Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.

FORT WORTH, Texas — Beto O’Rourke is running to replace Ted Cruz. Literally. Sweat pours off his lean, 6-foot-4-inch frame as the El Paso Democrat jogs along the southern bank of the Trinity River surrounded by 300-odd supporters and curious voters jogging along with him. Incredibly, they have shown up at 8 a.m. on a Sunday to join him for a double shot of politics and cardio. In between panting breaths, O’Rourke explains to me the origins of this novel campaign event, which has him running several miles under the Texas sun, stopping in the middle to take questions and lingering at the end to pose for selfies. “Some sadistic member of our team,” he recalls, “was like, ‘So we’re doing like six town halls a day in six different counties. We’re driving hundreds of miles every day, we’re visiting all 254 counties. What more could we do? Ah, get up earlier and have running town halls.’”

This, in short, is how O’Rourke plans to pull off his long-shot bid to take away Cruz’s Senate seat: by outhustling his opponent. O’Rourke, a third-term congressman, often boasts that he has hired no consultants or pollsters. He is his own strategist, and his strategy is simple: campaign relentlessly, project vitality and hope his raw charisma combines in just the right proportion with anti-Cruz animus, Texas’ changing demographics and national Democratic momentum to put him over the top.


It’s a lot to hope for. Cruz is among the country’s shrewdest politicians. He may be reviled in Washington and on the left, but his approval rating remains above water in most polls of Texas, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Liberals have been fantasizing about turning the state blue for a decade, to no avail. And Cruz retains a double-digit lead in recent polls.

But something is catching here. Fueled by millions in small-dollar donations, O’Rourke is outraising Cruz. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant families detained at the border has given his campaign a jolt of moral clarity. And voters are responding in a way that Texas Democrats say they have not seen before in modern times.

Over a weekend of campaigning in late June, O’Rourke drew thousand-strong crowds in hundred-degree-plus heat, two ambulances were called and chants of “Be-to” rang out—the sorts of scenes that are unheard of for a Senate campaign five months before Election Day. Texas, though, is still a big state with a lot of Republicans, and the race will test whether the only thing crazier than O’Rourke’s crowds is the idea that a liberal Democrat can run, drive and charm his way into Cruz’s Senate seat.



***

I got my first taste of Beto-mania on a Wednesday evening in late June on the second floor of Yard House, a generic sports bar in Washington’s Chinatown. The average age in the room hovered in the low 30s as attendees munched on mini cheeseburgers and lined up to exchange drinks tickets—obtained by making a campaign donation—for booze. The event, called “Beers with Beto,” was heavy on Texas expats.

The first attendee I spoke to, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer named Brian Nistler, said he had persuaded his parents, lifelong Republicans, to attend an O’Rourke town hall at a middle school in Amarillo earlier this year and that, come November, he expects them to cast their votes for a Democrat in a statewide election for the first time in their lives.

Melanee Derenzy, a 39-year-old fitness trainer originally from Dallas, told me she had never been involved in politics before hearing about O’Rourke. “I found out about him, and I loved him, and felt I had to help out,” said Derenzy, who has volunteered to enter data and send text messages for the campaign. “I love how open he is. I love the Facebook Live.”

O’Rourke has made abundant use of that platform, livestreaming all of his campaign events on it. In March 2017, he and a Republican House colleague, Will Hurd, created a social media phenomenon by livestreaming their road trip from San Antonio to Washington after a canceled flight forced them to drive to work. This January, when O’Rourke livestreamed his life on the campaign trail for 24 hours straight on Facebook, Derenzy said she tuned in for about three hours of it.

It’s that kind of passion that has fueled the formerly obscure O’Rourke’s remarkable turn in the national spotlight. By the time the candidate arrived, a couple of hundred supporters packed the second floor, making it difficult to move. The crowd spilled out the door and onto the second-floor landing.

O’Rourke, who has pledged not to accept money from political action committees, co-hosted the Wednesday event with End Citizens United, a campaign finance reform group. Before he spoke, the group’s president, Tiffany Muller, warmed up the crowd by razzing his opponent.

