AUSTIN, Texas — With an unassuming air and a black Toyota Tundra he says was “the first new vehicle I’ve ever purchased,” Beto O’Rourke…
AUSTIN, Texas — With an unassuming air and a black Toyota Tundra he says was “the first new vehicle I’ve ever purchased,” Beto O’Rourke has campaigned thousands of miles across Texas and risen to national prominence on a workaday image that aligns with his politics, but not his personal finances.
The son of a onetime Republican county judge and a longtime furniture store owner, the Democratic congressman from El Paso married into the family of one of his hometown’s most prominent developers and has assembled real estate investments worth millions.
Congress is rife with rich people, but O’Rourke had a 2015 net worth of about $9 million, ranking 51st out of 435 House members, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more-than double the $3.8 million worth of his Republican opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, who ranked 41st of 100 senators. O’Rourke and his family live in a hilltop, Hacienda-style, 4,700 square-foot home in El Paso, while Cruz, his wife and daughters have a well-appointed condo in an elegant corner of Houston.
“I was very fortunate and I recognize that a lot of people don’t have that same fortune,” O’ Rourke told The Associated Press after a community college event in Austin, where he wore his usual campaign outfit of simple button-down shirt and slacks.
O’Rourke’s rise from punk rocker to star political underdog has become well known as he’s mounted a surprisingly competitive Senate bid for a Democrat in the country’s largest reliably red state. But the more privileged parts of his life don’t fit as easily into his colorful campaign story and are rarely mentioned.
Affluence is where the similarities between the candidates ends.
O’Rourke champions single-payer health care, raising the minimum wage, reducing student debt and relaxing immigration policies, while Cruz is on the opposite side of those issues.
A graduate of a posh Virginia boarding school, O’Rourke and his friend Cedric Bixler-Zavala helped form Foss, an El Paso punk group that toured the country in a station wagon dubbed the “Lumber Wagon.” O’Rourke later quit to get a degree in English literature at Columbia University, thanks, he says, to loans, grants and work-study jobs.
