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OAKLAND — Pot stores, prisons and homeless encampments might not be typical presidential campaign stops.
But the unconventional agenda for Beto O’Rourke’s California campaign swing this week shows how he’s reinvented his long-shot presidential bid since the devastating mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso last month.
Instead of sticking to the tried-and-true presidential formula of Iowa diners and New Hampshire living rooms, the former Texas congressman is spending his time visiting marginalized communities far off the well-trodden campaign path — a risky strategy for a candidate who’s struggled to make headway in the polls.
On Tuesday, as President Trump held fundraisers in Palo Alto and Beverly Hills, O’Rourke walked through Los Angeles’ Skid Row to talk to homeless people and advocates. On Wednesday, he met with inmates at San Quentin prison to discuss criminal justice reform. And on Thursday, the congressman bounded into an Oakland cannabis store co-owned by a man who once was arrested for selling weed just a few blocks away, highlighting O’Rourke’s plan to end the War on Drugs.
“If ever there were a time to be with those who’ve been marginalized or counted out or down, it is now,” O’Rourke said, after a tour of the store and a meeting with local cannabis entrepreneurs. “To elevate them and lift their stories and share them with the rest of the country — that’s what I’m trying to do as a candidate, that’s what I will do as president.”
O’Rourke entered the presidential race in March as a media sensation, buoyed by national attention on his close loss in the 2018 Texas Senate race. But he struggled to articulate a clear rationale for his White House bid. He seemed unprepared for the first two debates, and he was soon relegated to an afterthought among the top candidates.
After the mass shooting in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso last month, though, his searing emotional responses brought him back into the spotlight. Since then, the former congressman has seemed to throw out the presidential playbook, turning his campaign into a national tour to highlight issues of social injustice. It’s brought him to places such as the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and several Mississippi towns impacted by the largest workplace immigration raid in history.
“If I really want to understand the story of this country, if I really want to understand the solutions to the challenges that we face, I’ve really got to listen to everyone… and not only go to those early primary states or those superdelegates who are going to vote at the Democratic convention,” O’Rourke said.
Other struggling hopefuls have taken the opposite tack. Kamala Harris’ campaign said Thursday that she would refocus on Iowa, stumping in the first caucus state every week in October and doubling her staff and offices on the ground. That comes as the California senator’s national poll numbers have sunk to their lowest level since she entered the race in January.
“We’ve got to put Iowa first,” Harris communications director Lily Adams told reporters, arguing that a focus on the state has paid off for past Democratic candidates such as Barack Obama and John Kerry, who also were down in the polls a few months before the crucial caucus.
O’Rourke’s campaign is hoping that his focus on progressive social issues and the authenticity he projects put him back in contention — even if the people he’s meeting with, San Quentin inmates or undocumented immigrants in Mississippi, can’t vote for him.
In some ways, Beto 2.0 comes off as the most woke presidential candidate in history.
As he introduced himself at the Oakland cannabis store, O’Rourke noted that “my pronouns are he/him.” Speaking outside of San Quentin, he acknowledged that the reason a past DUI arrest didn’t derail his life had “a lot to do with my race” and his “privilege” as a white man. And he declared at the last debate that “we can mark the creation of this country not at the Fourth of July, 1776, but August 20, 1619” — the date when the first African slaves were brought to the British colonies.
Taina Vargas-Edmond, an activist with the Oakland criminal justice reform group Initiate Justice, said she liked that O’Rourke was taking a different tack from most politicians by meeting with inmates, homeless people and marijuana entrepreneurs.
“You can’t address a problem if you don’t talk to people who’ve been directly harmed by it,” she said. “Any candidate running for higher office should visit prisons and talk to folks incarcerated to learn their experiences firsthand.”
But there’s no sign yet if O’Rourke’s new strategy will win him more than progressive brownie points. Some of his recent rhetoric could be anathema to independent voters in swing states who could determine the general election — and to anxious Democrats who care more about beating Trump than about ideological purity.
His support for a mandatory assault weapon buyback — “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” he declared in the last debate — has worried some gun control activists who think O’Rourke went too far. One of his rivals, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, agreed with an interviewer this week that O’Rourke’s comments were “playing into the hands of Republicans.”
On Thursday, O’Rourke didn’t seem to care how photos of his reviewing cannabis products at Blunts+Moore, a bright, airy shop near the Oakland Coliseum, might look to conservative voters.
The visit was timed to coincide with the release of O’Rourke’s new marijuana justice plan, which would legalize the drug at the federal level and tax sales of it to provide monthly payments to former nonviolent marijuana convicts, based on how long a sentence they served. But O’Rourke spent most of his time listening to cannabis entrepreneurs and asking questions about their business models, instead of pitching his own ideas.
O’Rourke was especially interested in Oakland’s equity program, which helps former convicts get licenses to open dispensaries — a plan designed to avoid a situation where “a bunch of rich white guys are going to get richer while black and brown people are still sitting in prison for doing exactly the same thing,” as James Anthony, a cannabis industry lawyer in the city, put it to O’Rourke.
Some of the attendees said they were concerned by the prospect of new federal taxes on top of state and local taxes adding up to as high as 40 percent. O’Rourke — who did not sample the merchandise — nodded along and said hearing about their experience made him think twice about increasing the tax burden on small cannabis businesses.
Bri Moore, one of the shop’s co-owners, said O’Rourke “felt very genuine” and she was happy that he’d come to learn about marijuana issues first hand.
“He has a full understanding of how the war on drugs has been unfair,” she said. “He sees that Oakland is trying to do something different about it, and he wanted to have an idea of what has worked and what hasn’t.”
