WASHINGTON — The night he eked out a second term, Sen. Ted Cruz promised the 49 percent of Texans who voted against him that he'll be their senator, too.

On Thursday, Cruz put a sharper point on what he meant: He'll listen respectfully to opponents. But they shouldn't expect him to abandon his views or even give ground.

"There are going to be Texans that disagree with you, whatever way you vote," Cruz said. "The right way, I think, to approach politics is with an honest and candid conversation with the voters, laying out the principles that you believe so that voters know what to expect."

Cruz beat Rep. Beto O'Rourke by just 2.6 percentage points, 219,000 votes out of 8.3 million — the narrowest win for a Republican senator in Texas in decades. That night in Houston, Cruz declared to those who voted against him that "I am your senator as well."

This was not a theme of his campaign, in which he'd labeled O'Rourke a gun-grabbing socialist, warned of migrants "marching" toward the border, and vowed to continue his years-long fight to unravel Obamacare.

Democrats were skeptical that this hardliner on illegal immigration and the Second Amendment would back down on these and other divisive issues. Republicans who watched him engineer a government shutdown months into his first term wondered how long Cruz will keep his most aggressive instincts dormant, especially in the new era of divided government.

But the race was close enough to justify soul-searching and perhaps a new tack, some said.

At a post-election conference run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics and hosted at George Washington University near the White House, a student noted that nearly as many Texans voted for Cruz's opponent, and that O'Rourke had advocated policies on gun control, taxes and climate change much different from his.

"Will you take those into consideration?" the student asked.

"On election night, something I said then, and I believe, is it's my job to represent every Texan, all 28 million. Whether you voted for me or not, it's my job to represent you," Cruz responded. "Now, that doesn't mean that I could agree with every Texan on every issue at every time. That's impossible. At the end of the day on a vote, you've got to vote yes or no."

1 / 2Sen. Ted Cruz speaks at his election night victory party in Houston on Nov. 6, 2018.(Tamir Kalifa / New York Times) 2 / 2Rep. Beto O'Rourke and his wife, Amy, came out to thank supporters in El Paso after he conceded to Sen. Ted Cruz on Election Night.(Tom Fox / The Dallas Morning News)

Even so, Cruz said, he intends to fight for jobs for all Texans, whether or not they agree with his approach, which focuses on cutting taxes and regulation.

"We have elections to have a choice, but I will fight for jobs for every Texan," he said.

Sporting a short and slightly gray beard this week for the first time in his Senate tenure, Cruz also provided his take on the midterms, in which Republicans padded their Senate majority by two seats, and across the Capitol, lost 40 seats and the majority.

"In the House, I think the Democrats have unleashed some of the angriest voices on the left. ... We may even see impeachment," he said. "That anger and rage is going to have to burn out some more before we can enact major legislative reforms that we should be doing."

As for his own contest with O'Rourke, he noted that the challenger outspent him 3-to-1.

"We saw money flooding into the state of Texas. Over $80 million on the other side," Cruz said.

Among the consequences, he said: O'Rourke deployed 805 paid campaign staff. Cruz had only 18.

"That's what happens when you're being outspent 3-to-1. I would have loved to have had 800 paid campaign staffers, but we didn't have the money to do that," Cruz said. "That was in many ways I think a manifestation of the divided time we have, of the anger that is on the left. We're seeing — this is happening across the country but it happened especially in Texas — massive Democratic fundraising because people are ticked off. Anger is a powerful motivator for fundraising and also for turnout."

In part because of the money, he said, Democratic turnout in Texas skyrocketed from the last midterm elections in 2014.

Texans cast 4.6 million ballots in the 2014 race, when Sen. John Cornyn easily fended off Democrat David Alameel, a dentist and businessman. The challenger collected 1.6 million votes — 34 percent.

This month, O'Rourke attracted just over 4 million votes. Cruz got 4.2 million.

"That is a massive, it's a greater than 100 percent increase in turnout" among Democrats, Cruz said. "That was a threat I took seriously from the beginning. Indeed, I said across the state, I said, 'Look, the far left is going to crawl over broken glass to vote this November.'"

He called it a mirror image of the 2010 midterms, when "a lot of folks on the right were ticked off" about President Barack Obama, Obamacare and the new Dodd/Frank regulations on the financial sector.

"We saw a tidal wave election where Republicans took the House in a massive election, because that's where the anger was," Cruz said.