Beto O’Rourke says he’ll run for Senator again if Texas wants him to

Beto O’Rourke says he’ll run for the U.S. Senate again if Texas will have him.

The former El Paso congressman shared that sentiment during a Denton town hall when asked by a member of the crowd whether he has plans to run again in the future.

“If it comes to pass that this is what the people of Texas want, that it’s the highest and best use of what I can give to you, then yes, I will,” O’Rourke said to applause, Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA reports.

O’Rourke originally ran for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s seat in 2018, coming within three percentage points of the Republican incumbent. This time, O’Rourke would run for John Cornyn’s Senate seat.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced plans to run against Texas’ senior senator in the primary. Cornyn has spent 22 years in the senate but in November lost a longtime bid to succeed ally Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, potentially indicating tepid approval among fellow Republicans.

Though both Cornyn and Paxton have cozied up to Trump on numerous occasions, Cornyn drew heat for publicly questioning Trump’s electability ahead of last year’s election. However, the senator has since switched back to signaling his support by posing for a cringe-worthy photo in which he’s reading — or pretending to read — Trump’s book, Art of the Deal.

Paxton has remained a die-hard Trump champion, which may or may not be related to the Justice Department recently making the decision to quietly drop charges against him of bribery and abuse of office.

Nonetheless, both Cornyn and Paxton are likely to clamor for Trump’s endorsement in the primary. Whoever wins could face off against O’Rourke in the general.

O’Rourke immediately followed his 2018 Senate bid with an unsuccessful run for president in 2020. He followed that up with a 2022 run for governor, also unsuccessful.

Since then, O’Rourke hasn’t exactly retreated to lick his wounds. Rather, he’s remained active in the political sphere through his organization Powered By People, which registers and engages voters throughout the state.

One of the touchstones of O’Rourke’s initial Senate campaign was the groundbreaking way in which his campaign harnessed data and circumvented the Texas Democratic Party’s Voter Activation Network (VAN) system to develop its own proprietary door-knocking and data-collection machine.

Powered By People similarly uses new technology to better turn out large swaths of voters in a state that isn’t a red state so much as a non-voting state, a common O’Rourke refrain from his earlier campaigning days.

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This article appears in Apr 16-29, 2025.