“Beto O’Rourke plans to present himself to the country as a changed candidate on Thursday, with his presidential campaign recast as a moral crusade against President Trump in the aftermath of a mass shooting in El Paso, his hometown,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. O’Rourke, who represented the city in Congress until the start of this year, said he would abandon the relatively traditional approach he has so far taken — with limited success — and largely detach his travel from a primary calendar that tethers most candidates to a handful of early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire.”

“Instead, Mr. O’Rourke said he would now plan his political activities around confronting Mr. Trump in direct and personal terms, and highlighting what Mr. O’Rourke views as the injustices of Mr. Trump’s administration. He intends to seek out immigrant-rich towns to campaign in, and to make gun control a central issue.”

“Beto O’Rourke will formally rejoin the presidential race on Thursday, resuming a campaign that has been suspended for nearly two weeks with what he promises will be a ‘major address to the nation’ from his hometown of El Paso, Texas, where a mass shooting killed 22 people,” the AP reports.

Politico: “For more than a week since the shooting, O’Rourke served as a passionate voice for his border city and for immigrants more generally, with his wrenching criticism of President Donald Trump. And if O’Rourke had wanted to run for Senate, this would have been the time to make the jump — summoned home by tragedy, not limping back amid a sputtering campaign.”

“But O’Rourke has never expressed interest in running for Senate this year, after his near-miss loss to Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. The El Paso massacre only redoubled his resolve to campaign against Trump, according to sources close to his campaign, while persistent calls for him to run for Senate exasperated his supporters.”

President Trump tweeted late Tuesday night questioning the authenticity of Beto O’Rourke’s name and telling the former Texas congressman to “be quiet.”

Said Trump: “Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him, and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement – & be quiet!”

O’Rourke responds: “22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism. El Paso will not be quiet and neither will I.”

Washington Post: “He’s collecting millions of dollars in campaign donations, has hired experienced Democratic operatives and is paying his field organizers eye-popping wages, probably the highest in the primary campaign. O’Rourke has quickly built a large operation in Iowa, with 11 offices scattered throughout the state, and he welcomed crowds of at least 100 during his last two town halls there.”

“But those images belie the struggles he’s facing: spending money more quickly than he is raising it, polling nationally between 1 percent and 3 percent in the past month, and trying to convince voters he has the experience and vision to be president. After a first debate appearance that raised alarm among his major donors, there is ever-increasing pressure on O’Rourke to shine at Tuesday’s debate and remind Democrats why so many thought he could be a front-runner just a few months ago.”

The Atlantic: Searching for Beto.

Caught on video: With his flight delayed out of Sioux City, Iowa, Beto O’Rourke challenged his presidential campaign staff to a push up competition.

Said O’Rourke: “We gotta make use of this time.”

“Beto O’Rourke has gone from phenom to front-runner to flailing in five months, and so he came home to this dusty border town last week to regroup, prepare for the next debate, and try to recast himself as the underdog in a Democratic presidential race in which many have already counted him out,” NBC News reports.

“O’Rourke says that he doesn’t plan to change his freewheeling style much, but that a top priority now is to raise the money to keep building his campaign organization so it will be ready to rebound.”

Said O’Rourke: “If you remember in Texas, it didn’t happen overnight. It was a really long process that was against the odds, very often counted down and out.”

“Beto O’Rourke will report raising about $3.6 million from April through June, a startlingly small sum for a candidate whose presidential campaign once appeared ascendant and who raised massive amounts of money for his 2018 Senate race,” Politico reports.

Politico: “He got battered in his first presidential debate. His poll numbers have sunk to low single digits. Glowing press coverage has given way to questions about how long he can hang on. Beto O’Rourke’s candidacy today is almost an inversion of what it was at the start of his campaign less than four months ago.”

Matthew Yglesias: “But while Beto’s campaign seemed almost painfully meta — he’s the guy who party professionals thought seemed like the kind of guy who voters would like — he’s running on a substantive agenda that in some ways comes the closest to representing the polar opposite of Trumpism.”

“He’s a NAFTA supporter and a longtime resident of a majority-Latinx border city who’s enthusiastic about immigration. His immigration platform commits him to going further than Trump or Obama in aggressively deploying executive power — protecting not only Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients but also their parents from deportation. He also calls for legislation that would dramatically expand a number of categories of immigration, from refugees to family unification to high-skilled workers.”

“But it’s really O’Rourke’s fulsome embrace of a politics of cosmopolitanism that makes him stand out from the rest of the field. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren try to out-protectionist Trump and Joe Biden casts himself as an electability champion ready to win back the Rust Belt, Beto is the candidate of a hypothetical future Democratic Party that wins elections in Texas, Georgia, and Arizona powered by voters in the fast-growing suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix.”

“Beto O’Rourke established a dominant presence on social media during his nail-biting run for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas last year. So far, though, his 2020 presidential campaign has lagged behind major Democratic rivals in Facebook ad spending,” CNBC reports.

“Political strategists said this could be a sign that O’Rourke is focusing more on the ground game than digital tactics because of potential trouble attracting donors – even after his campaign against GOP Sen. Ted Cruz grew into a fundraising juggernaut.”

“Beto O’Rourke issued an ambitious plan to revamp the U.S. voting system by cracking down on voter suppression and getting an additional 35 million people to the ballot box by the 2024 elections,” Reuters reports.

“A key part of O’Rourke’s plan would be to set term limits for politicians, to give young people incentive to vote for new and fresher candidates. He proposes limiting membership of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to 12 years, and requiring Supreme Court justices – currently appointed for life – to step down after 18 years.”

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) “spoke on the phone with Hillary Clinton” last week, the Daily Beast reports.

“It was the first time the two had spoken about the 2020 campaign.”

The documentary Running With Beto will premiere tonight on HBO.

Daily Beast: “In the doc, Beto comes off as charismatic yet controlling—its most revealing moments being ones where he is seen dressing down his clearly overworked staff for their perceived lack of preparedness. The person on the receiving end of most of the scoldings is Cynthia Cano, his road manager. At several tense points in the film, Cano is criticized by Beto—in front of her campaign colleagues—for not leaving enough time in his schedule for media interviews, having him be late to campaign events, and not adequately prepping him for those events. (Cano views Beto’s penchant for going long in his speeches and wanting to speak with every single constituent and/or person with a microphone as the reason for his constant tardiness and lack of prep time, which appears to be the more likely culprit.)”

“After Beto was narrowly defeated by Cruz, he delivered a concession speech in front of thousands of supporters in his backyard of El Paso, where he exclaimed, ‘I’m so fucking proud of you guys.’ Just prior to that, in the backstage area of the venue, Modigliani’s cameras caught Beto and his top staffers (as well as his teary-eyed wife, Amy) in an intimate huddle, where the Senate candidate apologized to them for being ‘a giant asshole.'”

“In the days leading up to Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, a top Republican opposition research firm was brimming with requests from political reporters angling for dirt,” the Daily Beast reports.

“America Rising, a political action committee that shared details of its internal inquiries with The Daily Beast, said the asks came from a dozen or more reporters and ranged from broad questions to more tailored points of interest. But 10 weeks after O’Rourke’s official launch, those requests are virtually nonexistent.”

Said one staffer: “The requests for oppo on him have completely died off.”