“A beer with Ted Cruz?” she said, raising her arms in an incredulous shrug. “I don’t think the bartender would even show up!” She went on to note that O’Rourke had recently completed his pledge to campaign in all 254 Texas counties. “The only counties Ted Cruz have been to are in Iowa,” she said, voicing the dig that Cruz has been tending to his national ambitions rather than his constituents.

With his youth and magnetism, O’Rourke, 45, draws comparisons to Barack Obama, but he projects a gawkier sort of charisma than the former president’s. His delivery is faster and jerkier. He sprints through his stump speech. Speaking without a mic, his unoccupied left hand constantly wanders to his solar plexus, while he repeatedly points down forcefully with his right hand, as if making an emphatic point in a rap battle.

A fluent Spanish speaker, O’Rourke is especially emphatic when he talks about immigration. In Chinatown, he led off by relating the story of the so-called Voyage of the Damned, the saga of a boat full of Jewish refugees from pre-World War II Europe who were refused entry to Cuba and the United States and ultimately returned to the continent, where more than 250 of them later died in the Holocaust. He compared their plight to those of the migrants coming to the southern border, and urged his audience to do all they could on the migrants’ behalf.

Sweat stains formed around the collar of his shirt as he spoke and the tendons in his neck protruded. As he wound his way through his stump speech, he leavened his talk of migrants with a vulgar crack about Congress’ approval ratings: “Just below communism, just above gonorrhea.”



***

It’s engaging, but will it work? Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to a top statewide office in almost 30 years.

Its last Democratic governor, Ann Richards, was elected in 1990, beating out Republican businessman Clayton Williams. Dallas Democratic donor Marc Stanley, founder of the Fire Ted Cruz (also known as “F Ted Cruz”) PAC, said he looks to that race as a precedent. O’Rourke’s authenticity reminds him of Richards, and Williams' flaws remind him of Cruz, he said. “This is best setup I’ve seen since 1990.”

Texas is already one of the most racially diverse states in the country, and its demographics are changing rapidly. Only 31 percent of Texans over the age of 65 are nonwhite, while more than two-thirds of Texans under the age of 19 are nonwhite, as are a majority of Texans ages 20-39. Those changes are driven by a growing Hispanic population, which tends to vote Democratic.

In recent years, these trends have given Democrats reason to hope the state is on the brink of becoming competitive. In 2013, Obama’s national field director, Jeremy Bird, launched Battleground Texas to build the political infrastructure needed to deliver statewide Democrat wins by 2020, when the Hispanic share of the population is projected to catch up, then surpass, the white share. A year later, in 2014, state Senator Wendy Davis’ gubernatorial run fueled liberal hopes that Texas could turn blue ahead of schedule.

Davis, not Richards, is the precedent that leaps more often to mind when observers assess O’Rourke’s campaign. Davis had her own rock-star moment, a filibuster of a restrictive abortion bill that created an instant national profile. She even had signature hot-pink running shoes, worn during the filibuster, that became a totem of her campaign. In the end, she lost by more than 20 points to then-Attorney General Greg Abbott.

But Davis argues that O’Rourke has several things going for him that she did not. For one, she says Cruz is more disliked than Abbott, then a relative unknown, was. She points out that she was running in a Republican wave year—as midterms during Democratic presidencies tend to be—while 2018, with Trump in the Oval Office, is shaping up as a Democratic wave year. She added that this year, Democrats are fielding credible candidates in every congressional district in the state, bringing with them more turnout muscle to drive Democratic voters to the polls.

“I had a strong headwind,” she said. “Beto’s running in a climate where he does have a wind at his back.”

Then there’s O’Rourke’s personal magnetism.

Bird, who is based in Chicago, saw that up close at a recent high-dollar O’Rourke fundraiser in the city, which he said drew more new faces than he’d seen any other Senate candidate draw in their swings through the city. “He’s young,” Bird said. “He’s dynamic. He’s working for every single vote.”

