Robert Francis Beto O'Rourke has dropped his 2020 election campaign.

Robert Francis Beto O'Rourke at a rally. Yahoo News/AP.

Former Texas representative Robert Francis Beto O'Rourke has announced that he is dropping out of the 2020 presidential race. Yahoo News. O'Rourke admitted that his campaign didn't have the means to continue campaigning. O'Rourke came to national prominence in 2018 after losing a campaign to unseat Texas Senator Ted Cruz. His 2020 bid was rocky, with more experienced candidates sucking much of the air out of the room. His biggest moment was at one of the debates where he vowed to pass gun confiscation and said "hell yes" when asked if that meant taking people's AR's and AK's. O'Rourke has so far failed to endorse any of the candidates in the race and is not expected to start a Senate race against incumbent John Cornyn. 

My Comment:

I won't pretend to be impartial here, I hated O'Rourke. Even back when he was up against Ted Cruz and was a fairly centrist Democrat I thought he was garbage. There is just something about his face that rubs me the wrong way and I can't imagine being in a room with him and being able to keep my temper under control. 

At the beginning of the race I thought that O'Rourke was trying to get votes from centrists. He ran a fairly boring campaign but it did not gain any traction at all. He had a brief moment in the sun where the media was trying to push him as the chosen one but outside of the beltway he never had much appeal. 

Seeing his campaign failing and sensing an opportunity in the wake of the El Paso shooting, O'Rourke, to his eternal shame, announced a plan to confiscate America's AR's and AK's. Though Eric Swalwell had done the same thing, he was already out of the race and O'Rourke's statement went hugely viral. He got a huge amount of media attention and pushed the other candidates to the left on the issue.

This seemed to backfire on both O'Rourke and the Democrats. Republicans were furious with O'Rourke and pointed out that his plan was both unworkable and would lead to the deaths of a huge number of people. Gun rights groups were ecstatic as one of the gun control movements most obvious and ubiquitous lies was "we aren't coming for your guns" and that lie was now forever proven to be just that. They fundraised off of O'Rourke's statements and the NRA in particular used it as a much needed distraction from their own internal problems. 

Democrats were not happy with O'Rourke either. Though publicly the other candidates praised his "passion" on the issue, they knew that he had hurt them too with his statements. Gun control advocates were furious for O'Rourke letting the veil slip prematurely. Plus, though gun control was in the news, it wasn't anyone's first priority and was a major distraction. 

Many of the rank and file Democrats I spoke to hated what O'Rourke said on gun confiscation. They told me that O'Rourke was going way too far and that his plan would do nothing to prevent violence. They also said that his announcement sucked all the air out of the room for a chance at a deal to pass gun control, which I think is also true. I'm way more positive about it than they are but I think O'Rourke's plan derailed any chance of a deal for gun control in congress passing and the current impeachment frenzy ensures that nothing will be done until after 2020, buying gun owners a major reprieve on the national level. 

None of this helped O'Rourke gain momentum and he continued to linger in the low single digits. His debate performances were poor, he'd angered both the opposition and his own party and he didn't have a clear path to the presidency. He probably should have dropped out then but instead he tripled down on the stupidity. 

O'Rourke's final campaign moment, besides dropping out today, was to announce that he was going to pull tax exempt status from churches that didn't agree with him on LGBT issues. Doing so is a clear violation of the 1st amendment (unless you do it across the board it's viewpoint discrimination) and wasn't something anyone was asking for. It created another group of powerful enemies as now the evangelicals were furious with him.

At this point I suspected O'Rourke was actually a GOP plant. He was confirming so many of the fears that Republicans have about Democrats I almost wondered if he wasn't fake. He vowed to take guns away and tax churches and otherwise punish people on the right for simply existing. He was a strawman come to life and it was almost unbelievable how quickly he morphed into the most extremist candidate in the race considering he was totally milquetoast in the beginning. 

I think that O'Rourke's a good example of pandering to the extremes isn't always a good thing in a presidential race. O'Rourke went full extremist on gun control but lost any mainstream appeal in the process. And I think he forgot the fact that very few people actually have gun control as a single important issue, unlike people like me who always vote based on who I think will be better on gun rights. Despite his extreme statements, none of this resulted in any bounce in the polls. 

As for the rest of the field, I think it will continue to narrow. I think that O'Rourke was the first major candidate to drop out as he was the only one that was alive in the polls at any point. Right now only three or four candidates are viable and I think we will see other big names, like Kamala Harris or Corey Booker drop out fairly soon as well.