Beto O’Rourke is an impressive guy.

No, really. It takes someone special to get hammered the way he’s been hammered in his last couple of campaigns and still even entertain the possibility of running for office.

He challenged Sen. Ted Cruz and got he butt handed to him, then ran for president and was never really a factor in that race at all. Now, it seems those who pushed him to run for president now want him to run for governor of Texas.

Speculation is mounting over whether former Democratic presidential candidate and gun control advocate Beto O’Rourke will run for governor of Texas, as the state looks set to allow people to carry handguns without a license.

Democrats are keen for O’Rourke to give an answer over whether he would challenge GOP Governor Greg Abbott in 2022.

Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa told the Associated Press that “impatience is not the word for it,” in referring to wanting confirmation of an O’Rourke gubernatorial run, “but anxious is.”

“I told him that I thought that we needed a strong candidate for governor and he certainly fit that mold, and that, in my opinion, if anybody could beat Abbott, he could beat him,” Hinojosa added.

Focusing the minds for Democrats was the move by the GOP-led Texas Senate on Monday to vote for a bill that would end the need for people to obtain a license to carry handguns if not prohibited by state or federal law.

In other words, they want to push an anti-gunner front and center as their answer to Abbott.

Yeah, that’s going to go over like a fart in church.

Look, Texas isn’t known for backing gun control candidates anyway, but sure. Put Beto O’Rourke up for a vote and see what happens. I mean, while Beto only lost by a few points to Cruz, Abbott won in 2018 by more than 13 points. He’s still popular after his handling of the pandemic, too.

Honestly, at this point, I’m starting to think that Texas Democrats don’t actually like Beto and just love seeing him get the crap kicked out of him. Why else would they keep urging him to run for things when they have to know he doesn’t have a shot in hell?

Or, perhaps the problem is that Democrats in the state have gone so deeply anti-gun that they can’t imagine the possibility that the rest of the voters in the state don’t agree. Remember that constitutional carry and the sanctuary state law passed both chambers of the legislature, which suggests that the majority of lawmakers have reason to believe their constituents back these laws.

Unless they’re horribly, horribly wrong, I just don’t see Beto O’Rourke as anything but a sacrificial lamb staked out so Abbott will have someone to destroy in 2022.

Of course, both can be true to some degree.

After all, it was just last year when the Bloomberg crowd thought they could flip Texas blue. That didn’t happen, of course, but that same mentality is clearly at work.

Either way, I’m sure Abbott would appreciate Beto as a challenger.