But Texas Republicans look at the national buzz and fundraising hauls and see a candidate who is all hat, no cattle. “Francis O’Rourke seems to be interested mostly in being a media darling and a recipient of funds from out of state,” said James Dickey, chairman of the state GOP, using the candidate’s middle name to undermine his appeal to Hispanic voters. (O’Rourke, born Robert Francis O’Rourke, has no Hispanic heritage but began going by Beto, the Mexican nickname for Roberto, as a child in West Texas.)

O’Rourke’s chances looked the most real in April, when a shock poll from Quinnipiac University put him 3 points behind Cruz, just within the margin of error. Suddenly, it looked like a tight race, but Cruz’s own internal polling still had him up by double digits, according to his top strategist, Jeff Roe, who said the campaign’s polls have yet to show O’Rourke within 10 points. Cruz’s campaign critiqued Quinnipiac’s methodology but did not push back harder in part because Roe hoped the prospect of an uncomfortably close race would fuel fundraising.

The April poll does appear to have been an outlier. In late May, a Quinnipiac poll gave Cruz a less surprising 11-point lead. In June, a CBS poll showed a 10-point race. The consensus expectation, among supporters of both men and neutral observers, is that O’Rourke is likely to come within a few points of Cruz but fall short.

“It’s in the bag,” said financier Toby Neugebauer, a Cruz megadonor, in a long monologue of a voicemail. “This is fake news that’s going to cost the Democrats a lot of money. Ted’s going to win.”

Neugebauer—who moved from Houston to Puerto Rico in 2014—is aware of the enthusiasm for O’Rourke back home, but remains unmoved. “I have been in Texas a lot and seeing all the Beto signs, and I get all of that,” he said. But he cautioned against over-extrapolating from O’Rourke’s strength in the cities. “It’s a big, big state,” he said. “Big. You take the rural, you take the suburbs, get out of the inner urban areas of Dallas, Austin, Houston, Ted’s got huge support.”

For his part, Cruz—whose 2016 presidential campaign earned a reputation as the best-run in the field, despite losing— has taken a passive approach. “Do we want to go out and define the guy now?” Roe told me. “It’s pretty expensive to define somebody in Texas. It’s a lot easier to let him define himself.” Roe argued that O’Rourke is “self-radicalizing” in front of voters—on issues like impeaching Trump, gun control and “Medicare for all”—which is great for firing up the base but a poor way to beat Cruz in Texas.

“His whole shtick of the beer, the running, the punk rock—all that stuff's OK. It’s not OK, it’s great,” said a Cruz adviser. “He really did have a chance to be this outsider punk rocker taking on the machine kind of candidate. I don’t know why he got ideological.”



***

Two nights after the Washington event, O’Rourke kicked off a weekend of home-state campaigning with another “Beers with Beto” fundraiser, this time at Shipping & Receiving, a funky watering hole in a semi-industrial section of Fort Worth featuring an oil painting of female nudes and a “Vote Dude Lebowski 2016” sign above the bar.

A half-hour before the event’s 8 p.m. start time, several hundred people already filled the bar and its adjoining yard, driven there by Facebook and word-of-mouth. Julie Bothun, a 61-year-old government teacher at nearby Mansfield High School, said she heard about the event from her “crazy friend Joy” and that nothing would keep her from the chance to see O’Rourke.

“It’s 108 degrees outside, and I just walked like 10 miles to get here,” she said. (In fact, it was closer to 100 degrees, and she walked more like 2 miles, but the determination to see a Senate challenger speak five months before an election remained impressive.)

Soon, her crazy friend Joy materialized, drenched in sweat, and the pair revealed that on top of their travails, Joy’s husband, Richard, had been stung by a cactus on the trek to the bar. He, too, remained undeterred. “The enthusiasm for this young man is incredible,” Bothun said.

Tyler Hollandsworth, a 21-year-old waitress and Bernie Sanders supporter, said her mother, a 57-year-old interior design assistant, brought her to see O’Rourke. “We’re his groupie girls,” she explained.

Out in the yard, a musician warmed up the crowd, crooning, “It’s a perfect time to get wasted” and calling O’Rourke “Bay-toe,” the alternate gringo pronunciation of his first name, which is properly pronounced “Bet-o,” like a wager.

