On the Road with Beto

and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac DeVer.

Right now I'm at a hotel in Boston on my way to the New Hampshire State Democratic Convention, which is happening over the weekend.

I spend a lot of time on the road covering this presidential campaign.

Planes, trains, Ubers, many, many rental cars.

Today, I took the bolt bus.

If you're not familiar, it's basically a greyhound for 20-something New Yorkers.

I've never ridden one for a campaign, and despite once being a 20-something New Yorker myself, I hadn't ridden one in years.

Neither had Beto Arbourke, but that's how he decided to go himself from New York, where he was for the CNN Climate Change Forum on Wednesday night, up to New Hampshire by way of Boston.

Not a campaign bus with his name on it, just a bulk bus with bad Wi-Fi.

Waiting to get on, I asked him how long it had been since he'd been on a bus like this himself.

It's been a while.

Yeah, I used to live here in New York, and so I remember taking the bus to D.C.

or to Boston, Chicago.

I even took it to El Paso once, but that was in my 20s.

I ride the bus.

Bedo is a name you surely know.

He's the former congressman from Texas.

Right now, he's a presidential candidate.

In 2018, though, he ran for Senate, and in an effort to unseat Ted Cruz, he upended politics, becoming a celebrity and raising $38 million in a single quarter.

His presidential campaign hasn't gone as well.

The problem hasn't been that he didn't have the big breakout moment at the second debate, which fans were hoping for.

Though he did not.

The problem was that he still hadn't convinced nearly anyone that there was a clear reason he was running at all.

O'Rourke, as a candidate, is always about listening.

He wants to meet everyone and hear what they think more than give big campaign speeches.

But voters want to hear from candidates what's driving them to run.

And O'Rourke didn't seem to have that clear rationale energizing him.

That changed on August 3rd.

We're back with the breaking news.

A mass shooting in El Paso, Texas at the Cielo Vista Mall.

We're hearing there are multiple fatalities.

Police say one person is in custody.

The Walmart in El Paso is just five miles from the border, making it a popular shopping destination for Mexicans.

Federal and local authorities are investigating the attack there as an act of domestic terrorism and a possible hate crime.

As news came in that his hometown was the site of a mass shooting, O'Rourke rushed back to El Paso and the press court followed.

Is there anything in your mind that the president can do now to make this any better?

What do you think?

You know the sit he's been saying.

He's been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals.

I don't know, like members of the press, what the

hold on a second.

You know,

it's these questions that you know the answers to.

I mean, connect the dots about what he's been doing in this country.

He's not tolerating racism.

He's promoting racism.

He's not tolerating violence.

He's inciting racism and violence in this country.

So, you know, I just

don't know what kind of question question that is.

A few days ago, there was yet another mass shooting in Texas, in the Midland Odessa area.

Altogether, the two August shootings left 29 people dead and 46 injured.

Just in August, just in Texas.

They have put O'Rourke into a dark place, but also maybe helped give him that clear reason to be running.

So that was all on my mind as we boarded the bus together in New York and started to make our way north.

Let's see.

Testing, testing.

Alright,

we're on a bus.

Why are we on a bus?

We are traveling to Boston and get to be on the road, which I love to do.

I always prefer to travel on the road and actually see the country through which we pass.

You know, I honestly prefer to drive over being driven.

You seem to like having wheels under you.

I do.

And honestly, it just makes a ton of sense from the savings.

And also, you know, one of the things I'm advocating for is that we find ways to reduce our energy consumption

and

be a little bit more thoughtful and mindful of how we travel and

what we burn to get there.

And, you know, this is one of the more efficient and effective ways to do that.

I'd just rather be moving instead of waiting.

And on this bus, we're moving.

And in addition,

you can make a phone call, you can read, you can...

You are reading the new Bill McKibben book, How the Human Game Has Maybe Played Itself Out.

That seems like the very on brand of where your head is at the moment.

Yeah.

