It’s a bit paradoxical that the only reason anybody’s talking about Beto anymore is to note that nobody’s talking about Beto anymore. A couple of weeks ago I asked, “Is Beto Done Already?” If you measure it by the GOP’s interest in tearing him down and making his supporters angry, or lack thereof, then yep, he’s done already.
“The requests for oppo on [Beto] have completely died off,” a staffer at the oppo group [America Rising] said.
The lack of oppo requests suggests a larger problem looming over O’Rourke’s campaign: a visible decline in public interest. Once elevated to the top of Democratic watch-lists, the former congressman is now registering in single digits in several national polls…
The Republican National Committee, known for slinging insults about Democrats into mainstream consciousness, has not received any requests from reporters for O’Rourke information in recent weeks, according to a senior official.
That last part is the most important. It’s 2019, so the Republicans don’t care about anything anymore except trolling and owning the libs. If you’re a Dem candidate for president and nobody’s goofing on you, then you’re in trouble.
This makes me assume Beto’s candidacy is over. And then I remember that at various points during the 2016 campaign, I assumed Trump’s candidacy was over. But it just kept right on being not over. Over and over, it wasn’t over.
Beto’s doing some sort of town hall on CNN tonight, so that should be riveting. His younger, smarter, gayer rival Pete Buttigieg got huge ratings with his Fox News town hall on Sunday night, so it’ll be interesting to compare the two. My prediction is that Pete will come out on top. And when I see that Beto is just edging out Cory Booker in the polls, I have to remind myself that Cory Booker is actually running for president.
But as you know, I’m always wrong. So if Beto makes a comeback, this will be my headline:
Is ‘Is Beto Done Already?’ Done Already?
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