For more than a year, Beto O’Rourke has campaigned to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate knowing that a successful election strategy would depend on increased turnout by Texas Democrats and traditional non-voters in the 2018 midterms. For the final month of the campaign, O’Rourke’s field organization has channelled its get-out-the-vote efforts into more than seven hundred pop-up campaign offices. All over the state, people have offered their living rooms, home offices, bars, garages, restaurant patios, and breweries as spaces for neighborhood volunteers to gather for outreach efforts.

Paid staffers who oversee several pop-ups at once are available to do trainings, supply campaign literature, and coördinate strategy, but the spaces are volunteer-run, often by homeowners, many of whom have kept their doors open to their neighbors for nearly a month. They offer snacks, bug spray, or rain ponchos to block-walkers, or a quiet place to sit for people making phone calls. After several election cycles where targeted analytics and social media dominated discussions of strategy, the pop-ups are a return to the belief that face-to-face interaction is what motivates voters the most.