You know, someone put that book into my hands the other night at an event and said, you really need to read this.

and you know I probably pick up a few books that people give me a week read

very little of any of them just because of time

but here I was waiting for the bus to come that Bill McKibben book was sticking out of the the bag and I just thought well

rather than scroll through my Twitter feed again why don't I read something that will nourish my mind and make me a little smarter.

And it's really good, very well written, really interesting, and I'm just at the beginning of it.

So

I am impressed that you can read on a bus.

I get car sick often, hopefully not on this trip.

I think tracks back to an incident when I was about 10 years old, a school trip on a bus that I got sick and maybe the psychology is in there.

Did you vomit?

Yeah, I can confirm that that happened.

There was a classmate of mine who did not fare well.

Oh.

Which, as you can imagine

for a group of fifth graders was just everybody was really calm and understanding.

Did it trigger any other vomiting from any of your other classmates?

I've seen that happen, this kind of chain reaction of nausea.

Once somebody loses it, it causes other people to do it as well.

It did not, but I have,

it's been a while since I've had Doritas and maybe since then.

Yeah.

For me, it's southern comfort.

Going back to my time in New York, Rob Choi and I, for some reason, got into some Southern Comfort and just was a very

messy night involving Rob Choi, you know, and this is not something I've seen in any other city, but in New York, walking down the streets before Christmas, there are all these netting machines to put the Christmas trees in to constrain and constrict their size.

And Rob Choi made it through one of those netting machines on Southern Comfort.

If I just smell Southern Comfort now, I am.

Southern Comfort is to me what Doritos are to you.

Well, neither of them are on the bus, so we should both be okay.

I want to take you back.

We're joking around, but

it's been a rough month for you.

You were

in Las Vegas for a presidential forum, a labor forum, when the news of the shooting in El Paso broke.

You made a statement right away, got on the plane went home.

Just walk me through what that was, when you landed, when you're sort of trying to process what's going on here.

Well,

there was confusion at first.

What had happened, where had it happened, how serious was it?

There was almost an inability to believe that what I was reading about on Twitter and what friends were texting me about could really be happening.

Surely they're mistaken.

Someone's blown this out of proportion.

It's natural for us to panic and assume the worst.

But, you know, this is.

What you thought the body count was out of proportion?

There was no body count at first.

There was just an alert.

There's

active shooters, plural, at Siela Vista Mall.

That was

the

initial

text that I got from a friend.

Then I got on Twitter to see if I could learn more and I really didn't get much more detail.

Then there was, you know, people have been shot.

Then there was

an unconfirmed report that there were bodies in the parking lot.

And even at that point, I'll be honest with you, I couldn't believe it.

Just not in El Paso.

Does not happen there.

Hasn't ever happened there.

I have this

extraordinary faith and pride in our safety and our security.

in large part because of who we are, which,

as you've heard me say, just flies in the face of the rhetoric and the conventional wisdom about

communities of immigrants or border communities or El Paso itself.

It's supposed to be dangerous and

a security problem to be contained when, in fact, it's one of the safest places in the United States.

So, none of it rang true to me.

And also, that's where I'm from and where

Amy and I are raising our kids.

And so, I think part of me didn't want to believe it for that reason.

But as

true, and as details came in,

I called the mayor, I called the chief of police, I called the sheriff, I called Veronica Esquire, a member of Congress,

trying to learn details.

And the more I learned, the worse it looked.

And we just, you know, actually, even before we got many of those details, made a decision we got to go back to El Paso.

And this is while it was still an active shooter situation, got on the phone with Jen, our campaign manager, said, hey, I hope we're all on the same page.

Does not make sense for us be in Las Vegas or to continue our trip in Nevada.

I just want to be home right now and I want to be with my family and I want to be with El Paso.

And then on the flight, you know, we're still trying to gather information.

This young man approaches me and introduces himself and says, I guess you're headed back to El Paso as well.

And says that he just found out that his mom has been shot and doesn't know her status

or her prospects,

just

got the bare details, left work, his boss booked him a flight,

and he's headed home to find out how she is and asks if I would join him when we get to El Paso.

