O'Rourke's sprint at the exit leaves the Democratic field panting

PLYMOUTH, N.H. – D here Thursday afternoon, Beto O'Rourke will have campaigned in the 10 counties of New Hampshire – a sprint that will take him every 48 hours. Last week he was everywhere in Iowa and, between the two, he crossed the Upper Midwest.

Having no job attaching to Washington or a national capital – and a real zeal for the "open" road, O'Rourke rallies students, connects to coffee counters and presses each hour in the news cycle on different media markets.

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"We set the tone," O'Rourke said this weekend in Iowa after a 5-kilometer run at the start of a hectic campaign day in the nation's first caucus. He then traveled to Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, before driving his leased Dodge Grand Caravan more than 430 km east of New Hampshire.

Less than a week after the announcement of his campaign, the Texan Democrats alone sped up the clip of the primary presidential primary, annoying some of its competitors – and making others insane.

O'Rourke is not the first presidential candidate this year to arrive in Iowa or New Hampshire, says presidential candidates have been visiting since mid-term elections last year . After the announcement of his campaign last week, O'Rourke however enjoys the crowd and the attention of the media.

His first fundraising of $ 6.1 million, which he reported on Monday, surpassed all his competitors. And meanwhile Wednesday to announce his average donation of $ 47, O'Rourke has generated a new batch of stories. Later, while O'Rourke was moving away from an event in Plymouth, an elderly woman wringing her neck to see him grimace on a bench.

"Hey," she saidhe stands on furniture. "

Alongside other senior Democrats who run for president, the last few days have inevitably been dragged into the "Beto Show", texting on his wild gestures and his campaign at the top of the table – while recognizing that it offered voters and journalists a closer approach to consider that they usually are not.

Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, makes about the same speech at every event. He avoids coffee counters for his podium and rarely answers questions from the public, let alone the media.

Rival aids used Twitter as a sort of tracking tool, taking private shots of O'Rourke's meager operation and noting sneaky replicas whenever he stumbles or borrows a policy or argument from his candidate.

With O'Rourke unemployed and free to travel the country in his van, other campaigns began to discuss how to maximize their visibility on their travels.

Yet none of the other Democrats' advisors announced plans to radically change his approach, each insisting that he will organize his own race and a predictor that O'Rourke would eventually fade away.

As a top Democratic Party leader in 2020 says, POLITICO said, "When you're part of a 20-person race, you can not change everything for one person."

"He could still be in Congress, but he resigned," said another senior official about O'Rourke. "He decided that it was his big adventure now, and he was going to do what he was going to do."

However, some of them who work for people in day jobs are forced to change their work schedule to accommodate the faster pace of the campaign.

O'Rourke's frantic pace is largely an effort to replicate the tighter-than-expected Texas Senate campaign he waged against Ted Cruz when he visited the 254 counties of the United States. State to heavy republican.

Asked about his strategy, he repeated several times, "You must show yourself."

For O'Rourke supporters, the candidate's efforts to achieve this are half of the appeal. When several hundred students who were waiting for O 'Rourke at Keene State College on Tuesday night learned that it would be late, they issued a faint groan, but recovered when the organizers ordered them to d & rsquo; Activate Facebook, where O'Rourke was transmitted live from the car. . Upon arrival, he lingered long after the event to ask with all those who wished.

But O 'Rourke is also trying, in his swift campaign, to set himself up as a trajectory corrector after Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016. Many Democrats remain bitter that Clinton has not campaigned at all in Wisconsin, a critical state eventually carried by President Donald Trump. Recently invited to evaluate the Democratic Party's failure in the last presidential election, O. Rourke said: "You must introduce yourself and you must return."

Robert Wolf, a venture capitalist who raised funds for former President Barack Obama and advised the former, said, "If I were told that their first stop would be Iowa and that their second stop was would be a road trip through the blue wall. our last candidate missed the Blue Wall badly, I would say it's a well thought-out strategy. "

He said: "After what I hear and hear, the excitement around Beto is real and the resulting base grows exponentially at every stop. We have learned in the past that instead of being a candidate who is always behind ropes, those taking selfies, shaking hands and kissing babies attract bigger crowds and more support. "

Despite his ability to raise funds and draw crowds, O'Rourke still runs far behind Sanders and his former Vice President Joe Biden and pretty much with Senator Kamala Harris of California in the latest CNN poll released on Tuesday. O 'Rourke will travel to South Carolina after New Hampshire and will spark a new media convulsion on March 30, when the coup kickoff of his election campaign in his hometown of El Paso.

As usual, O'Rourke announced Wednesday that he will not only hold an event in El Paso that day, but also in Houston and Austin.

Yet it is so early in the year that O'Rourke almost certainly fails to maintain the media's consistent focus for his first week. Legislators in the running for the presidency can – and do – strengthen coverage by introducing bills, and debates starting this summer will offer many opportunities to separate. Biden, who is supposed to be running, will probably attract O'Rourke's special attention after the announcement of a campaign.

When asked if he could keep up, O'Rourke replied, "We'll see. It's extremely exciting to do that … It's very exciting for me.

For Jeff Roe, who was Cruz's chief strategist, O'Rourke's debut is well known. He added that if O'Rourke remained attached to the road, this would prevent him from writing a public narrative other than being a road warrior – a story that will eventually grow old.

"Coming out of the grid for the first two weeks, it will probably be fine," said Roe. "But that's all he has … he's constantly looking for himself."