The 2024 election is shaping up to be a nail-biter for Texans, with Dallas’s Democratic football-player-turned-civil-rights-attorney-turned-politician Colin Allred set to challenge incumbent Republican Ted Cruz for his Senate seat. But he isn’t the first to attempt the feat. Beto O’Rourke, a former El Paso city councilmember and US Representative for Texas’s 16th Congressional District, rose to national attention during his 2018 senatorial bid, ultimately losing narrowly by a 2.6 percent margin.

After two more failed runs—for president in 2020 then for governor of Texas in 2022—O’Rourke isn’t on the ballot this cycle, but the thrice-challenger is still in the game.

“I am going to contribute [to the Allred campaign]. I’m going to ask other people to contribute,” O’Rourke told Houstonia while at a Class Bookstore event in Houston on May 1. “We have done some fundraising emails with him, and certainly we’ll do more fundraising as we get closer to the election. I’m in to help him in whatever way I can, whenever I can.”

Allred has raised over $9.5 million in the first quarter of 2024. By comparison, O’Rourke had raised $6.7 million at this same point in his campaign. These numbers give the previous challenger hope and confidence in Allred, who he speaks highly of as a politician.

“[Allred’s] kind. He’s incredibly empathetic. He’s also one of the hardest working people I’ve known. He’s one of the most disciplined people I have met in politics,” O’Rourke says. “A testament to his character is the fact that he is giving up what would have been a very safe reelection to a prominent position in the United States Congress to do something that’s incredibly difficult, but very necessary, which is to win that seat back from Ted Cruz.”

These days, O’Rourke travels around Texas to lecture, listen, and learn about political strategy and voting rights. While on the campaign trail, he noticed that “sometimes Democrats don’t speak clearly or consistently or concisely,” which can alienate potential voters, he says. He believes this lack of connection with the community makes it even more difficult to share valuable information on how to recognize and report potential voter suppression and intimidation incidents.

The Texas Tribune keeps an archive of the struggles Texans face when voting—or attempting to vote, anyway. This includes, but is not limited to, discarding mail-in ballots, reducing the number of poll locations, questioning the citizenship of American-born voters, and more. It’s also the subject of O’Rourke’s 2022 book We’ve Got to Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible. In it, he traces the history of voting rights and suppression, with some county-by-county breakdowns of problems that have arisen since 2013, which the book cites as a critical moment when “the Voting Rights Act was stripped of much of its power to protect the right to vote by the Supreme Court’s… Shelby v. Holder decision.”

O’Rourke also founded the PAC Powered by People in 2019 to help Texans with registering to vote and learn more about their rights when taking part in democracy. Since its inception, the organization has signed up 250,000 eligible citizens, mostly face-to-face at community and private events, rather than via less personal emails, calls, texts, and mailers. These efforts give O’Rourke hope when it comes to creating a more just, fair, and equitable Texas for all.

“It’s one thing to say this is the toughest state in the nation in which to cast a ballot. It’s something else to help those who are targeted for voter suppression actually make their ways to the polls,” O’Rourke says. “I think all those are important things we need to do.”

Voting rights have also been central to Allred’s campaign, who focused on this very issue when he worked as a civil rights attorney and then in the Obama administration. While O’Rourke doesn’t have any official advisory role on Allred’s team, he mentions that he’s always happy to answer other senatorial hopefuls’ questions about what he learned throughout his own fight against Cruz.

“[Cruz] was a clown. He was somebody who got nothing done for Texas. He was bloviating and grandstanding and blew hot air in every direction. His biggest accomplishment was shutting down the United States government over the idea that people who were too poor to purchase private insurance could be able to see a doctor to get medication,” O’Rourke says, referring to a defining moment in Cruz’s career in 2013 when he attempted to stall the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Since O’Rourke’s campaign, Texans have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, Winter Storm Uri, and the subsequent power grid failures—not to mention Cruz’s trip to Cancún taken while 210 of his constituents died as a result of the freeze. A further 69 percent lost electricity. After President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, Cruz cast doubts on the legitimacy of the election and voted against certifying its results.

“Cruz has helped instigate an insurrection attempt that sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to another for the first time in American history,” O’Rourke says, referring to the riots of January 6, 2021. “Allred has every opportunity to run against Cruz on these massive failures.”