And so that

was

a way for me to just, in very personal terms, understand what was happening.

Just to see this guy, Chris, is his name, just

his pain, his uncertainty,

his fear, but also

extraordinary strength.

I don't know that I would have been able to keep it together the way he was keeping it together.

And I think at that point, he may have known that his mother had been shot in the chest,

but not much else beyond that.

And how does that story end?

What happened with his mother?

So we land, we go to University Medical Center, we walk into his mother's intensive care unit.

She is awake.

We learn that she's been shot in the chest.

Both of her lungs have been perforated.

They're draining fluid.

You can see tubes kind of snaking out from under the sheets that are connected to her chest, taking all this fluid out.

She's got a mask on her face to breathe.

And she sees Chris, her son, and she's like breaks out in the biggest smile.

possible.

Her daughters are around her.

There's some other family members.

And then Chris says, hey, I want to introduce you to Beto.

And I got to tell you, I felt somewhat apprehensive.

This is a very personal,

very difficult,

got to just be literally physically painful moment for her to try to connect with people as she's fighting for her life.

And she

graciously smiled, hugged me, welcomed me, answered my questions, told me how she was feeling.

Seemed like she knew who you were.

Yeah, yeah, she she and that's why in part why Chris and Bai said, oh my god, my mom would love it if you came.

I said, are you sure?

I don't know that she's going to love anything right now.

And he said, no, I think it'll make her feel better to know that you're there and that you know that she's there.

And then, you know,

they tell me that

Chris's mother's mom, Chris's grandmother, was also shot, shot in the stomach.

Shot in the stomach, though,

tried to help others who were wounded in the aftermath of that shooting.

And so she finally, because of her wounds, just couldn't do that anymore.

And the next morning, I got to go visit her,

who she was every bit as strong as her daughter, Rosemary, which helped me understand where Rosemary got the strength to begin with.

And

grandmother, Rose,

Rosa, she...

Kind of cheered me up.

You know, I came in, you know, probably looking pretty grave and serious.

How are you doing?

And, you know what can we do to help and she was smiling and laughing and she said you know what you knocked on my door when you were running for congress in 2012 and uh i told you that you know sorry i'm voting for sylvester reyes um but that i appreciate that you showed up and this is just a this is the incumbent congressman democrat who you beat in the primary and it was it was a dogfight then so yeah absolutely and so she said and so we're laughing about that and she kind of cracks me up and she said but ever since then and since you won and the very fact that you came to my house you know i've been for you ever since and so you know here she was kind of bucking me up and and uh making me laugh and and encouraging me in what i'm doing right now but you know again so

gracious so kind so warm her sister also shot um

at that point still receiving urgent medical care, would succumb to her wounds, would not make it.

So that family, three people wounded, one dies, two will live with those wounds forever.

The grandmother in her early 80s

just brought home to me

just

how

painful and traumatic

that shooting was and yet how strong and resilient people are and especially those people that I met in the past.

And I could tell you story after story.

I just got off the phone with Jessica who was shot in both legs.

Her husband Memo

was shot in

the abdomen and in different parts of his body and he's still in intensive care right now, still coming through,

but they're coming through

and incredibly strong.

Did it get dark for you?

It seemed like there was

clearly frustration coming out of you, some anger, a lack of,

seemed like to you, recognition of what had happened.

There was that moment where like,

you said members of the media, what the fuck, right, where that came out.

But that came because that was after a day and a half of trying to process what was going on and reporters chasing you around because you are running for president and you got separated from your wife and you were trying to find your car and then you got this question that was like a

very weird question when you really think about it, like what could Donald Trump do to make this better?

And it should be, that was from

a foreign reporter who asked it.

But

how dark did it get?

I felt a

I don't know how to put it.

This moment where you are either going to give up and accept that this is what is happening.

It's just so dark, so fucked up, so inexplicable.

And that can be consuming.

