SAN ANTONIO — Voters in Texas watched on a year ago as Democrat Beto O’Rourke came within an inch of taking Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s seat in the closest Senate race Texas has seen in decades.

Cindy Ochoa, 22, was anxiously watching, too — but she was preoccupied with another fight, counting election results county by county in the frantic campaign “war room” for her boss, Republican Rep. Will Hurd.

Elections have been tight in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District for years, but last year’s race came down to less than 1% of the vote — Hurd won by some 800 ballots.

Any relief from the Hurd and Cruz victories didn’t last long. Democrats took two congressional seats from Republicans and 47% of the total vote that night. Six Texas Republicans have since announced they are retiring and not running for reelection next year. That includes Hurd, the only black Republican in the House and a rare critic of President Donald Trump.

Ochoa and other young Republicans in Texas say Hurd’s close call in 2018 and the exodus of House Republicans is just the latest sign that politics in their state are shifting. Between a changing Texas and navigating the downstream effects of Trump’s volatile brand of politics in Washington, they’re not sure their party is prepared for what’s shaping up to be a pivotal moment.

“People just don’t want to talk about where the party is right now, and where it’s going, and that it’s very likely to be turned blue in 2020,” Ochoa, a district staffer in Hurd’s office, told BuzzFeed News in San Antonio. “We don’t have the greatest person leading our party, so it’s a tough spot for Republicans right now, but I think we need to get serious and stop being naive about what’s going on and actually face the facts.”

Republicans in Texas are facing an identity crisis, revealed in nearly two dozen conversations with BuzzFeed News in recent weeks. With a new generation rising up in Texas, the party is struggling to decide what it should look like in the years to come — torn between embracing Trump as closely as possible and adapting to broaden the party’s appeal to young and Latinx people.

Latinos in Texas are projected to overtake white Texans as the largest population group by 2022, according to the Texas state demographer, and other communities of color, too, continue to grow in the state. The significant upswing in support for O’Rourke compared to previous Democratic statewide candidates came primarily from suburban voters, particularly in the fast-growing and diversifying Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio suburbs — areas that have traditionally leaned Republican.

There was also a staggering increase in the number of young voters who cast a ballot in 2018 in Texas — more than 1 million in total, a 234% increase from the previous midterms in 2014.

And even though Trump won a majority of Texas’s vote in 2016 and beat Hillary Clinton by nine points, Trump is unpopular in the state. A Quinnipiac poll in September showed 45% of registered voters in Texas approved of Trump with 50% disapproving. And 48% of Texas voters said they would definitely not vote for Trump in 2020, compared to just 35% who said they definitely would.

This does not mean a Democratic wave in Texas is likely, especially as soon as 2020. Polling in the state in 2016 showed a narrower margin for Trump than he ultimately won, even in the days before the election. Recent polling from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune shows Trump still edging out Democrats Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders in a head-to-head race. Some Republican operatives are confident that the party is generally on solid ground in the state. They put the 2018 losses and close calls down to a “down ticket effect” driven by the momentum O’Rourke’s Senate campaign generated, which they don’t believe Democrats can sustain into 2020, when Trump will be on the ballot.

Republicans running down-ballot in Texas, though, will be in a tough spot next year, another veteran Republican strategist told BuzzFeed News. Those candidates, the strategist said, will likely need to swing further to the right during their primary campaigns to win over the party’s base, which has rallied around Trump after House Democrats announced the impeachment inquiry. In the general election, they’ll need to do the opposite, convincing moderates and conservatives in the suburbs who have been cooling on Trump that they’re not beholden to the president.

At the Texas Young Republicans Convention in Houston last month, many young Texans who represent the next generation of the party said they see this as a moment when the party needs to actively define itself outside of Trump’s messaging and agenda and embrace different voices if it’s going to hold off Democratic gains.

One of those possible new voices belongs to Rep. Dan Crenshaw — whose face was emblazoned on posters, tote bags, and even a cake at the young Republicans’ gathering. Crenshaw, who was first elected in 2018, is one of only two millennials among Texas’s 23-strong Republican delegation in the US House of Representatives.