By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Beto O’Rourke and his surprisingly durable challenge against Ted Cruz in bright red Texas. You’ve heard about how he’s visited all 254 Texas counties in his Toyota Tundra. You’ve seen videos of him sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls. You’ve watched the rangy 45-year-old congressman skateboard through a Whataburger parking lot in Brownsville. And if you’re following the 2018 midterms, you know that O’Rourke only trails Cruz by a single digit while running an unabashedly progressive campaign, making Democrats around the country salivate at the prospect of a blue wave crashing everywhere from Galveston to El Paso.

That’s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat’s campaign points to something rather obvious: O’Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race—and yes, even if he loses—O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O’Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.

The most appealing thing about O’Rourke is both delightfully uncomplicated and extremely powerful: he talks about politics like you and your friends do. “I am so sick of the stuff that’s been made safe for politics,” O’Rourke told me earlier this month as we drove in his truck through South Texas, between a pair of town halls in Beeville and Corpus Christi. “It’s so bad. It has no impact. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t excite me. I want to do what excites me. That’s my goal at least.”

“Democrats in Texas have been losing statewide elections for Senate for 30 years,” he said. “So you can keep doing the same things, talk to the same consultants, run the same polls, focus-group drive the message. Or you can run like you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s what my wife, Amy, and I decided at the outset. What do we have to lose? Let’s do this the right way, the way that feels good to us. We don’t have a pollster. Let’s talk about the things that are important to us, regardless of how they poll. Let’s not even know how they poll.”

I was following O’Rourke and Cruz around Texas for an episode of Good Luck America, Snapchat’s political documentary series. Cruz, too, is working hard and not taking the race for granted. He’s accessible to the media and packing in supporters at meat ’n’ threes across the state. Cruz’s theory of the race is that Texas is fundamentally red, that there simply aren’t enough Democrats in the state for him to lose. “There are many more conservatives than liberals, and many more common-sense Texans,” he told me. And he has a point: in modern times, no Democratic candidate has hit more than 42 percent in a statewide election. But O’Rourke’s theory is that he can yank new voters out of the woodwork, and when we arrived in Corpus Christi after our drive, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, there were some 4,000 people waiting for him in a bingo hall on the outskirts of town. For a midterm candidate. In August.