AUSTIN – In deep-red Texas, a state that President Trump carried by nine percentage points in 2016 and where a Democrat hasn’t won statewide elected office since 1994, Beto O’Rourke needed an edge beyond his polished television spots and enthusiastic crowds. He found one in Facebook. 

Thousands tune in as O’Rourke live streams behind the wheel while high-tailing across Texas, air drumming in the drive-through lane to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” and skateboarding in the Whataburger parking lot after the debate with Republican rival Ted Cruz. Comment after comment from Facebook supporters scroll alongside videos even when he’s just knocking on doors in between loads of dirty clothes at a laundry mat, speaking fluent Spanish to residents and asking week-old mewing kittens in McAllen, Texas: “Cats, can we count on your vote?”

O’Rourke’s not just tapping Facebook to build an email list of millions of supporters, he’s also raising money there – and a lot of it. In the past three months, O’Rourke brought in more than $38 million, the most of any Senate candidate in history. Political strategists say his Facebook pipeline to supporters across the country helped fill O’Rourke’s war chest.

He’s not the first political candidate to jump on Facebook to mobilize supporters, raise money and get out the vote, but his campaign bet heavily on digital, establishing a direct line of communication with voters and donors in a bid to create the feeling of intimacy candidates usually can only get standing on someone’s stoop. That strategy helped elevate the relatively low profile of the 45-year-old El Paso congressman as he takes on Cruz who has national name recognition and fundraising chops.

“It’s almost reverted to the way it was before: grassroots – but the medium has changed,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and political analyst on MSNBC who worked on Cruz’s presidential campaign.

A month ago The Cook Political Report updated its rating for the heated Senate race, from “leans Republican” to “toss up.” Republican strategist John Thomas estimates that O’Rourke’s digital strategy has paid off in a three- to seven-point bump in the polls, probably not enough to overcome his long odds but, without it, “he’d just be another up-and-coming candidate to watch, not a rock star.” 

Making a social connection

O’Rourke’s turn in the social media spotlight came in the summer of 2016 when, after Speaker Paul Ryan ordered C-Span cameras turned off during Democrats’ 25-hour sit-in to pressure Republicans to hold votes on gun-control measures, he was one of the Democrats to broadcast the sit-in live on Facebook.

Last year was his breakout moment. He embarked on a 1,600-mile, 36-hour road trip alongside Republican U.S. Rep. Will Hurd from San Antonio to Washington after flights were grounded due to snowy weather. Tens of thousands – even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg – tuned in as the pair talked health care and border security, took questions and music suggestions and dropped by Graceland via Facebook and Periscope. Earlier this year, a video of O’Rourke’s response to a question at a town hall gathering in support of NFL players kneeling for the national anthem went viral.

Carrie Collier Brown, 42, an Austin lawyer, said she became aware of O’Rourke by watching one of his Facebook livestreams a few years ago following a school shooting. She tuned in regularly after that.

When he announced he was running for U.S. Senate against Cruz, Brown began organizing fundraisers and volunteers for O’Rourke’s campaign. Today, she helps run about 60 volunteers – “a bunch of pissed-off mamas in Southwest Austin” – on his behalf.

The unscripted videos and his command of the issues strike a nerve with Texans, Brown said as she waited in line recently to see O’Rourke speak at a downtown Austin event.

“It’s the type of thing Texans respect, that type of honesty and authenticity,” she said. 

A fundraising tool

Television advertising still rules politics, accounting for a bit more than half of the $8.9 billion in ads that Borrell Associates says voters will see by Nov. 6. But digital, which Borrell predicts will account for about $1.8 billion this election cycle, is growing faster. 

More than a third of O’Rourke’s ad spending over the past three months has been on television. His first ad, though, was shot on an iPhone and ran only online. And O’Rourke has primed his fundraising machine with Facebook ads appealing to individual donors. He has spent more campaign money on Facebook ads than any other candidate in the midterm elections, $5.3 million since May, while his rival spent just over $400,000 in the same period.

The average Senate campaign during this election cycle is spending about 10 percent of paid advertising on digital, estimates Travis N. Ridout, co-director at the Wesleyan Media Project which tracks and analyzes ad spending. Sen. Cruz is spending 13.5 percent. O’Rourke is spending closer to a third, Ridout estimated. 

“This is a prioritizing of digital that we really haven’t seen in the past,” Ridout said.

As Cruz surges in the polls, buoyed by the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and rallies with President Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in Texas, O’Rourke is doubling down. In one week, from Oct. 14 and Oct. 20, the O’Rourke campaign spent more than $500,000 on Facebook ads to get out the vote. 

Energizing voters

If O’Rourke has any shot at winning, he needs to motivate voters who usually stay home during midterms, get Latinos to the polls and have a “historic turnout” of 18- to 29-year-old voters, said Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist. Texas’ older voters reliably vote Republican, he said.

