Maybe it’s impossible for any Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas in 2018.

But if you’re a Democrat hoping to find an opening in this state’s seemingly impenetrable red wall, there’s only one way to do it. You have to create the sense that you’re leading not just a campaign, but a crusade.

From the beginning of his underdog quest for Ted Cruz’s U.S. Senate seat, Beto O’Rourke seemed to grasp that point. That’s why the El Paso congressman talks about this year’s election in grand historical terms. During his Tuesday morning East Side town hall at the Ella Austin Center, he argued that this election cycle was the most important one this country has seen since 1860.

It’s a highly debatable point, given the economic desperation of 1932 and the international dangers of 1940, just to offer two examples. O’Rourke can only overcome this state’s entrenched electoral math, however, by creating a sense of profound urgency, by convincing the apathetic and the disillusioned and the chronically cynical to answer a historical challenge.

On Monday night, O’Rourke began a two-day San Antonio mini-tour with a boisterous appearance at a South Side VFH hall. And he launched that visit with something he likes to call the “history book test.”

“How will future generations think about what we did or failed to do?” O’Rourke asked a crowd of about 800 supporters.

In particular, O’Rourke pondered what those future Americans will make of President Donald Trump’s plan to spend $30 billion for a 2,000-mile wall along the Mexican border at a time when this country is grappling with problems such as overwhelming student debt, underfunded public schools and “the fact that millions of our fellow Texans cannot afford to see a doctor” or receive needed medications.

“If they read that we failed them and built this wall,” O’Rourke said, “you know what they’re going to be thinking: ‘Who were those pendejos in 2018 who let this happen?’”

O’Rourke’s bilingual call to action recalled nothing so much as Ronald Reagan’s legendary impromptu speech at the end of the 1976 Republican National Convention, when the party’s presidential nominee, Gerald Ford, invited Reagan, his defeated challenger, to address the delegates.

Reagan, who knew a thing or two about how to make a campaign feel like a crusade, talked about writing a letter for a time capsule that would be opened in 100 years and how it made him consider what the people of 2076 would make of the decisions made by his contemporaries.

“Will they look back with appreciation,” Reagan asked, “and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom?’”

On Monday, O’Rourke relayed the story of a man who recently told him that he would vote for a box of cookies over Ted Cruz. There simply aren’t enough Box of Cookies Democrats in this state, however, to send O’Rourke to the Senate and that’s why he keeps trying to separate himself from political orthodoxy.

He famously committed to only accept money from individual donors (not political action committees) and, with a $2.4-million fundraising haul over the final quarter of 2017, easily out-raised Cruz. He brags about eschewing consultants and pollsters.

He goes out of his way to cite instances in which he collaborated with Republicans on legislation and embraces a cause generally associated with the GOP: congressional term limits. (O’Rourke would like to see House members limited to eight years and senators to 12.)

At the same time, he never comes off as pandering to the opposition, in the way that Wendy Davis did when she caved on gun control during her failed 2014 gubernatorial campaign. He merely sounds like he’s fed up with partisan gamesmanship standing in the way of constructive action.

Much has been made of O’Rourke’s Kennedy-esque looks and there are moments, when he stabs the air for emphasis, that he suggests a taller, thinner Bobby Kennedy who happened to be raised on the West Texas border and inspired by the irreverent energy of punk rock. To be sure, he inspires a Kennedy-esque level of devotion from his followers.

O’Rourke proudly talks about already having visited 211 of the state’s 254 counties, including King County, which Cruz won with 96 percent of the vote in 2012; about making his case to the voters of the Valley, who are generally assumed to be safely in the Democratic column.

“We’re taking nobody for granted,” he said Tuesday at Ella Austin. “Writing nobody off.”

Of course, he can’t afford to.

ggarcia@express-news.net

@gilgamesh470