WASHINGTON - As the polls closed in Texas’ first-in-the-nation primary, Ted Cruz uncorked the first statewide radio ad of his 2018 reelection campaign —a spoof he helped write based on a hit country tune, the words re-worked to frame his newly anointed Democratic challenger.

“If you’re gonna run in Texas, you can’t be a liberal man,” the singer croons.

Cruz’s not-so-subtle epithet aimed at El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke made clear that the Texas tea party icon, after months of hardly uttering O’Rourke’s name, intends to make his case in starkly ideological terms to the state’s vast conservative base.

The underlying strategy is not so subtle either: We outnumber you, and in a base election, we win.

If some Democrats want to run at Cruz as the embodiment of President Donald Trump in Texas, Cruz is determined to lump O’Rourke in with the Democratic-Socialist views of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Congressman O’Rourke is a left wing, liberal Democrat,” Cruz told reporters on primary night. “He is running like Bernie Sanders across the state.”

O’Rourke’s answer, based on a series of interviews and statements, has been a sunny, milk-and-honey campaign that plays up Texans’ everyday concerns over jobs and health care, while downplaying ideological divisions.

“Whatever it is, we can do it when we’re focused on working together with one another,” he told his supporters on the night of his primary victory last week. “We don’t allow party or geography or who we pray to, or who we love, or anything else that they would have us be divided on, get in the way of doing the big things before us.”

Cruz’s attack, in a conference call before the polls closed, represented a sharp pivot to the November election which most analysts already rate as a longshot for O’Rourke, who is running hard to break a decades-long drought for Democrat in statewide elections in Texas.

Read more: Stage is set for November

Flexing his top-dog political muscle, Cruz’s strategy also is a rebuke to what he called the “Pavlovian excitement” of a Democratic “blue wave” enveloping Texas and post-Trump American politics.

“Those predictions sound great in the newsroom, but they run into the reality that Texans are conservatives,” Cruz said. “If conservatives show up and vote in November, Texas will stay bright red and the predictions of a ‘blue wave’ will be kicked off two more years, or four more years, or six more years, when the whole wave of stories will start all over again.”

Republicans’ own internal studies have carried warnings about demographic shifts in Texas, particularly among immigrants and Latinos, that could threaten the GOP’s statewide dominance. The question is when Democrats will reach the tipping point.

O’Rourke believes it could be 2018.

But even as Democrats hope to ride a “blue wave” of anti-Trump energy to make history in The Lone Star State, O’Rourke has resisted turning the race into a stark referendum of left versus right.

“This campaign is not ideological,” he told the Chronicle in a primary night interview. “It’s definitely not partisan. It’s solely focused on the interests and the aspirations of the people that I want to represent in Texas.”

His rebukes to Cruz have been mild and indirect, suggesting an absence from the job, not ideological error. “The biggest laugh line we get in any town hall is asking when the last time Ted Cruz showed up for a town hall,” O’Rourke said.

Running in one of the nation’s most Republican-dominated states, Democratic strategists say O’Rourke can hardly afford a partisan food fight. He has sought instead to couch his agenda in day-to-day, kitchen-table terms, talking about education, health care, jobs, transportation and “gun safety” - a more neutral term for gun control.

Personality clash

The race is also shaping up as a personality clash, with O’Rourke running as the antithesis of what many Democrats regard as a mean-spirited, intolerant streak infecting the GOP under Trump.

“Beto O’Rourke does this Pope Francis interpretation, turning the other cheek,” said Cal Jillson, a political analyst at Southern Methodist University. “He’s tapping into a Democratic sense that Donald Trump and his trash-mouth politics and the hard-ball played by Republicans allows Democrats to feel as if they harken for bipartisanship, dialogue, reason and common sense.”

Cruz, by temperament pugnacious, lends himself to that contrast, Jillson said. “Part of what O’Rourke is trying to do is just be visibly different, emotionally and intellectually different than Ted Cruz and allow people to make a decision about ‘By whom do you wish to be represented?’”

Consciously nor not, the Democratic strategy seems tailor made to exploit Cruz’s singular weakness in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. His runner-up finish to Trump won him praise for strategy, organization, energy and fundraising - but not likeability.

“You have a Republican incumbent senator who isn’t warm and fuzzy enough to have universal support, and you have a strong, young, vibrant Democratic challenger over-performing expectations his first year on the campaign trail,” Jillson said.

