in America for at least 50 or 60 years.
Quiz!
How many African-Americans can you find in this picture? How many Native Americans? How many Hispanic Americans can you find?
Like the inclusion of the Romanian. Should have added “Iron-Eyes” Cody, too.