The Texas Democratic Party’s convention was underway in Fort Worth, and a slate of Democratic candidates in town for the gathering spoke ahead of O’Rourke. Eric Swalwell, an ambitious young congressman from California, also spoke. By then, more than a thousand people packed the air-conditioned bar and the sweltering yard. An ambulance pulled up outside, presumably to aid someone felled by the heat.

O’Rourke took the stage to raucous cheers. “You look great,” he told the crowd. “Absolutely beautiful.”

Before returning home to El Paso—where he started a small technology business and served on the City Council— O’Rourke played bass for a punk rock band called Foss during his undergrad days at Columbia University in New York. In Fort Worth, the congressman told the crowd he was running for Senate in “the most punk rock way I know how”—that is, by barnstorming every county in Texas and showing up in small towns that hadn’t seen a statewide candidate since Lyndon Johnson stole himself a Senate seat in 1948.

If it weren’t for his blue collared shirt and the lack of musical instruments, he could have been playing a rock show. “Enjoy yourselves,” O’Rourke told the crowd by way of closing. “Be responsible. Have fun. Let’s kick some ass. Thank you.” A brief chant of “Be-to” broke out as he left the stage.

After allowing the congressman to pose for a few photos, two campaign staffers, one in a cowboy hat with his arm wrapped around the candidate, hustled O’Rourke from the stage and through the adoring throngs inside the bar—like he was James Brown without the cape. Though it was now close to 10 p.m. on a Friday, the hardest-working man in politics was not ready to call it a night. His aides led him out a back door to a private event with female supporters. The press was not invited to join.



***

The next day, Saturday, O’Rourke scrapped a planned town hall to visit a border facility for detained migrant children at Tornillo, Texas. The weekend before, O’Rourke had led a Father’s Day protest of the Trump administration’s family separation policy at Tornillo. Through direct action and impassioned cable news appearances, he became a face of opposition to the policy.

And Cruz, long a hard-liner on immigration, showed signs that he was feeling some pressure. He initially defended the administration’s policy, but as the furor built, he proposed “emergency legislation” that would house detained families together and even began working with California Senator Dianne Feinstein on a bipartisan fix. (Cruz’s campaign insists that O’Rourke’s activism played no role in the senator’s actions on the issue.)

Now Health and Human Services officials were allowing O’Rourke and other lawmakers to tour the facility. Afterward, O’Rourke told me that HHS officials and the private contractors who operate the facility told him not to engage the detained children, but he did so anyway, quizzing them in Spanish about their conditions and telling them he was working to reunite them with their parents.

While O’Rourke was at the border on Saturday, the state party’s gathering wound down at the Fort Worth Convention Center, where Travis Jarrell, general manager of Bumperactive, the print shop that supplies O’Rourke’s campaign, told me that the business had doubled the size of its staff from eight to 16 over the past two months to accommodate the frenzied demand for Beto merchandise. Currently, Bumperactive is shipping 1,000 to 2,000 Beto T-shirts and yard signs per week, he said.

The black-and-white signs were sprouting up in front yards and shop windows all over the state, at least the urban parts. One O’Rourke staffer told me the design reminded her of the spicy ketchup packets at Whataburger, the Southwestern fast food chain (Indeed, the resemblance is uncanny).



***

The next day, the first joggers began gathering by 7 a.m. for their chance to run with O’Rourke.

The early morning runs help O’Rourke, an avid runner off the campaign trail, project youth and energy, drawing a contrast with his near-contemporary Cruz, who comes across as older than his 47 years. In June, Cruz, an enthusiastic basketball player, played Jimmy Kimmel one-on-one for charity in front of 6,000 people and won. (Though the stunt looked like a response to his challenger’s high-energy campaign style, Cruz’s campaign said O’Rourke did not figure into the decision to ball with Kimmel.)

Of course, to be competitive O’Rourke will need to do more than out-alpha his opponent.

One of the biggest challenges facing Democrats in Texas is engaging Hispanic voters, who historically have turned out at a lower rate than the state’s white and black voters. At the events I attended, the crowds tended toward white and affluent. When O’Rourke paused his run to take questions, one man told O’Rourke he had been asking the campaign to hold a Spanish-language town hall in Fort Worth to no avail. O’Rourke responded in Spanish that he would find a date to hold one.