And in the

immediate aftermath of the shooting, when it hit home, this is even before I got to El Paso, when I realized what had happened, I just,

it overwhelmed me, you know, emotionally and physically.

And it just,

at a really deep, fundamental level, made me wonder what I'm doing, or what I'd ever been doing, or what we are doing.

And this is probably not making sense, but I, but I,

how could this happen?

How could I have allowed this to happen

as a part of this country, as someone who held public office as

an El Pasoan?

And all of the

performance,

the ritual,

and the

I don't know, all the editing that goes into speaking when you're running for office

just really

evaporated or didn't seem as important or I didn't even really know that I cared at that point.

And, you know, know, we'd just been at this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful vigil

right outside of Las Americas

and

just heard Manuel Joaquin's father, Joaquin had been killed at Marjorie Stone and Douglas in Parkland.

Manuel who just finished this beautiful mural.

And who happened to be in town.

He was going to be there anyhow and happened to be there and spoke at this vigil and moved all of us.

In fact, there's a New York Times report in front of me who was just choking back tears and then finally just gave in and was just sobbing in front of me as she was listening to Manuel.

And, you know, I see all my friends, their family, my community.

I'm overwhelmed with pride at the same time that I'm overwhelmed with grief.

And it was this funny moment where I saw

three friends of mine.

I saw Cesar and

Carlos Guynar and I saw Joel Guzman and they were there as well and they was like, hey, Betho, but then there were all these people around me and members of press and I couldn't quite get to them and it felt I was like, I just want to be with them right now.

I just, like, I'm fucking fucked up too.

And they're fucked up and we want to be together right now.

And, but you've got this campaign team and we're trying to get to the next vigil and

we're doing that.

And I'm in between these two parked cars and I get boxed in on either side by members of the press.

And

then I can't, I don't see Amy.

And I'm like,

I just, and then I get asked the stupidest fucking question I've ever been asked,

and I just, I just lost it.

And I remember Cynthia from my team trying to restrain me.

Like, she was like, oh shit,

he's losing it.

And I was like, no, no, no, hold on a second.

Let me answer this question.

You do hear on the audio,

you can be heard saying, hold on a second.

Yeah,

that checks in.

And

then finally, we find Amy, we get to the van and we start driving to this vigil that we're going to on the east side

and

it just feels like

maybe this is over.

And I think I said that to Amy.

I was like, you know, I think I just really messed up there.

My anger got the best of me.

My emotions overcame me.

And I didn't say it this articulately.

I think I just said, look, I fucked up

and and nobody spoke in the van.

I didn't speak.

I was pissed.

I was pissed at myself.

I was

pissed at the world.

I was pissed at that question.

I was pissed that we were even having this conversation.

Like how in the how in the world could we be asking ourselves these questions as civilized, intelligent human beings who

report the news, make the news,

you know, report on the policy, make the policy.

Why are we even asking, is Donald Trump racist?

Did he have something to do with this?

Could he make it better?

And I think I was mostly mad at myself.

Why have I not been able to figure this out?

And

why have I not been able to make these connections more clear?

Why have we not been able to change this?

And

anyhow,

that was all in my mind.

Was there a point where you thought of not getting back into the race?

You took a pause from the trail?

I don't know that there was a

certainly not a conversation nor a conscious thinking through.

Well, if I don't do this, what will I do?

I think there was just, as I said, I think in the immediate aftermath, I just, you know,

what am I doing at all?

And I don't know, again, I don't know how to articulate this, but just

down in my bones or my essence made me question myself.

And so to some degree, yes, I was just, you know, I mean, and I just remember, I do remember having the conversation about going to the Iowa State Fair, and I was like, fuck no, uh-uh, no.

I can't pretend, I would be pretending, and to some degree,

you're performing when you're running for office, right?

You're never fully, wholly, truly yourself, warts and all.

You are on a stage, and you're projecting and you are acting in a way that you want people to read and inform their picture of you.

No one can help that.

And to quote Shakespeare or Getty Lee from Rush, I mean, we're all actors on that stage

and no one more so than perhaps somebody running for president.

