By Eric Bradner, CNN

Beto O'Rourke, the former congressman and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, on Monday launched his campaign to unseat Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022.

"I'm running for governor," he tweeted alongside a video announcement. "Together, we can push past the small and divisive politics that we see in Texas today -- and get back to the big, bold vision that used to define Texas. A Texas big enough for all of us."

In launching a campaign that many Democrats in Texas had identified as the party's only chance of denying Abbott a third term, O'Rourke -- an El Paso native and former punk rocker who launched an internet services company and served on the city council before being elected to Congress in 2011 -- is making his third run for office in four years.

His first statewide run in Texas, a long-shot Senate campaign against Republican Ted Cruz in 2018, electrified Democrats in a state where the party has rarely been competitive for a generation.

He rose from little-known congressman to fundraising dynamo, setting what at the time was the all-time record for money raised for a Senate bid. And he did it with a relatively bare-bones campaign structure, mostly driving himself to campaign events across the state with two staffers and live-streaming it all on Facebook.

O'Rourke's near-miss in the Senate race -- he finished less than 3 percentage points behind Cruz -- led to a short-lived presidential run the following year. By the time he dropped out of the race in October 2019, Democrats in Texas were already publicly musing about him as a candidate for governor in 2022.

This time, though, O'Rourke faces longer odds. In 2018, with then-President Donald Trump in the White House, the political environment was extremely favorable for Democrats. In 2022, amid the Biden presidency, it's Republicans who hope the midterm electorate will sweep them into power in Washington and statehouses.

In the two-minute video announcing his campaign, O'Rourke used the February failure of the Texas power grid during a severe winter storm to criticize Abbott's leadership, saying those without power and water were "abandoned by those that were elected to serve and look out for them."

"When the electricity grid failed and those in power failed all of us, it was the people of Texas who were willing to put their differences behind them and get to work doing the job at hand, which meant helping our fellow Texans get through that crisis," he said. "We did that out of a sense of duty and responsibility to one another. Now imagine if the governor of Texas felt that same way."

He said Abbott and Republicans in Austin have failed to tackle larger issues, including expanding Medicaid, legalizing marijuana, improving the electricity grid and improving schools.

"Instead, they're focusing on the kind of extremist policies around abortion or permitless carry or even in our schools that really only divide us and keep us apart and stop us from working together on the truly big things that we want to achieve for one another," he said. "It's a really small vision for a big state. But it doesn't have to be that way."

O'Rourke's support in Texas remains deep among Democratic loyalists, many of whom never took down their white-and-black "Beto" yard signs and bumper stickers. But with Democrats on defense across a much larger playing field, it's not clear he'll be able to tap into the same kind of national fundraising resources he did in 2018.

Still, O'Rourke has pointed himself toward a showdown with Abbott for months.