To the fanfare of middle-aged moms across the country, CNN is out with a new 2020 Democratic presidential poll, and failed senatorial candidate and soon-to-be unemployed Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, is seemingly on the rise. While former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., top the poll at 30 and 14 percent respectively, Beto comes in third at 9 percent, more than doubling his support from CNN’s last poll in early October.
Before you get your hopes up faster than Beto can flee a drunk-driving crash, consider what this means, empirically, at this stage in the game. Despite burning through record amounts of cash during his camapaign, Beto failed to unseat incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the most divisive figures in national politics whose approval took a massive beating as he’s stumbled in navigating how much to cozy up to President Trump. Sure, the media has lavished Beto with dozens of fawning features and magazine covers, but unless he has a career card up his sleeve to fill up the next two years, that steam is hard-pressed to persist until the primaries start in earnest.
Beto might be the only candidate in the top five to make significant polling gains. But in the time elapsed between the two polls, the biggest event was the midterm election, which none of the top contenders were affected by.
[Bernie Sanders: It’s premature to be talking about Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 prospects]
Furthermore, candidates who poll sort of well due to name recognition but aren’t real contenders — former Secretary of State John Kerry (sixth), former Attorney General Eric Holder (10th), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. (11th, and don’t think that the Franken base won’t cannibalize her from the start) — and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who may have committed political suicide with her ancestry shenanigans, will likely get whittled out of the field in a matter of months. Then, candidates more viable to beat Trump (Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and former Vice President Joe Biden) and more intersectional (Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Cory Booker, D-N.J.) will probably fill that void, not Beto.
At this stage in the game in 2008, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner with a third of the vote. In 2014, Jeb Bush led the Republican pack by 10 percentage points. But perhaps Beto’s best right-wing parallel, Sarah Palin, came second to eventual nominee and current Sen.-elect Mitt Romney, R-Utah, with a whopping 14 percent of the polling vote in November 2010.
I could be wrong. And if I’m wrong, you can rub these Beto-bashing columns in my face until Trump has a field day clobbering him on the debate stage. But between the faulty equivocations to President Barack Obama, paper-thin resume, lack of real policy potential, and breathless (read: misguided) media attention, I wouldn’t bet on Beto.