But

I couldn't go do that.

And

so

that I knew.

I knew that should we,

when we continue this campaign, whatever point that is, I just can't go back to that.

I have to,

as much as I can, be as honest as I can.

I have to go do the things that I think are important.

And

in that same week

of El Paso, we learned about the raids in...

Mississippi and the two seem very connected to me in a very obvious way.

This

manner of terrorizing people and trying to terrify the country about immigrants and Hispanics and

people who are really the most vulnerable and the most defenseless in America.

And I said, I want to be there.

I want to go there.

And I want to go anywhere where people are being kept down or made to be afraid.

Okay, we're going to step off the bus briefly.

We'll have more with Beto Arourk in a moment.

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What did you tell your kids about what was going on?

There's a story you tell about,

I heard you say it last week in Charlottesville, being at the March for Our Lives and with your son, and you get to the end of it, and there's somebody, there are people with assault rifles, and you're trying to explain that juxtaposition.

But when you've got three kids,

they're growing up in El Paso.

They're seeing what's going on around them with the shooting and the aftermath of it.

What do you say to that?

Coming off of that March for Our Lives march organized by these amazing students who want to end gun violence, want to stop AR-15s and AK-47s from being used to hunt down kids in their classrooms, in the hallways of their schools.

We come back from that march, Henry, my eight-year-old's on my shoulders, and there are guys with AR-15s and AK-47s waiting at the end of the march, really there to intimidate us and

to show us,

you know, defiantly,

you're going to try to do something about these guns.

Here are these guns, and how do you feel with these guns in your face?

And Henry, who like every kid

is just honest and has a BS detector that's as finely tuned, as acute as anything on this planet, is like, dad, I don't get it.

We were just marching talking about guns, and then here are these guys with these guns that are the kind of guns we're talking about we don't want in our schools and our lives.

And I said, oh, don't worry about that.

These are very, you know, nice people, and they're just trying to make a point.

And, you know, under Texas law, they can do it, but don't worry about it.

Don't give them any attention.

And

what I should have said is, no,

you're right, Henry.

That is absolutely wrong.

And

there's nothing funny about that.

And you're right to point this out and be disturbed by it.

And you

should be angry and should make you a little bit afraid.

And that's a very natural reaction.

You know, at my town halls across Texas, because people would show up with guns, with AR-15s, to protest my presence, I'd very often give them the microphone.

And I think I probably took some foolish pride in doing that.

Like, look, I could get along with anyone, I bring everyone in the conversation.

And I think to some degree that's important, but I think not acknowledging that having those weapons

in our communities, in public life, at a town hall meeting, when you're trying to engage people democratically, by not calling out that blaring, obscene injustice and saying, look, we've got to get those weapons off of the streets, and in fact, we're going to have to buy them back.

You will no longer be able to possess these.

I think that was

a mistake on my part, something

I couldn't see past,

and frankly something that

I think I could only truly see with eyes wide open after El Paso.

I think it was just too convenient not to have to see that or acknowledge that.

I feel like the two kinds of responses that that could bring out is from people who don't agree with you and who are some of those who might have shown up with the guns to say, well, what are you saying?

You're not going to reach out and talk to us anymore.

And then the other response to it could be people who have criticized you from now,

who were more in favor of gun control measures, including some of the ones that you are in favor of, who say, Oh, it's very nice, Beto.

It took a shooting in your hometown to wake you up to this.

Like, nice show up late for the parties, right?

Like, absolutely, yeah.

How do you balance those two?

What do you say to each of those?

Yeah, just be honest.

You know, I mean,

I, of course,

want to continue to bring people in but but I don't I don't want to be blind to the fact that showing up at a public event in a state that ranks 50th in voter turnout because white men with guns have used them to terrorize and suppress voter turnout that just saying like shit everything's hunky-dory you showed up give you the mic and everything's fine you show up I'll give you the mic I'll engage with you but then I need to point out how wrong it is that you showed up with a fucking gun at at a town hall and you made people there feel afraid.

