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O'Rourke Campaigns With His Wife as He Struggles With Women

Associated Press

   DES MOINES, IOWA - Beto O'Rourke stumbled with women from the start,
   featuring his wife sitting silently in his presidential campaign launch
   video and joking repeatedly about being a part-time parent.

   But with his campaign at risk of stalling, O'Rourke is attempting to
   improve his standing with female voters. His wife, Amy, will begin a
   rare string of campaign appearances on Friday in Iowa, speaking at
   joint events and making herself available to chat and take pictures
   with would-be supporters.

   Her presence will be an important test of whether Beto O'Rourke can
   reverse his less-than-favorable first impressions with women. It's an
   unusual position for a candidate whose appeal with women helped make
   him a national political phenomenon while nearly upsetting Texas Sen.
   Ted Cruz last fall. And it shows how much work has to be done to get
   his presidential bid back on track.

   "Any perceived entitlement by a young white male candidate did
   disqualify him with some young women activists," Judy Downs, executive
   director of the Des Moines-area Polk County Democratic Party, said of
   O'Rourke. Downs remains undecided in the party's 2020 primary but
   added, "In a field where we have 24 qualified candidates, that kind of
   small-level of gaffe can be enough to cut someone off the list."

   This Iowa swing comes as O'Rourke seeks to reintroduce himself to
   voters.

   He burst into the presidential race at a breakneck pace, bouncing
   around the country and prioritizing town hall crowds over national
   media appearances and building out a campaign infrastructure. When
   initial buzz fizzled, O'Rourke changed course, hiring dozens of new
   staffers, appearing more often on national TV and rolling out detailed
   proposals on immigration and other hot-button issues, attempting to
   shake perceptions he offered more style than substance.

   Aides insist that strategy shift doesn't extend to Amy O'Rourke, noting
   that she campaigned in New Hampshire last month. They say her stepping
   more into the presidential race spotlight is due to the logistics of
   their three children finishing the school year -- not an
   acknowledgement that his campaign needs her help.

   "When she can get on the road, she wants to get on the road," O'Rourke
   spokesman Chris Evans said. "She is as much of the core of the campaign
   as he is."

   But others in O'Rourke's orbit acknowledge there's ground to be made
   up.

   "He has this kind of persona of the preppy rich kid and it's easy to
   say, `He's just another privileged white guy and does America need that
   now?' I totally see that," said Tzatzil LeMair, who helped organize
   campaign events while O'Rourke was running for Senate in Texas and
   helms the "Latinos for Beto" page on Facebook. "Beto is like this
   product, but you have to try it. You have to get people to meet him.
   You need to `experience' Beto."

   Iowa state Sen. Clarie Celsi remains undecided in the primary but said
   O'Rourke's parenting quip was a "deal breaker for me," despite his
   quickly apologizing and abandoning it during the campaign's opening
   days.

   "You see young men with five kids running for office, and you're like,
   `Oh, I wonder how you're able to do that -- oh, you have a wife at
   home, great.' But women have to fight a lot harder to be able to have
   that much freedom," she said.

   Playing an active role in the campaign, Amy O'Rourke could smooth over
   such impressions. A 37-year-old teacher and school administrator, she
   advised on policy and strategy during the Senate race and is doing the
   same for the presidential bid, aides say. Even while not personally
   campaigning, she helps plan travel schedules, reviews major issue
   proposals and critiques things like designs on campaign shirts.

   "We're better when Amy talks. We're better when she's talking, be it in
   a video, on stage or in Beto's ear," said Kim Olson, a friend of the
   O'Rourkes who campaigned unsuccessfully for Texas agriculture
   commissioner last year and is now running for Congress in a district
   between Fort Worth and Dallas.

   Winning over women will be crucial to success in Iowa. Women made up a
   majority of Iowa voters who supported Democratic House candidates,
   according to AP VoteCast, a survey of voters from the 2018 midterms,
   and they typically turn out in stronger numbers than men for the
   caucuses, which begin the presidential nominating process.

   O'Rourke received 52 percent of the 2018 female vote in the nation's
   largest red state compared to 48 percent for Cruz, according to
   VoteCast, though Cruz won the race by 2.6 percentage points. O'Rourke's
   campaign also points to recent polling suggesting he could beat
   President Donald Trump in a head-to-head, 2020 matchup, fueled by
   strong favorability ratings with women.

   Even as he reboots his campaign, though, the new Beto O'Rourke at times
   looks like the old one. He recently livestreamed getting a haircut, a
   move he also made while running for Senate. But he joked this time
   about "cutting off some of this ear hair you get when you get older," a
   quip that women on social media quickly noted a female candidate
   wouldn't have been able to live down.

   Avery Blank, an adviser to the Washington-based Wilson Center's Women
   in Public Service Project, wrote a column about Amy's nonspeaking role
   in the O'Rourke launch video. She says the campaign missed a chance to
   leverage what she knew about her husband as a person -- but appearing
   together before voters can fix that.

   "Let Amy speak," Blank said. "Give her the mic."