As early voting opened Monday in Texas, O’Rourke continued to advertise heavily on Facebook, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

His campaign purchased at least 90 different ads since Monday, spending as much as $1 million on ads viewed as many as 32 million times. Several of those ads encourage early voting, and at least two ads appear to tap into Facebook users’ voting history to encourage them to vote. In the same time period, the Cruz campaign has run about a dozen ads, most of which invite Facebook users to attend rallies, others that cast O’Rourke as a dangerous liberal and extremist. He’s spent less than $200,000 on ads viewed fewer than 4 million times.

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Only 13 percent of registered voters age 18-29 voted in Texas during the 2014 midterms, compared to 56 percent for the 65-69 age range, Jones said. O’Rourke is betting on this aggressive social media push to reverse that trend. 

If early voting turnout is any indication, O’Rourke’s strategy appears to be working. In Harris County, which includes Houston, 181,916 voters turned out in the first three days of early voting, compared to 83,347 for the same period during the 2014 midterm elections, according to the Texas Tribune. Travis County counted 83,162 votes the first three days, compared to 27,116 votes in the same period of 2014.

“This is by far the most robust social media strategy we’ve ever seen in Texas,” Jones said.

President Obama revolutionized the use of social media as a political tool in 2008. In his run for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders broke through the noise of presidential politics with quirky Facebook posts that drew tens of thousands of likes and shares and burnished his image as a straight shooter with younger voters. His campaign spent big on Facebook and Instagram ads and raised most of its nearly $230 million total online.

HOUSTON, TX – OCTOBER 22: People wait in line to vote at a polling place on the first day of early voting on October 22, 2018 in Houston, Texas. Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Beto O’Rourke is running against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the midterm elections. (Photo by Loren Elliott/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 775246187 ORIG FILE ID: 1052750808 (Photo: Loren Elliott, Getty Images)

Trump elevated the use of Facebook to a political art during the 2016 presidential election, rapidly testing thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of different campaign messages which precisely targeted voters on the values and issues that would drive them to the polls and, in some cases, attempted to dissuade Clinton voters in battleground states from voting. The Trump campaign reportedly spent $70 million a month on digital advertising, most of it on Facebook, and the strategy netted a big return, with Facebook and other digital platforms generating at least $250 million in donations for Trump plus booming sales of campaign merchandise.

“It’s the Obama playbook, the Sanders playbook and the Trump playbook all rolled into one,” Dan Schnur, professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications, said of O’Rourke’s campaign. “Over the last decade and a half, there has been a gradual evolution of how candidates use social media to motivate supporters. The thing to remember is that all the online activity in the world doesn’t make a difference unless it results in offline activity. All those supporters watching Beto O’Rourke’s videos are going to have to hit the streets and turn out friends if he’s going to pull off the upset.”

In Austin on Wednesday, more than 200 people waited in a cold, steady drizzle in the parking lot of Austin Community College, Highland Campus, for O’Rourke. The candidate arrived to chants of “Beto! Beto!” then jumped onto the bed of a pickup truck and delivered his main stumping points: universal healthcare, legalizing marijuana, improved benefits for veterans.

Near the end of his 20-minute speech, he urged those gathered to vote – and spread the word on social media.

“We all know, in this age of social media, if you don’t take a picture of it and post it, it didn’t happen,” he said to the cheers of the crowd.

Among those gathered was Gabrielle Cristine Lopez, 19, an anthropology student at ACC, who will be voting for the first time ever in these elections. Lopez said she supports O’Rourke for his charisma and stand on issues. She first learned of him from his Facebook videos, she said.

Many of her friends and fellow students, who have shared his videos online, are also backing him, she said.

“I love what he represents,” Lopez said, “not just for Texas but for the country.”

Blanketing social media

Other midterm races are tighter, but for Democrats nationally, this is the contest to watch. It doesn’t hurt, says Republican strategist Thomas, that O’Rourke’s facing off against Cruz, who is the biggest bogeyman next to Trump for Democrats and isn’t that popular with many Republicans either.

An Ipsos online poll released Wednesday in conjunction with Reuters and the University of Virginia showed Cruz leading O’Rourke by 5 percentage points among likely voters. Another recent poll showed O’Rourke trailing by as much as 9 percentage points.

Robert Stovall, a San Antonio-based Republican activist and former chairman of the Bexar County, Texas, GOP, had heard of O’Rourke’s social media blitz. But he got his strongest indication three weeks ago when his 27-year-old son called to alert him that O’Rourke was all over Instagram, Snapchat and pretty much every other social media platform.

Stovall predicts Cruz will still win the race but O’Rourke’s social media strategy is reminiscent of President Trump’s strategy in 2016 and could be the wave of the future.

“It’s gutsy, it’s out there, it’s in your face,” he said. “Whether it’s effective, I don’t know.”

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