much of a threat from the GOP nominee in the heavily Democratic district this November.

He was an unconventional candidate for being such a serious threat to an establishment incumbent like the 67-year-old Reyes.

O’Rourke has supported the idea of legalizing marijuana as a way of making a dent in the drug war being waged directly across the border from El Paso in violent Ciudad Juarez. O’Rourke, however, said during his campaign that he would not press for legalization in Congress because it wasn’t a priority to this district.

He’s also a former guitarist in an El Paso rock band that included members who now play in the Grammy Award-winning act The Mars Volta. He was arrested in the 1990s on charges of burglary and drunk driving, and has called hispublic service a way for atoning for those mistakes. O’Rourke said the burglary arrest happened after he tripped an alarm while jumping a fence at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1995 but prosecutors declined the case. As for the drunken driving arrest, he ays he received deferred adjudication 15 years ago and was not convicted but calls the incident “a mistake.”

But O’Rourke also comes from a family with deep political roots. His father, Pat O’Rourke, was a former El Paso County judge who was a popular longtime Democrat before switching parties in 1996, when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Republican.

A super PAC called the Campaign for Primary Accountability spent $240,000 on ads that linked Reyes to a controversial contract awarded to a company