Part of the case for O’Rourke’s optimism is a fundraising haul at the start of the year that saw him pull in $1.5 million more than Cruz, despite his refusal to accept money from political action committees.

Then there was the outpouring of voter enthusiasm on Tuesday, when more than a million Texans showed up to vote in the Democratic primaries, double the number in the 2014 midterm elections.

“It’s clear Texas Democrats are fired up, exceeding expectations, and charging forward to November,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa.

But tempering the Democrats’ enthusiasm in Texas was some fairly simple primary math: More than 1.5 million Republicans voted in Tuesday’s election. Of those, more than 1.3 million voted for Cruz in a five-way GOP Senate race.

Parker: Off to the races for Cruz and O'Rourke

On the Democratic side, O’Rourke got 641,324 votes in a three-way race. Even if O’Rourke had received every Democratic vote cast, he would have fallen short of Cruz’s total.

“Texas is a bright red state with an engaged conservative majority who are committed to keeping Texas on a conservative path,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Despite the confidence of many Republicans in Austin, one state GOP leader, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, called the Democratic primary surge a “wake-up call.”

“It certainly got my attention,” Cornyn said. “If Republicans become complacent and don’t turnout our voters, then November could be a real shock.”

While Cornyn sees no imminent danger for Republicans in Texas, he has long been one of those who understands that the state’s complexion is changing, and that GOP candidates need to respond.

Equally troubling for O’Rourke was his loss to primary challenger Sema Hernandez in many heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border, a phenomenon some attributed to O’Rourke’s name.

Altogether, Cruz got more primary votes than O'Rourke in 27 of the 50 most Hispanic counties in Texas, including 39 of the 62 counties where Hispanics account for more than 40 percent of the voting age population.

Cruz, who won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in his 2012 run for Senate, anticipates O’Rourke’s play for Latino voters. The Cruz campaign jingle takes a shot at O’Rourke’s childhood nickname, “Beto,” a Spanish cognate of his given name, Robert:

“I remember liberal Robert wanted to fit it. So he changed his name to Beto. And hid it with a grin.”

Democratic activists reeled on social media, many pointing out that Cruz chose to Anglicize his given name, Rafael, and go by “Ted,” short for his middle name, Edward.

‘Big, bold, courageous’

O’Rourke, best known in national media circles for his Punk Rock past, declined to take the bait in morning-after television interview.

“We can focus on the small, mean, petty stuff, or we can be big, bold, courageous, and confident,” he said. “That’s our distinction as a state.”

For now, Cruz appears to be at the top of the seawall against what some regard as a rising tide, if not a wave. Since his first insurgent Senate campaign in 2012, his strength has always been rallying the conservative base.

Fast forward six years, and his new song lyrics mince no words on two issues that resonate most with the GOP base:

“Beto wants those open borders. And he wants to take our guns.”

O’Rourke, for his part, talks about the vibrancy of border towns like his native El Paso, where he learned to shoot as a child. He says Texans are ready to show compassion - up to and including health care - for people living illegally in the United States. He also embraces restrictions such as universal background checks and access to military-style weapons like the one used in the recent Florida school massacre.

“Texas is in a perfect position to lead on that,” O’Rourke said. “We have this incredible, proud heritage of gun ownership and safety.”

To Cruz, O’Rourke’s boast about his “F” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) is tantamount to a kiss of death. “That is a wonderfully popular view in left wing circles on the East Coast,” said Cruz, who has taken more than $460,000 in contributions from the NRA and other pro-gun groups over his political career. “But that is not a view that reflects the people of Texas.”

The gun issue helped raise O’Rourke’s profile in national politics when he took part in a Democratic “sit in” on the House floor after the 2016 mass shootings in the Pulse night club in Orlando. That came a year before his bipartisan road trip with Texas U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, a gesture that got national attention for both congressmen.

On guns, a potent divide in Texas, O’Rourke has sought to portray his positions as mainstream, citing increasing support for universal background checks in public opinion polls since the recent mass shootings in Florida and Sutherland Springs, Tex.

But however O’Rourke defines himself over the next eight months, Cruz is convinced he is running against a liberal in a conservative state - whatever public opinion polls show about Trump’s popularity.

“We will see… a very large turnout from the far left in November,” Cruz predicted. “Just as we have seen a very high Democratic turnout in the early vote. But the good news is there are more conservatives than there are liberals in Texas, and if conservatives show up and vote… Texas will remain reliably red.”