And I may not,

as

you know, a candidate, I may not as a white man.

I may not as someone who, if there's police protection, it's focused on me.

But other people will feel intimidated.

Kids will be a little bit more scared because they know that that is wrong.

So I think that's what I'm trying to say in that respect.

And just to maybe prove that point,

after releasing our gun violence plan,

I went to

a gun show in Arkansas to listen to people and to make very clear to them what my plan is, but then to listen to them and get their feedback on that.

And then to this other criticism,

I mean, I think

it's a valid point.

It's a legitimate point.

It's true.

Sometimes it takes

experiences in our lives to further open our eyes or to

help us to understand something that we couldn't fully comprehend or move us past a point that we were complacent in or satisfied in.

I mean, you know, I traveled the 254 counties of Texas talking about ending the sales of weapons of war.

I can't tell you how many people,

senators and members of Congress in D.C.

who wanted me to do very well, who said I was very stupid for saying that.

They're like, look, talk about universal background checks, that's a pretty bold move in Texas.

You do need

to talk about AR-15s and AK-47s.

It's just, it's a loser politically.

I don't think we can get it passed in the Senate anyhow.

So, why would you put yourself out there?

You're just going to alienate people.

But, you know,

and I knew that it was a good step.

I knew it was a step in the right direction.

I think

El Paso forced me to acknowledge that that step

was insufficient.

And so, you know,

maybe,

you know, maybe that's unique to me.

Maybe it's true as humans that we're not immune from how events in our lives and in our communities and

events that affect the people we love change our perspective or the distance we're willing to travel politically or through a policy in order to do the right thing.

But absolutely, I could not help but be changed by OPAS.

I don't know that I'm alone in that.

But yeah, I think it's a totally legitimate point.

You have this, and we've talked about this before, long before the shooting,

part of your idea of yourself as a candidate has been being this sort of vessel for hearing all these stories and bringing them forward and that when we hear more of the stories and it changes how we think of things, you've been talking about that more since the shooting.

How does that become an actual governing philosophy?

What does that mean?

If you were president, are you just going to spend all the time talking about all these unknown stories that we didn't have?

It's funny because,

and this is true for anybody running for any office, school board trustee to president, you

never lack for advice.

You know, Betzo, I think if you just did it this way, or I think what people people really want to hear is the following.

And

one piece of consistent advice that I've received from

people on my team, people who support me, people who love me, people who want me to do better is, look,

I think what you really need is just a really concise stump speech.

This is what you're going to do on healthcare.

This is what you're going to do on climate.

This is what you're going to do on immigration.

This is how we make sure the economy works for everyone.

This is how you fix our democracy so that every voice is heard.

You do that, you take some questions, and then you just move on.

It's got to be consistent, you got to say the same things, and you got to touch upon every single one of those issues.

You know,

a policy platform to

allow America to achieve its true greatness.

And all those things are important, and I talk about all of those things in any town hall that I do, but it

feels like acting,

it feels like I'm the anchor reading the script.

It feels

like I'm not making the connection to the other human beings who are in the room when I just repeat the same thing.

And I've tried doing that.

But when you say, like, after the

second shooting in Texas in August, mass shooting, the one last weekend, your response was, this is fucked up, right?

And I think everybody agrees on some level, this is fucked up, we shouldn't have this going on.

But then it becomes like, okay, so like you said that, how are you going to unfuck it, right?

What, yeah, like, why is it you?

Why is it you, right?

So, so, um, this is the labored point I was trying to get to, um, to the constructive critics

advice that I'd be more concise and have a quick stump and a quick answer to your questions.

When I

talk with people and bring other people's stories into it,

share with them Jessica and Memo story in El Paso or the mother of the 15-year-old girl who bled to death in front of her in the shooting in Odessa

not even

a week ago.

You see yourself in that other person.

It becomes personal for you.

I think you're moved beyond the policy prescription or the abstraction of numbers or the volume or the scale.

