For his 2020 Presidential campaign, Beto O’Rourke has repurposed the logo from his Senate campaign, which ended a little less than five months ago. It’s an image of his nickname, in white-on-black sans-serif font, stark, with three black stripes on either side, to hint at the national flag. Close observers have noted its resemblance to the spicy-ketchup labels at Whataburger, the local fast-food franchise where Beto ate so much during his Senate campaign that people started showing up to his rallies with offerings of fresh fruit. Something about its kerning recalls the Old West, but the font could be on the menu of a subway-tiled nouveau-barbecue joint in Austin or the business card of a tech entrepreneur at South by Southwest. When I look at it, I think of things that you sometimes see in the sleek and gaudy cities of Texas, like a group of bachelorettes eating chips and salsa out of a giant Martini glass on a patio, warmed by the glow of outdoor space heaters. The logo speaks of strings of lights over picnic tables in dirt yards, of migas, scrambled eggs with flour tortillas, of a bar with sawdust on the floor and a mechanical bull. It’s the black of crude oil and the black of a photovoltaic cell and the black of the column of smoke from the Intercontinental Terminals chemical fire that spewed benzene into the air of the Houston suburbs a few weeks back. It is, like Beto himself, an image you can project onto.

By his own admission, O’Rourke plummeted into a period of darkness after losing his Senate race to Ted Cruz, on November 6th. He took to journalling on the Web site Medium, then headed out on a solitary road trip, posting about the people he met and the pancakes he ate. On a day when he didn’t interact with many people, he experienced what he described as “low altitude.”

“Maybe I’d been hoping for some kind of connection that day and hadn’t found it,” he wrote, about a lonely day in Kansas. “All the conversations had been pleasant, everyone was kind, but there hadn’t been anything more than that.” In February, he was a guest at one of “Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday Conversations from Times Square” and, between repeating bits of his campaign speeches, said, “I felt a profound disappointment in myself, that I had let so many people down.”

A few weeks later, O’Rourke announced his candidacy for the Presidency and regenerated the road-tripping, hand-shaking energy vortex of his Senate campaign. In twenty-four hours, he managed to raise more than six million dollars without posting a single policy position on his Web site. In March, he went on an eight-state “listening tour.” Having listened in all the counties of New Hampshire; on a road trip across Iowa; over lunch, at a restaurant called Drake’s, with the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina; and at Taqueria Arandas in Las Vegas, Nevada, O’Rourke returned to Texas on Saturday to mark the official launch of his candidacy. He began his day in El Paso, with a speech and a rally at 10 a.m., then flew across the state to Houston, where he spoke at around six in the evening, before driving the two and a half hours to Austin.

Major political campaigns are exercises in repetition, and Beto O’Rourke is now well into his second year of doing this particular roadshow as a full-time job.

After this day of speeches, O’Rourke now has a set of policy goals to which voters can refer. They include expanding access to Medicare, requiring universal background checks for gun buyers, instating universal pre-kindergarten and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, recruiting more teachers of color, addressing the rise in maternal-mortality rates, ending the prohibition on marijuana and the war on drugs, and signing a new voting-rights act into law.

But what came through most throughout the day was how little running for national office has changed his approach. Here O’Rourke was, doing what he had done for nearly all of 2018, still dressed in a blue button-down shirt, khakis, and sometimes, especially if he was on a college campus, a baseball cap, still live-streaming himself driving the long Texan highways. His speech in El Paso showed a new emphasis on supporting unions, addressing inequality, and vague promises to bring broadband to rural America and help every farmer “make a profit,” but the speech I saw in Houston had many of the same anecdotes, catchphrases, and uplifting lines as the stump speech he was delivering at the end of his Senate campaign, last fall. Major political campaigns are exercises in repetition, and O’Rourke is now well into his second year of doing this particular roadshow as a full-time job. He left the impression that either he had been running for President all along or that he was still running for senator, or that his unlucky fate as a nationally viable Democratic candidate from a stubbornly red state would condemn him to a Sisyphean struggle of alternately trying for both for the rest of his life.

Each stop on O’Rourke’s Texas tour made a point: El Paso is his home town and allows him to present himself as President Trump’s principal adversary on the border. Austin, with its technology startups and music scene, is O’Rourke’s most obvious constituency. Houston’s demographics have the most national resonance: it is a Southern city in a Republican-voting state, growing in population, with as many languages spoken as in Queens, New York, and with a large Democratic base of African-American voters. O’Rourke has rightly been credited with helping to flip two Houston and Dallas-area House districts to Democrats in the 2018 midterms, and before he spoke in Houston he met with some of the seventeen Internet-famous African-American women who were elected judges in Harris County. Part of the promise of O’Rourke’s Presidential campaign is that he could also get out the vote in Atlanta, or Nashville, or the cities of North Carolina. To campaign like he’s running for President of Texas is to run for President of the whole New South.

The Houston rally was at Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston’s Third Ward. The school is a popular stop on political campaigns; Kamala Harris had passed through a week before, drawing an estimated twenty-four hundred people, according to the Texas Tribune. The crowd in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Humanities Center on Saturday was only in the hundreds, but it was also O’Rourke’s third time visiting the campus in a little more than a year. A giant American flag had been set up as a backdrop, and the top of the steps had been populated with Texas Southern students, some pulled from the crowd. The Imani School Choir sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in crisp uniforms of white and cherry red, and the Pledge of Allegiance was gravely delivered by a small boy in a suit and a tie. The audience was of mixed heritage and, like O’Rourke himself, looked ready to resume the frenzy of political organizing that had peaked last fall. Representatives from the National Organization for Women staffed a voter-registration table. The line for T-shirts was long.

For his supporters the continuity was reassuring. They mixed their new “Beto 2020” caps with their old “Beto for Texas” T-shirts. Beto T-shirts are not like Hillary Clinton T-shirts. They were not incinerated in despair the night O’Rourke lost his bid to unseat Ted Cruz. A Beto T-shirt has a futures market; it still sparks joy.