National Democrats have long dreamed of recapturing Texas, and Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s bid to unseat Republican senator Ted Cruz has seemingly given them reason for hope. O’Rourke has raised record-breaking amounts of cash ($38m in his latest haul), drawn large crowds of supporters at rallies across the Lone Star state and been fawningly profiled in nearly every major publication in the country.

But there is a fatal flaw in the 46-year-old El Paso congressman’s strategy. O’Rourke is betting that increased voter turnout among Texas Democrats, rather than the persuasion of Republicans, will propel him to victory. Appealing to disgruntled Republicans and independents by tacking to the center on key issues – gun control, abortion, taxes – isn’t part of O’Rourke’s strategy, even if he pays lip service to the idea in his impassioned rhetoric and populist pose.

To understand why this no-compromise, no-persuasion approach is likely to fail (O’Rourke is trailing in the latest polls), you have to understand how Texas became so Republican in the first place. Today Texas is known for being a GOP bastion, but it wasn’t always. Like much of the American south, Texas was firmly in the hands of the Democratic party from the end of reconstruction until the end of the 20th century.

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And then things began to change. The first sign that the Democrats’ hold on Texas was beginning to loosen was the election of Republican John Tower to the US Senate in 1961. Tower narrowly won a special election to fill the seat vacated by vice-president Lyndon B Johnson, and he did it by appealing to conservative Democrats who were disillusioned with the leftward drift of their party. By emphasizing his conservative position on issues like spending, the national debt, foreign policy and private enterprise, Tower drew enough conservative Democrats away from his opponent to claim an unprecedented victory.

Indeed, the modest gains of the GOP in Texas throughout the 1960s and ‘70s had as much to do with the emergence of a more competitive Republican party as it did with emergence of a more liberal the Democratic party. In Tower’s case, he defeated a conservative Democrat opposed by large numbers of liberal Democrats, who simply didn’t show up to vote. His victory represented the beginning of an entirely new GOP rising in Texas. The political establishment couldn’t see it yet, but 15 years later, the new political landscape was impossible to ignore when Ronald Reagan swept the 1976 Republican primary in Texas.

Reagan’s victory deprived incumbent president Gerald Ford of even a single Texas delegate. It shocked the entire country. Ford’s people in particular didn’t see it coming, in part because they didn’t believe Reagan would appeal to mainstream Texas Republicans and in part because they didn’t think there were large numbers of conservative Texas Democrats willing to cross over and vote for a Republican.

Yet that’s exactly the gamble Reagan’s activists and campaign organizers had made. Throughout the primary campaign, their insistent message to conservative Texans, Republicans and Democrats alike, was that their respective parties had abandoned them, had become too liberal – on the Soviet Union, labor unions, welfare spending – and that their true political home was in a more conservative GOP led by Reagan. The gamble worked. Large numbers of Democrats switched parties in 1976 and voted for Reagan in the primary – the same voters who would send Reagan to the White House four years later.

In other words, the growth of the Texas Republican party was driven by a concerted, sustained effort to draw out the ideological differences between the two major parties and convince conservative Democrats that based on their values and policy preferences, they actually belonged in the GOP. Eventually, the strategy worked. George W Bush won the governorship in 1994, Republicans took control of the state senate two years later, and in 2002 they won the state house. Ever since, the Texas GOP has maintained control of both legislative chambers and nearly every statewide political office.

How is all this relevant to the Cruz-O’Rourke race? Because if O’Rourke wants to become the first Democratic senator from Texas in 30 years, he’s going to have to do what Texas Republicans did in the 1970s and 80s: convince significant numbers in the opposing party to cast a ballot for him.

O’Rourke’s big problem is that during a time of deep partisan divisions in America, he’s not making the slightest effort to persuade Texas Republicans to vote for a Democrat. Instead, he’s simply betting that demographics and voter turnout will carry him to victory.

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At his rallies, O’Rourke is fond of talking about overcoming party labels and bringing Texans of all political stripes together, but his policy preferences reflect orthodox – that is, progressive – Democratic policies. He supports gun control, abortion and higher taxes, all of which are badly out of step with the vast majority of Republican voters in Texas. Rather than compromise on any one of these or other issues, O’Rourke is hoping to outmuscle GOP voters at the polls.

In the end, maybe it will work. Texas has notoriously low voter turnout, and increasing the total number of people at the polls will almost certainly help O’Rourke. But given the electoral history of Texas, it’s a long-shot strategy. If O’Rourke – or any Democrat, for that matter – really wants to win in Texas, they will probably have to do it the old-fashioned way: persuade erstwhile opponents to come over to their side.