Anyone who bothered to actually cover O'Rourke and
Ted Cruz campaigning in Texas knows that O'Rourke's single biggest applause line on the stump was about banishing corporate PAC money in politics. His ability to raise a gargantuan amount of cash from small donors online is precisely the reason he was credible on that message—and would be in 2020. O'Rourke ran openly on passing Medicare for all, an issue that Sanders successfully pushed into the mainstream of the Democratic Party. There's literally a Daily Kos headline that we are all free to Google: "
Beto O'Rourke (D) Is All in for Bernie Sanders's Single-Payer Health-Care Bill." As the
Houston Chronicle has noted, O'Rourke also split with Obama on a number of national-security decisions, and voted against re-authorizing FISA warrants allowing intelligence agencies to spy on Americans.
People who don't live in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill might also be aware that O'Rourke has been a progressive leader on immigration reform and criminal justice, fatal blind spots for Sanders as he struggled with minority voters in 2016. O'Rourke ran for Congress on abolishing private prisons and decriminalizing marijuana. Hailing from the U.S.-Mexico border, he's long been a fierce advocate for vulnerable immigrants, and was one of few Democrats willing to speak out against Obama's deportation policies.
The point here is that Sanders, or his supporters, do not get to have a monopoly on what it means to be a progressive in 2020. That term had its own logic in 2016, defined against the backdrop of the fading Obama administration and a head-to-head rivalry with Clinton and her Goldman Sachs paychecks. Today, Trump is president, the world is different, and candidates who run headlong into campaigns fighting the last war always lose.