Updated Tuesday at 9 a.m. with Club for Growth attack ad.

WASHINGTON — With Beto O'Rourke fighting Ted Cruz to a draw in polls and topping him in cash, and his party itching to nab a Senate seat and end their drought in Texas, major GOP players are grappling with a possibility they haven't faced in decades.

They may soon need to divert serious cash to Texas to protect their franchise there. For some, that would mean aiding a senator they don't much care for.

Cruz has been warning Republicans about complacency for months, sounding the alarm that Democrats are unified and eager to use the midterms to punish President Donald Trump. He recently asked Senate colleagues — including many he antagonized during his first term — to help replenish his coffers.

With two months to go, allies are poised to pump millions into an ad blitz aimed at putting the brakes on O'Rourke's momentum, and they're standing by to spend even more heavily in the final two months.

"Democrat enthusiasm is at an 11. It's unclear what Republican turnout and enthusiasm will look like," said Jason Johnson, a senior strategist on the Cruz presidential campaign who now runs Texans Are, a pro-Cruz super PAC. "The No. 1 issue that I've run into is potential supporters trying to wrap their head around the reality that this is a real race."

"It's a real race," he said.

Roughly $315 million has poured into Senate and House races nationwide this year from super PACs and other outside groups. Hardly any of that has come into Texas so far — just $341,000 as of last week, a blip in one of the nation's most expensive Senate races.

That's about to change.

Club for Growth Action lobbed the opening volley on Tuesday -- an ad denouncing "Beto the bully" for using his El Paso City Council seat to facilitate redevelopment that entailed bulldozing homes.

The group is putting $200,000 into the spot, starting in San Antonio and adding the Dallas and Houston markets as part of it's "seven figure" assault on O'Rourke depicting him as "crooked."

"As liberals celebrate Beto O'Rourke as their rising star cast as a 'man of the people,' the truth couldn't be more different," said Club for Growth president David McIntosh. "O'Rourke is a modern-day Elmer Gantry who has a long record of using government to enrich his family and his friends."

Republicans have gotten a series of wake-up calls in recent weeks.

O'Rourke's midyear fundraising tally showed that he'd nearly caught up with the senator. Then came a flurry of polls showing the race was a dead heat or close to it.

A Texas Lyceum poll showed a statistical dead heat, with Cruz ahead by 41 percent to 39 percent. A Quinnipiac University Poll released the same day, Aug. 1, showed Cruz leading 49 percent to 43 percent — better, but still about half the size of his lead two months earlier in the same poll.

Not only had the race tightened; those were the closest snapshots of the contest to date.

Independent handicappers still give Cruz the edge. But Texas is on their list of Senate battlegrounds. By contrast, Gov. Greg Abbott's lead has kept fairly steady at 20 points, a more typical cushion for Texas Republicans running statewide.

On the fundraising side, O'Rourke has proved formidable, especially for a challenger.

Technically, Cruz has raised $3 million more for the 2018 race. But that's counting six years of donations since he won the seat in November 2012.

In the 15 months since he'd jumped into the race, O'Rourke outraised Cruz $23.1 million to $12.9 million. Midyear reports released in early July showed the challenger had raised $10.4 million in the second quarter of 2018 — more than twice as much as Cruz

"There's no question that whenever he posted his big numbers, that started to get the attention of a lot of folks," Johnson said.

Donors he'd courted months ago have been calling more frequently in recent days, offering to help, he said.

The sense of unease and urgency is growing in a constellation of groups that Cruz may need.

"If he's in trouble, we have to be there for him," said McIntosh, president of Club for Growth and head of its super PAC.

Cruz is one of five Senate candidates endorsed by the conservative advocacy group. McIntosh said last week that the super PAC plans to pour at least a seven-figure sum into ads portraying O'Rourke as part of the Washington establishment.

Club for Growth spent $5.6 million helping Cruz win in 2012, and put nearly $422,000 into his failed presidential bid. Donors have been checking in with McIntosh on Cruz's race for months, and offering to step up their support if necessary.

The time has come, said McIntosh, adding, "Ted Cruz has been a champion for the issues that are important to us, and he is a symbol of what we have been fighting for for 20 years."

Texans Are, the pro-Cruz super PAC run by Johnson, has raised $3.4 million and is about to start spending. The group has reserved $750,000 worth of TV time for September. The first volley will start airing after Labor Day.

"We'll go up [on] Tuesday and we won't go down before the election," said Johnson.

He was coy about the message. Super PACs can't coordinate with candidates. But it's sure to track Cruz's own push to scuff up what Johnson called O'Rourke's "positive, rosy, feel-good" image.