As we ran back, I asked O’Rourke how exactly he planned to pull this thing out. What is his strategy for overtaking Cruz?

"We'll keep doing what we're doing,” he said, pointing to the campaign’s impressive “energy.”

No, but really, I pressed him later that day, is there more to his strategy than just holding as many events and knocking on as many doors as humanly possible? “No, there’s not much more to it,” he said, before launching into a soliloquy about human connection and the soullessness of “corporate politics.”

For now, at least, O’Rourke’s bid is too much of a long-shot for the national party to throw any money at it, which is forcing O’Rourke to pay his own way, but also frees him to follow his heart when it comes to campaign strategy.

His fundraising performance has been stellar, drawing on both large and small donors around the country. In the first quarter of this year, Cruz’s campaign raised $3.2 million, including money to a primary account and a PAC, while O’Rourke’s campaign raised $6.8 million. Those totals brought O’Rourke’s cash on hand to $8 million, surpassing the Cruz campaign’s primary war chest, which stood at $7.2 million, for the first time. Cruz has said he expects O’Rourke’s second-quarter haul will once again beat his own.

So far, the biggest recipient of O’Rourke’s campaign cash has been Revolution Messaging—the progressive ad agency that worked for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—which has received $3 million for digital advertising from O’Rourke’s campaign through the first quarter of this year, per Federal Election Commission records.

What else will O’Rourke spend all that money on? Not slick mailers, he said. Instead, he plans to prioritize logistical support for his growing army of 10,000 volunteers—facilitating door-knocking, phone-banking and texting. He might also run television advertising, he said, “if there was some way that it could look like what this feels like,” this being his campaign. “And if we can't, we shouldn’t do it, because you don't need another polished 30-second spot.”

Beyond avoiding cliched television ads, O’Rourke will have to accomplish two things Texas Democrats have been trying and failing to do in midterms for several cycles, according to Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas: Mobilize his voters and persuade Cruz voters to defect.

Thus far, O’Rourke has been mobilizing sympathetic voters—his name ID and favorability are growing among Democrats—but Henson has seen little evidence of persuasion, pulling Cruz voters into his column.

In June, UT and the Texas Tribune released a poll of registered voters showing O’Rourke 5 points behind Cruz. In reality, Henson said, an O’Rourke loss in this range would be a “huge event” in Texas politics in and of itself.

But could the El Paso congressman actually eke out a win?

“It's hard to not be skeptical based on the evidence at hand and past Democratic performance,” Henson said. “Even if Beto O’Rourke is running a stronger, better campaign in a better environment than we've seen.”



***

A few hours after the run, having showered and changed, O’Rourke emerged from the lobby of the Fort Worth Embassy Suites with sopping wet pants. He had just spilled coffee all over himself, he explained as he lifted his top to expose a brownish stain on his white undershirt. He asked an aide to lay down a towel on the driver’s seat of his Dodge Caravan, the model he rents whenever he is campaigning.

As he drives, blasting a friend’s playlist that includes the Minnesota rock band Hüsker Dü, he begins to recount what he felt he accomplished with his detention facility visit the day before. “You just perform at a higher level when you know you’re going to be held accountable, and so being there was critical. Seeing the kids, being able to establish that in fact kids had been separated from their families.”

As he speaks, he interrupts himself to unload an expletive at the GPS navigation on his phone. The F-bombs have become a signature part of O’Rourke’s unvarnished public image.

“It really excites the crowds,” explained Davis, who said her personal favorite came when O’Rourke decried the decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop tracking gun-related injuries and deaths, asking the crowd at a campaign rally, “Can you fucking believe that?” to wild applause.

O’Rourke told me he’s trying to stop swearing in his public remarks. But he’s not trying that hard. On the way to Plano, he related the story of a grandmother who came up to him after an event in San Antonio and asked him to stop cursing, saying it undermined his message. But as she was leaving, her teenage grandson looked over his shoulder and whispered to O’Rourke, “Keep it up.” So he has.

