Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke is an American politician who represented Texas’s 16th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019. He is most notable for his 2018 campaign for United States Senate, in which he lost to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. In March 2019, he announced he would run for President in the 2020 United States presidential election. His campaign was suspended before the primary elections began on March 14, 2019.
About Beto O’Rourke in brief
Robert Francis \”Beto\” O’Rourke is an American politician who represented Texas’s 16th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019. He is most notable for his 2018 campaign for United States Senate, in which he lost to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. He sought the 2020 Democratic nomination for President of the U.S. and suspended his campaign on November 1, 2019, before the primaries began. In his infancy, his family gave him the nickname ‘Beto’, a common Spanish-Portuguese nickname for first names ending in ‘-berto’, to distinguish him from his namesake grandfather. He was a member of the computer hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, named after a shut-down Lubbock slaughterhouse. His parents and paternal grandparents were native El Pasoans, while his maternal grandfather was from Metter, Georgia and his maternal grandmother was from Racine, Wisconsin. He has two younger sisters, the younger of whom was born intellectually impaired. As a teenager, he wrote numerous poems and other texts under the pseudonym ‘Psychedelic Warlord’, a name taken from a 1974 rock song by a band called Hawkwind. He graduated from Woodberry Forest School and Columbia University. In 2005, he was elected to the El Paso City Council, serving until 2011. He switched parties in the early 1990s, and made several failed attempts to win election to public office as a Republican. In 2012, he defeated eight-term incumbent Democrat Silvestre Reyes in the primary.
After being re-elected to the House in 2014 and 2016, he declined to seek re-election in 2018, and ran a competitive campaign that drew national attention. He set a record for the most votes ever cast for a Democrat in Texas history. In March 2019, he announced he would run for President in the 2020 United States presidential election. His campaign was suspended before the primary elections began on March 14, 2019. His father Pat O’ Rourke served in public office in El Paso as County Commissioner and County Judge; he was an associate of Texas Governor Mark White, served as the state chairman of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. His maternal ancestors settled in the American colonies in the 18th century. His mother married Fred Korth, former Secretary of the Navy under President John F. Kennedy, in 1980, and he is a fourth-generation Irish American. He told The Texas Observer that, in his youth, El Paso’s punk scene, though small, helped him find a sense of community in the city. He said he has expressed regret over some fictional stories he wrote as a teenager for a cDcc forum which included sexual and violent themes. He also admitted that he stole phone service during his long-distance teen years in order to use his dial-up modem to use the phone service to send texts to friends and family. In 1988, after two years at El Paso High School, he enrolled in WoodberryForest School.
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