For the final two weeks of the campaign, O’Rourke has settled on what he called “in some ways the least sophisticated strategy you’ve ever seen,” which is, “literally just showing up everywhere all the time, and never discriminating based on party or any other difference.” Since he started running for the Senate, O’Rourke has made personal appearances in each of the two hundred and fifty-four counties in Texas, including the reddest and the bluest ones. During the past eleven days of early voting, he has been making as many as eight or nine stops a day within a single metropolitan area. Most of these are at gatherings of a hundred to two hundred people outside of early-voting centers, where his supporters are encouraged to “Go to the polls with Beto!” This strategy has put him face-to-face with more than a thousand people every twenty-four hours, plus appearances before larger crowds at rallies on many evenings. At every stop, he lets as many supporters as time allows take photographs with him and encourages them to share the photographs on social media. He live-streams his drives between stops, making a reality show of the highways and gas stations of Texas that people have watched by the thousands. His campaign has encouraged supporters to open pop-up offices in homes, offices, restaurants, and bars, from which volunteers organize block walks and phone banks. The campaign claims that volunteers have knocked on a million doors and made 8.7 million phone calls since October 5th.

Ted Cruz, the incumbent in the Senate race, is not doing all this, but he doesn’t need to. O’Rourke may be a nationally viable candidate; he may have raised thirty-eight million dollars, most of them small donations, in the last quarter of the campaign; and he may have run one of the largest grassroots campaigns that Texas has ever seen, refusing all corporate political-action campaign donations. But this is still Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. The last time a Democrat won any statewide office was 1994. The most recent poll showed O’Rourke down by six points. And Cruz has another force on his side: Donald Trump.

On the same Monday that O’Rourke campaigned in Houston, the President held a rally there. Trump supporters started lining up downtown more than twenty-four hours before the event. According to organizers, a hundred thousand people had signed up to attend the rally, at the Toyota Center, which has a capacity of nineteen thousand. By midday on Monday, the line to enter stretched all the way to an Embassy Suites, several blocks away. A propeller plane flew over Houston’s towers of glass and a leaden sky, towing a banner that had the name “Beto” in a circle with a line through it and the words: “BECAUSE SOCIALISM SUX!”

Judging merely by appearance, Cruz was an afterthought for the crowd. Amid the thousands of red MAGA hats, I saw exactly one Cruz sign. Cruz, Trump’s rival in the 2016 Presidential primary, whose father Trump once claimed had been involved in the Kennedy assassination and whose wife he insulted, was now reduced to Trump’s Texas proxy. Venders sold MAGA hats and banners of Trump standing in his suit and tie on an amphibious vehicle as it plowed through waves, an AR-15 in one hand and an American flag billowing behind him, lit from above by the rockets’ red glare and surrounded by fluttering hundred-dollar bills.

The gathered crowd waited patiently, in lawn chairs, with coolers. The fashion choices, which seemed to have cohered since the 2016 election, featured a lot of red, white, and blue. They wore jeans with rhinestones on the pockets, Under Armour, or hunting camouflage. Many of the men had beards or long hair. Women wore pink MAGA hats and T-shirts that read “Adorable Deplorable” or “Trump Girl,” with a flag-patterned high heel. Several people wore American flag suits. Many had cross tattoos and cross necklaces. They wore T-shirts referring to right-wing Internet memes: Pepe the Frog, Wojak, and QAnon. They wore Infowars and “CNN Sucks” T-shirts. The crowd was overwhelmingly, though not entirely, white, and everyone I spoke with voiced the same concern: immigrants.