"You've got this guy who's presented himself as this aspirational nonpolitical figure, while the reality is that there's nothing further from the truth," Johnson said. "So far he's been able to get away with that. His days are numbered in that regard."

Strange bedfellows

On Friday, Trump announced a "major rally" with Cruz in October in the biggest stadium he can find. O'Rourke called it a sign that Republicans are worried — and it's not the only strange bedfellows pairing the race has forged.

In the 2016 presidential race, Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar." Now he's eagerly embracing help from the man who'd tarred him as "Lyin' Ted."

By the time the rally comes around, Cruz may be basking in aid from other unlikely corners, including the party's so-called establishment.

"You're seeing a critical mass among Cruz supporters and others who simply don't want to see a radical liberal elected statewide in Texas," said Johnson.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC founded by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has placed Cruz on a "watch list" and vowed to spend in Texas if needed.

The fund had more than $45 million on hand in its latest federal filing, having already spent $12.1 million on 11 Senate races and 2 House races since the start of 2017.

Cruz may also need help from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party's campaign arm, controlled by McConnell and the leadership team. Cruz has made goodwill deposits of $250,000 in September 2014, and $200,000 two years later, largesse that showed he was a team player despite any friction with McConnell. This fall, he may seek some payback.

If Texas is really teetering, it may not be a hard sell, despite a history of friction between Cruz and the party's leader.

The Texan infuriated nearly all of his GOP colleagues when he engineered a 16-day government shutdown in fall 2013 over demands to defund Obamacare, a futile quest given that President Barack Obama was sure to veto any such measure.

Cruz framed his 2016 White House bid as a crusade against the Washington "cartel," of which McConnell was a key player. In his campaign autobiography, A Time for Truth, he singled out McConnell repeatedly for merely posturing as a conservative, and for fudging the truth. He even took to the Senate floor to explicitly call McConnell a liar.

"We think Senator Cruz is going to be fine, but if he needs reinforcements, we'll be there," said Chris Pack, spokesman for the Senate Leadership Fund.

Army of small donors

The challenger's blistering fundraising reflects, in part, the pent-up demand among Democrats for a breakthrough in Texas after two decades of defeat. Through message, charisma and timing, O'Rourke has emerged as a vessel for those hopes and dreams.

The super PACs teed up to aid Cruz could help neutralize that edge but it's unlikely they can swamp the Democrat because — like Cruz and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 — O'Rourke's fundraising prowess relies on an army of small donors.

In the first half of this year, he took in 377,688 individual contributions, aides said. The average was only about $32. That's a huge list of supporters who haven't come close to the $2,700 cap.

That's a spigot he can continue to tap.

O'Rourke has not taken donations from political action committees, though some have collected individual donations and passed those along. He has far fewer super PACs — entities created after a 2010 Supreme Court ruling opened the door to unlimited independent spending — lined up to help him so far.

One is called the FTC PAC — for "fire Ted Cruz." It has raised about $217,000. Co-founder Marc Stanley, a Dallas lawyer and major Democratic donor, said the group plans to buy digital advertising attacking Cruz.

"I just don't know if any other campaign was going to focus on how disingenuous and untrustworthy Ted Cruz is," he said.

The group's website, FTedCruz.com, calls it "disgraceful" that Cruz failed to denounce Trump after his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, implicated the president in a scheme to skirt campaign laws while buying the silence of a porn actress with whom he'd allegedly had an affair.

"Can you imagine what Cruz would have done if this was Barack Obama's attorney? He would have chased down every TV camera in America demanding an impeachment," the group says.

O'Rourke himself hasn't issued such a pointed attack.

But that's the nature of outside spending. Such groups can amplify campaign themes or distract from them and either way, the candidates, by law, have no input.

One theme that Cruz and his allies agree on is that enthusiasm is mostly on the other side.

"They may disagree on different issues but they all agree they hate Trump and that's a reason to show up," Cruz said during a campaign stop in Lubbock on Wednesday. "The danger on the Republican side of issues is that the economy is booming and people are doing well and it's easier to be distracted, to be focused on your job or your family, or your kids, or just something else."

"The numbers are with us," he said. "The vast majority of Texans are conservatives, common sense conservatives. But the urgency, much of the urgency is on the other side and that's dangerous."

Democrats and some pundits have foretold a looming shift away from Republican control in Texas pretty much every two years for the last two decades. Now that the threat is genuine, it's not sinking in fast enough to quell concerns by Cruz allies.

"With Republicans, grassroots Republicans and donors, there's been a bit of a boy cried wolf scenario," Johnson said. "It's been really hard until recently for people to believe there's a legitimate chance that a Democrat can win in Texas."