And I think to answer your question, that is the first necessary step to be able to then

move on the policy prescription that you presented.

For me, universal background checks, red flag laws, and in the sale of weapons of war, mandatory licensing, gun registry, and buybacks of AK-47s and AR-15s, millions of them on our street.

But if I don't connect you to the problem, if I don't go to Conway, Arkansas on the gun show, and then talk about going to Conway, Arkansas and the gun show to demonstrate that everyone can be part of the solution or at a minimum I'm going to listen to everyone, then I think it becomes much harder to get that done.

I think of LBJ talking about the classroom in Catulla, Texas where he first taught school and he said, you know, Those Mexican-American kids that I taught just were never going to have the chance that I had.

It had been institutionalized through the racism that was in our laws in this country.

That was a very personal story that you could tell drove him and he shared that personal story with the rest of the country and brought the country in.

Those young people in the Children's Crusade in Birmingham in 1963 getting arrested en masse, shot down by fire hoses that stripped the clothes off their backs.

We connected with that.

Those were human beings.

I saw those images.

It meant something to me.

So

I just think there's a real power in that

is the the precedent.

It's not the end.

It's the precedent to being able to get the policy done, to bring other people in, to form the consensus, and to inspire, I hope, the urgency to compel those members of Congress to do the right thing.

So I'm going to ask you a political question.

Asking presidential candidates, any politician, about sort of seeing where they are in the race is tricky.

But I was asking someone yesterday about what I should talk to you about, and someone said to me, look, I think that it's a tough question here, which is

when you look back in the arc of this campaign, it started off, you were a huge,

everybody, me included, was trying to figure out what you were going to do, whether you were going to run.

We ran to Iowa when you got to Iowa.

But things have fallen off politically since then, the poll numbers, the fundraising numbers.

So make the argument to someone that your campaign, and still we're five months from the Iowa caucuses and six months from Super Tuesday,

that your campaign is still a viable one and this can catch and turn around in the way that you're seeing things now.

I'm happy to have this as a conversation because

I just don't understand the question.

You know,

You've been with us, you've watched me at town halls.

You know that we've qualified not just for the next debate in September but the debate after that in October.

We're many months away from the first caucus or primary.

And so I think the question implies that polls should determine the viability of a candidate.

And if you don't score well in those polls, well then why not drop out?

And I just think if I were to rely

on that factor to determine my candidacy, if anyone were,

then what's the point of voting at all or appealing to voters in the first place?

Just allow the polls and the pollsters, the pundits and the coverage to determine your prospects and your fate as a candidate.

I don't think they're unimportant, obviously.

They have an influencing and compounding effect,

and

I'm well aware of that.

But you know, as long as there's still the ability to connect with people, to listen to them, to learn from them, to reflect their stories and their experiences, to share with them my vision for this country and what I think we can achieve,

then I'm going to be in this race.

I'm going to be excited to be in this race.

And I do think that

unique among the candidates,

to be from the place

that this president directs

so much fear and hatred and racism

U.S.-Mexico border, in particular the community of El Paso.

And

if I didn't believe that, if I didn't think it was so important, there's no way I'd be on this bus right now.

I'd be back in El Paso to watch Ulysses cross-country meet this evening and to

be at home and to sleep in my own bed and to cheer from the sidelines or do whatever I could in whatever capacity as a private citizen to help out.

But I'm in this for this country.

I'm in this because I believe I have something unique to offer

and I'm in this because I know that this is a defining moment for all of us.

And I want to be defined by what I've been able to contribute, the leadership that I want to be able to provide for America.

And I'm just grateful that I have the chance to do it.

So we're two hours into this bus ride.

Does it still seem like a good idea?

Yeah, this seems like a good idea.

Yeah, I'm plugging into New Haven here.

Totally.

Totally.

We're going to be able to take a little bit of a break.

Looks like some new passengers are going to get on.

But so far, so good.

Yeah.

Better work.

Thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

All right.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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Catch you next week.