Becky Bond, a key aide to Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign who helped run his unsuccessful Senate bid against Ted Cruz, has left the campaign BuzzFeed has confirmed.

Bond's deputy, Zack Malitz, also departed. 

Bond is a hard left activist from San Francisco who worked for Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. But she lacked the experience to run a national campaign and O'Rourke, looking to professionalize his operation, brought in a seasoned pro.

The departures come as O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman, has sought to professionalize a campaign operation that was, in its earliest days, small and freewheeling. O’Rourke announced his run for the presidency less than a month ago.

In March, he recruited Jen O’Malley Dillon, a veteran operative who served in top leadership roles for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, to serve as his campaign manager.

In Washington, O’Malley Dillon’s hiring was taken as a sign that O’Rourke’s once-skeletal campaign was taking on a more professional cast, moving past the relatively small team that had helped propel him to his narrow loss in the Texas Senate race. Democratic strategists see O’Malley Dillon as an organized and even-handed counterbalance to O’Rourke, who is known for his spontaneity and rejection of traditional campaign tactics, like the use of consultants and pollsters.

Chris Evans, a spokesman for O’Rourke, did not address questions about the reasons for the departures or whether Bond and Malitz left voluntarily.

Evans said that Bond and Malitz, who worked for O’Rourke during the 2018 Senate race, only served as employees the campaign in a “temporary” one-month basis. Democratic operatives who have worked with Bond this year say she considered herself a central part of O’Rourke’s 2020 operation.

So much for the "temporary employee" narrative. So there is definitely something else going on that caused Bond to leave. O'Rourke is the former media golden boy, being supplanted by South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg as an object of worship by the press. Bond's radicalism may have proved to be too much for O'Rourke who is tacking to the middle after his announcement.

As a presidential candidate, O’Rourke has tacked more towards the center of the party, saying early in his campaign that he was “no longer sure” that the single-payer Medicare for All bill written by Sanders, which he said he supported in his Senate race, was “the fastest way” to achieve universal health care. He's instead backed a plan that gives people the option to buy into Medicare.

Beto is on the way down and is casting about for ways to jump start his campaign again. Mayor Pete has sucked most of the oxygen out of the race - at least to this point - and the O'Rourke campaign is suffering because of it. Perhaps a professional at the top of the campaign can reinvigorate the troops and get Beto back on track.