Beto O'Rourke returned home to El Paso on Monday evening for the final stop of his underdog bid to unseat part-time senator and full-time Trump bootlicker Ted Cruz in Texas. The political prognosticators pin O'Rourke's chances of success at about 20 percent chance on Election Day; this number is both far better than anyone expected in a Republican stronghold that hasn't sent a Democratic senator to Washington in three decades, and also, as they say in Texas, not one on which to bet the ranch.

After listening to his speech at the University of Texas at El Paso, though, if he's worried, you wouldn't know it. While his opponent has spent the race's last few days floating embarrassing crackpot conspiracy theories about O'Rourke's campaign funding the "migrant caravan," O'Rourke himself stuck stubbornly to the issues that affect Texans' day-to-day lives: access to health care, services for veterans, and fair pay for teachers. On immigration, he took a similarly forward-looking tone, comparing his hometown on the U.S.-Mexico border to a modern-day Ellis Island for new generations of people seeking a better life for their families.

"This community defines the positive story of immigration," he told the assembled crowd. "We are a city of immigrants. We are made far stronger, we're more successful, than we would have been without their presence. So we will continue to do what we have always done: Be a nation of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers." He called for an American immigration policy "written not in fear, not in anxiety, not in paranoia, not in lies, but in our real experiences in our families." And he emphasized that these goals are not partisan ones: "Texas is ready to move beyond geography, party, or any other difference that might divide us, and finally come together for our state and this country."

It says a lot about Cruz's political future that after two years of unified Republican government, he (like many of his GOP compatriots) campaigned for re-election not on tax cuts, or health care, or even the flourishing American economy, but instead on stoking anti-immigrant fears and appealing to racial animus. Cruz's most notable accomplishment in Washington has been reinventing himself as a bargain-bin version of Donald Trump, whom he professed to abhor until he realized that pledging his allegiance would be more politically expedient. He has been exposed as a substance-free charlatan who is more interested in remaining in power by any means necessary than in doing the work of governing, and should he eke out a win, it will not be because of the conservative principles that he always imagined would fuel his career in Washington; it will be because of his cheerful willingness to abandon them.

Meanwhile, even in deep-red Texas, O'Rourke has outperformed expectations by tapping in to the same sentiment espoused by politicians like Andrew Gillum in Florida: After two years of being told that they should be afraid and angry, voters are looking for reasons to be hopeful about their country again. This brand of patriotic optimism terrifies people like Cruz, not only because the attendant enthusiasm puts their jobs in jeopardy, but also because they are painfully aware that they have no counterargument.

Here's what O'Rourke had to say to reporters this morning, shortly after casting his ballot:

Texas is not going to be defined by our fears. We're going to be governed by our ambitions. We are going to be fiercely focused on the future. And we're going to do this together. We just do not care about the differences between us right now. We want all of us, Republicans and Democrats and independents alike, to come together and do something great for this country.

No matter how Tuesday ends, Beto O'Rourke has proven that his politics are the politics of the future. Cruz and his ilk will cling to power only for as long as they can convince enough people that life in America is a zero-sum game, and not one day longer.