O’Rourke, Beto (1972-…), served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019. O’Rourke is a Democrat from El Paso, Texas. In the 2018 elections for U.S. Senate, O’Rourke ran a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to defeat the incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz. O’Rourke’s colorful life story and skill as a public speaker made him a rising figure in the Democratic Party in the 2010’s.
Robert Francis O’Rourke was born in El Paso on Sept. 26, 1972. Friends and family have called him Beto, a nickname for Roberto, since he was a boy. O’Rourke attended El Paso High School for a year before transferring to a boarding school in Virginia. In 1995, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University in New York City. During his teenage and young adult years, O’Rourke also played bass guitar and drums in punk rock bands. In 1998, O’Rourke moved back to El Paso, where he started a website development company the following year. In 2005, he won election to a two-year term on the El Paso City Council. He was reelected, to a four-year term, in 2007.
In 2012, O’Rourke upset incumbent Representative Silvestre Reyes in a Democratic primary to win the party’s nomination for U.S. representative for Texas’s 16th congressional district. The district covers El Paso and other communities in western Texas. O’Rourke was elected to Congress in November 2012 and won reelection in 2014 and 2016. In the House, O’Rourke served on the Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs committees. He sponsored a number of bills pertaining to health care for military veterans, and immigration and border security issues.
O’Rourke gained a measure of national attention in March 2017, when he and Republican Will Hurd, a fellow Texas U.S. congressman, drove 1,600 miles (2,575 kilometers) from Texas to Washington, D.C., after their flights were canceled during a snowstorm. In 2018, O’Rourke won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. In his campaign against Senator Cruz, O’Rourke was sharply critical of President Donald J. Trump’s proposed border wall and of the federal government’s “war on drugs.” Cruz narrowly defeated O’Rourke in the general election that November. In March 2019, O’Rourke announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. He dropped out of the race in November 2019, however, while trailing his competitors in fundraising and in opinion polls. In March 2022, O’Rourke won a primary election to become his party’s 2022 nominee for Texas governor. He lost the general election to incumbent Governor Greg Abbott.
