O'Rourke drew large crowds in Lockhart and Elgin on Monday, dismissing Gov. Greg Abbott calling his appeal 'cult-like.'

ELGIN — Gov. Greg Abbott told "Fox & Friends" Monday morning that Democrat Beto O'Rourke's high-flying U.S. Senate campaign will come down to Earth when Texans find out what he stands for.

“Listen, we’ve seen this show before,” Abbott said. “We saw it at my first race for governor four years ago, when Wendy Davis was getting money and support from across the entire country, only to lose by 20 percentage points once it was revealed the positions that she really stood for. The same thing is happening for Beto O’Rourke.”

"He’s been a cultlike, very popular figure, the way he’s running his campaign. But you don’t vote on cults when you go to the U.S. Senate; you vote on the issues," Abbott said.

But, to judge by O'Rourke's appearances Monday before large crowds crackling with excitement in Lockhart and Elgin, the cult of Beto is only getting more frenetic, even in places that preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton two years ago.

Asked about Abbott's cult comment, O'Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, said, "The Cult was a decent 80s band," adding that this is what democracy looks like at a moment of intense concern about where America is headed and why Americans seem so divided against one another.

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"It’s a people thing, and I really do think that a lot of the electricity in the events that we get to come to is not about the candidate but about the people who have come out — people looking to their right and to their left and saying, 'I can't believe that there are this many people in Elgin (or Bastrop or in Del Rio or Eagle Pass) who feel the same way I do about the country at this moment.'"

"I would describe it as democracy, which is foreign to people who have their campaigns so driven by PACs and special interests that maybe it looks like something they're afraid of, but it is really democracy in action at its most fundamental," O'Rourke said.

O'Rourke's strategy is to drive up Democratic turnout and get people to vote who have never done so before, while reducing losing margins in that vast expanse of deep red Texas.

Asked about Monday's political terrain, O'Rourke says, "60-40, right?"

Pretty much. Trump beat Clinton by 20 points in Bastrop County, where most of Elgin finds itself, and a little better than 15 points in Lockhart's Caldwell County. Asked if his ambition here is to narrow the margin of defeat, O'Rourke said no, the objective is to win in the two counties and others like them.

"Win it," he said. "Win it."

Media attention

After his Elgin rally— attended by more than 500 people, where he was presented with a personalized "Beto for Senate" guitar by country legend Ray Wylie Hubbard — O'Rourke was interviewed briefly by a film crew from NHK, Japan's largest broadcasting organization.

"How would you fix a divided country?" asked the Tokyo-based NHK reporter, who said afterward that Japan is intensely interested in the Texas Senate race.

Before that, O'Rourke did a longer interview with veteran political strategist and commentator Steven Schmidt for "The Circus," a weekly Showtime documentary series.

Schmidt, who ran U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign but recently quit the Republican Party because of where Trump is taking it, pressed O'Rourke about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination for the Supreme Court. O'Rourke, who opposed Kavanaugh's nomination even before Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexually attacking her in high school, said he found Ford impressive and credible, and did not believe Kavanaugh was telling the truth.

But he has not put the nomination battle front and center in his campaign, perhaps because it triggers such partisan antagonisms.

'No stopping us'

Sunday night, on a Facebook Live event with supporters, he made a TV ad on the spot decrying negative campaigning, that began: "You've probably seen the attack ads seeking to scare you about what we're trying to do for this country at this critical moment. Now, we can be defined by our fears or known by our ambitions. I'm confident that when we see each other not as Democrats or Republicans but as Texans, as Americans, as human beings, there's no stopping us."

O'Rourke was supposed to have been debating Cruz on Sunday evening, but Cruz canceled because of his uncertain schedule amid the Kavanaugh deliberations. When a Senate vote was pushed back a week and the Cruz campaign tried to reinstate the debate, the O'Rourke campaign replied that it was too late. Cruz partisans mocked O'Rourke as scared of a second debate with Cruz, but, from the O'Rourke campaign's perspective, debates are almost inevitably exercises in off-brand negativity. There will be another debate in San Antonio Oct. 16 — and still a possibility Sunday's debate will be rescheduled.

Cruz campaigned Saturday at the Heart of Texas Republican Rally in Washington County. He will be campaigning Wednesday in Wichita Falls and Conroe with Donald Trump Jr., and on Friday at agricultural town halls in College Station, Lockney and Pampa.