He sat across his dining table from me, slumping in his seat, withered by his run in the foothills and freshly showered for the day. The lights in the house were dim though it was mid-morning and his dog kept nuzzling my leg.

He was Beto O’Rourke. The dog was a black lab, Artemis. It was early October, his exit from the presidential race still a few weeks away. He had consented to an hour interview which turned into two. It was instructive about a man who would not be president in 2020, about our politics and the indelible mark he has left, not just in Texas, but on the country.

Three things stand out, weeks later as I look back at the end of O’Rourke’s first and perhaps only bid to be president.

First, despite his obvious ambition, O’Rourke struck me as too decent to be in electoral politics. I came away genuinely puzzled at the contradiction. Second, unsuprisingly O’Rourke displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and has a keen understanding of a crucial condition of our times: The American electorate is no longer merely partisan or predictably ideological. All of that has been profoundly and perhaps irreversibly fractured. And third, Beto O’Rourke is both an idealist and clear-eyed realist to the end.

Since O’Rourke’s exit from the race in early November, more than a few words have been spilled on his departure, mainly a mix of puzzlement over his fizzle and snark over his demise. I had written myself that O’Rourke would make his move in September; he did, seizing on banning and buying back assault weapons in the wake of the El Paso massacre. I also wrote that Democrats might be better off with him as vice presidential timber. They might still, actually. But more on that later.

Through all that time, I had never had a sit-down with O’Rourke, though not for lack of trying. Finally, his press secretary arranged one at his home in El Paso, summoning me through a side door where O’Rourke stood. Passing through the kitchen he offered me coffee; I asked for a little water. He brought it. The house is a historic mission-style home with a distinguished history; Pancho Villa met the Army chief of staff, Gen. Hugh Scott, here in 1915 to encourage American help for Mexico’s revolutionaries.

Slouched across from me, the practically gaunt O’Rourke seemed a somewhat exhausted revolutionary himself. It might’ve been the morning run. It might also have been the ceaseless grind of campaigning nearly non-stop for 2 ½ years, since he launched his run against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. His talk soon turned to reaching people Democrats might leave till later or simply write-off, independents and even Republicans.

“It’s important that we deal with them,” he said. “We want them.”

O’Rourke then cited the obvious example of 2018. Cruz bested O’Rourke by fewer than 200,000 votes while Republican Gov. Greg Abbott netted 1 million more than his Democratic opponent. Where did he find those 800,000 votes? Sure, Cruz was highly polarizing for many, but O’Rourke noted something else, something he has always been good at detecting: the under-served, largely forgotten underdog. Our shared hometown of El Paso is just such a place after all. And a lot of folks who fit that description voted for him, O’Rourke said.

He recalled a trip to Bland County Va., during the presidential campaign. It’s a rural, Republican spot in the Appalachians where a Democrat hasn’t won since 1910, when Woodrow Wilson was elected. O’Rourke said he was the first presidential candidate of either party to ever visit and he learned something that neither Democrats nor Republicans would likely have guessed: People there, dependent on coal mining, already know their economy badly needs to diversify. They aren’t clinging to coal or the mines; they are clinging to work, whatever they can make a living at. Yet Republicans take the county for granted, thinking their empty promises on coal are all they need. But what O’Rourke found out is that people there still wanted broadband internet — something so common elsewhere that nearly no individual nor small business can exist without it. He found the same in Erie County, Penn., another place Republicans take for granted.

“And Democrats have written it off,” he said.

El Paso and later his run for the Senate taught him something his presidential odyssey confirmed: There are lots of American underdogs in this robber baron era in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the politicians do the bidding, ignoring whole stretches of the country where people’s needs are wholly unmet and they are left both disaffected and up for grabs..

I tried to pin O’Rourke into pinning himself with a label. Was he a moderate doomed to run in a race where a more progressive candidate, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was pulling away?

“No,” he answered firmly. “The lanes and the spectrum we have defined for ourselves do not matter. People say, ‘I don’t care about Democrats and Republicans.’”

It’s clear now, of course, that O’Rourke won’t be ascending to the presidency. When we talked, O’Rourke was readying a new message: That he could win Texas, its 38 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, and as a result put Trump away for good not just in the popular vote but the electoral one, which keeps tripping up Democrats. That, of course, is not to be.

But the consequences of his race, both this year and in 2018 when he took on Cruz, will be with us for a long time yet. O’Rourke not only plowed a path for Texas Democrats, who upset Republicans in 2016 and 2018. He also has the knowledge and infrastructure, email lists, donors and local power brokers to influence Texas politics. He has vowed to support the Democratic nominee against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn — and that support still carries weight with Texas Democrats. As Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune has written: “Ignore Beto O’Rourke’s misbegotten presidential campaign for a moment and give the El Paso Democrat his due: He is the reason Texas Democrats are hopeful and Texas Republicans are worried.”

Candidates haven’t all come on board with O’Rourke’s position on gun buybacks or assault rifle bans — even though he was dead right on that issue. (Seventy percent of voters nationwide agree with him, even a majority of Republicans.) But in my interviews with candidates in Texas there is more than a trace of O’Rourke in them — especially in their not wanting to get pinned down in any ideological lane, other than being a Democrat.

As O’Rourke demonstrated, sometimes leaders have to actually lead. “The last thing you should do is retreat,” he said about assault weapons. “You’ve got to say tough things to Trump and you have to have the courage of your convictions.”

What animated him most in our conversation was talking about talking to gun owners, not at them. He was a realist, too, though he certainly did not get so real as to admit he had any doubts about the campaign back when we talked.

“There were die-hard, dog days in Iowa that made people hardened and even more committed,” he recounted. Yet he did acknowledge that the road ahead was steep. He needed to do exceptionally well in the next debate; he needed more money; and he needed to catch a spark in the polls. None of those things happened. He made, in my view, a principled and yet clear-eyed decision. It was simply right to quit when the path ahead was insurmountable. I think it preserves his political viability though he has since said that this was the last we’ll see of him in electoral politics.

When I got around to talking about a vice presidential nomination, he wasn’t ready to bite — and maybe he won’t ever be. But even now I would not rule it out as the Democratic Party tilts far to the left with Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders and the only moderates, till recently, were Joe Biden’s deteriorating campaign and that of an untested mayor, Pete Buttiegeg, who has never won more than 11,000 votes in his little hometown of South Bend, Ind.

O’Rourke and I kept talking, especially about history, even as an aide kept glancing at the time. He showed me around his roomy and lived-in house; I met his wife, Amy, and we talked about their cat. Artemis followed us around. And then the man who has roiled Texas politics for the foreseeable future walked me out to the street as we kept talking history. We shook hands and I left.

Later, sitting in my car, I kept wondering how such an obviously decent fellow would be in the indecent business of presidential politics, particularly in the era of Trump. And now we know the answer — because the decent man left the field and possibly politics altogether.

Parker, author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas is Transforming America, is a regular columnist for The Houston Chronicle and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, MSNBC and other outlets.