But the bad boy image could be a double-edged sword in Texas’ Bible Belt, where Cruz has won campaigning on explicitly Christian themes. O’Rourke was arrested twice in his 20s, once for a DUI. In an attack ad during his first congressional run in 2012, his primary opponent, incumbent Silvestre Reyes, used video that appeared to show O’Rourke being spanked on a dance floor. Given that, I asked O’Rourke about the wisdom of events like “Beers with Beto” that could be used to paint him as unserious. He shrugged. “Running for public office exposes you to whatever anyone wants to say about you.”

Still, there are signs of political caution beneath the F-bomb-dropping bravado—this is Texas, after all. He favors weed legalization, but he quickly shut down a question about whether it’s worth exploring a broader end to the prohibition on narcotics with an emphatic “No,” despite having encouraged debate on that very issue as a member of the El Paso City Council in 2009.

After showing me an awkward black-and-white basketball team photo of an adolescent O’Rourke and offering to send along a copy for publication, campaign communications director Chris Evans backtracked, informing me, “There was a preference not to release the basketball photo after all.”

And O’Rourke, who voted against Nancy Pelosi for minority leader and has distanced himself from national Democratic leadership, also told me he does not consider himself part of the resistance or to be running an anti-Trump campaign.

“I’m for this country at a moment that she really needs us. I’m for Texas,” he said. “It can’t be about who you’re against or who you don’t like.”

***

In Plano, more than a thousand people spread out in a field hemmed in by a playground and a gazebo, some with beach chairs and blankets, to see the candidate. Banners flanking the steps from which he spoke implored voters in English to text “BETO” to a campaign hotline and in Spanish to text “UNIDOS,” meaning “united.”

For the only time in the five events I attended, O’Rourke drew a heckler. “How will you make a change?” shouted a heavyset man in his 50s sporting Ray-Bans. “He needs to tell us how he’s going to do it!”

“Shut the fuck up,” the man barked at the fellow attendees who tried to quiet him. When O’Rourke’s events and logistics director, Cynthia Cano, offered the man her business card in a bid to mollify him, he crumpled it into a little ball and placed it back in her purse.

But, bizarrely, even the heckler had apparently succumbed to Beto-mania. “I like him,” the man, who identified himself only as James, told me following the altercation. “I’m voting for him.”

After the event, hundreds of people lined up for photos with the candidate while Cano hustled them through their paces. Within a few minutes of each other, two people approached me to offer the view that O’Rourke is the second coming of another Robert Francis.

“He reminds me of Robert Kennedy, but more so,” said one of them, Dianne Martin, a 71-year-old South African immigrant who met Kennedy as a schoolgirl on his 1966 trip to the country and predicts O’Rourke will be president someday. “I can’t tell you how much I love this man.”

The temperature had risen above 100 degrees, and as the line for photos dwindled, one woman collapsed to the ground. For the second time that weekend, an ambulance pulled up to an O’Rourke town hall. This time, the candidate lay down on the grass to chat with his swooning fan.

At the Flower Mound Community Activity Center, O’Rourke’s final stop of the weekend, the fire marshal allowed an extra 40 people into the 300-capacity room the campaign had booked across the hall from some indoor basketball courts. Several hundred people who could not make it in went home. Several dozen more lined the sidewalk outside the room to gaze in through the windows as O’Rourke spoke and wait for a post-event photo.

It was his last event before returning to Washington, but he intends to keep up the relentless campaigning. Among other initiatives, O’Rourke is planning a monthlong road trip across the state during the August recess. Cruz will be stuck in Washington because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell canceled his chamber’s recess. It’s the sort of lucky break O’Rourke will need a lot of in the months ahead.

He will also need to ensure that his supporters continue to believe in Beto-mania. Back at his Wednesday night event in Washington, as he wound down his stump speech, O’Rourke argued for his viability by citing the April Quinnipiac poll that had him within 3 points of Cruz. The crowd loved it. He did not mention the university’s subsequent poll, which has him down 11. It was merely a detail. "Who knows with polls in 2018?” he told them. “But this feels right.”