Beto O'Rourke to hold first three large rallies Saturday in Texas

The former Texas congressman, who spent the better part of two weeks on a listening tour through early-voting states, is likely to draw crowds of thousands to speeches in his hometown of El Paso on Saturday morning, followed by Houston in the evening and Austin at night.

The El Paso event -- at noon Eastern time -- is being accompanied by what his campaign says are more than 1,000 watch parties across the United States.

The rallies and watch parties could amount to a show of force from O'Rourke, who entered the presidential race with the ambition to build what he has several times said will become "the largest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen" and whose campaign says it raised $6.1 million on his first day in the race, outpacing his competitors.

"This is a critical moment that will launch the most ambitious effort of this campaign: a massive, grassroots movement to reach every voter," O'Rourke's campaign said in an email this week to supporters, urging them to attend a watch party and make sure they don't "have any regrets about whether you were part of this, from the beginning."

It's also an opportunity for O'Rourke to offer something he hasn't yet had: a signature idea or policy proposal to drive a campaign that has so far relied on his personality and post-partisan vision -- without a clear explanation of how he'd like to get there.

O'Rourke launched his presidential campaign more than two weeks ago with the same go-everywhere, do-everything approach he'd had when he visited all 254 counties in Texas during his failed 2018 bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. His presidential campaign said in an email to supporters that O'Rourke "personally drove 2,366 miles and held 56 events where he answered 357 questions from voters."

But from the outset, there were signs this was already different.

The favorable magazine profiles that propelled his Senate run had turned into a Vanity Fair cover story on the eve of his run featuring an Annie Leibovitz photo and the words on the cover that led some female Democratic activists and operatives to see O'Rourke as privileged: "I'm just born to be in it."

O'Rourke drove his rental minivan through Iowa, then the other early-voting states, with two aides who had been by his side in Texas -- Cynthia Cano, his road manager who facilitates the question-and-answer portions of his town halls, and Chris Evans, his spokesman who holds the cell phone and streams everything live on O'Rourke's Facebook page -- in tow.

But unlike Texas, experienced advance staffers were also at events. Norm Sterzenbach, a veteran Iowa political operative, had joined the van for its first few days on the road. Soon after, Jen O'Malley Dillon, the deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election and one of the most savvy data experts in Democratic politics, signed on as campaign manager to run the show from El Paso.

Some of O'Rourke's trademark moves remained: weaving between English and Spanish, taking crowd questions at every event and sometimes climbing onto counters, tables and chairs to be seen in crowds of hundreds that have spilled out of the small venues his campaign booked for its early events.

Polls have shown O'Rourke, who was first elected to Congress in 2012 after ousting a Democratic incumbent in a primary, among the top Democratic contenders.

A Quinnipiac University survey released Thursday showed him in third place with 12% support from Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. That trailed former Vice President Joe Biden's 29% and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' 19%, but put O'Rourke ahead of California Sen. Kamala Harris's 8%.

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