For a democratically elected senator, Ted Cruz has few friends in Washington. “There’s not a lot of love lost for the guy,” Josh Holmes, Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff, once quipped to The Washington Post. Cruz, for his part, has attempted to appear in on the bit, even leveraging it to paint himself as a so-called political outsider. “I will acknowledge that, when I’m in the Senate dining room, I’ve sometimes wondered if I need a food taster,” he joked during a 2015 event, adding at another point, “If you ain’t never stood up to Washington, at any time in your life, you’re not gonna suddenly discover the courage to do so if you happen to land at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” For a while, the schtick worked: the past several election cycles have seen a slew of Republican candidates successfully tout their anti-establishment impulses and talent for disruption, leading to a surge of victories and a system that rewarded unlikeable qualities.

But of course, that was before Cruz was up against Beto O’Rourke, who’s displayed an uncanny ability both to out-raise Cruz, two to one, and to fuel turnout in increasingly purple and blue urban and suburban districts. Buoyed by an anticipated Democratic wave, O’Rourke is also charismatic—a quality that even Cruz’s fellow Republicans have admitted may come into play. “There’s a very real possibility we will win a race for Senate in Florida and lose a race in Texas for Senate, O.K.?,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told donors at a private event on Saturday, according to The New York Times. “I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s a possibility. How likable is a candidate? That still counts.”

Cruz, naturally, dismissed Mulvaney as “some political guy in Washington.” But there are signs that he and his proponents are beginning to panic. “It should be a 10- or 15-point race—it’s not. It’s a zero- to 4-point race,” Rick Tyler, Cruz’s former communications director, said bluntly on MSNBC last Sunday. Even the most begrudging of Cruz’s allies appears alarmed. “We’re not bluffing, this is real, and it is a serious threat,” Texas Senator John Cornyn told Politico. “If Ted does his job and we do ours, I think we’ll be fine. But if we have donors sitting on the sidelines thinking that, ‘Well, this isn’t all that serious,’ or, ‘I don’t need to be concerned,’ then that’s a problem.”

The potential embarrassment of a loss in Texas has prompted an all-out fund-raising blitz from all corners of the conservative world: Club for Growth Action recently launched a seven-figure ad buy, part of which attacks O’Rourke; the Family Research Council and the Tea Party Patriots are ramping up statewide outreach campaigns; and behind the scenes, groups aligned with the Koch Brothers, McConnell, and several deep-pocketed G.O.P. donors are discussing how best to help Cruz. Cornyn is planning to stump for his fellow Texan senator. And it’s even driven Cruz to call upon his most formidable campaign-trail antagonist: according to Politico, under the duress of increasingly iffy poll numbers, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick showed up in Washington in late July to beg the White House to send in Donald Trump. (Trump obliged, tweeting, “I will be doing a major rally for Senator Ted Cruz in October. I’m picking the biggest stadium in Texas we can find.”)

Cruz is counting on the cavalry, plus his ultra-conservative stance, and Texas’s reliably Republican voter base—which voted him into office by a double-digit margin in 2012—to push him over the finish line. In an election year in which dozens of formerly safe Republicans are in danger of losing their seats, however, the massive effort required to keep the unlikable Cruz safe—potentially at the expense of knocking out vulnerable Democrats—has not been lost on his frenemies. “We’re all adults, and I’d like to think that we’re professionals,” said Cornyn, whom Cruz once refused to endorse for re-election. “We understand what’s at stake.”