Ted Cruz is misunderstood, Ted Cruz tells me.

Out behind Mama Jack's Road House Cafe, the most prominent eatery in Kountze, Texas, the senator is hunkered down in the passenger seat of a Texas-size pickup truck, watching through Ray-Bans as his staffers re-arrange vehicles in his traveling caravan. It's the last stop on a five-day campaign tour—Cruz's tepid counterpoint to the marathon barnstorming that his Democratic opponent, Beto O'Rourke, has become famous for.

At hundreds of town halls, in the most far-flung corners of the state, the size of O'Rourke's worshipful crowds has been growing month after month. Not even well-wishers in his own party know quite what to make of it. This is, after all, Texas, a place where no Democrat has won a statewide election since 1994 and where no Democrat has won a Senate seat since 1988. The psychological impact of such a drought is difficult to overstate: For liberals in Texas, the institutional memory of their old party, or even what it feels like to win, has long ago slipped through the hourglass. And yet this has been the summer of Beto—a giddy campaign season during which descriptive clichés like “Kennedy-esque” and “punk-rock Democrat” have abounded.

O'Rourke's strengths—his charisma and optimism—are Cruz's weaknesses, and the hype that surrounds his opponent is not lost on the senator. You might think Cruz would be sweating things. But he isn't. According to him, the media has this race all wrong—just as it has long gotten him all wrong.

In Cruz's view, he's been maligned and unfairly portrayed for years as a surly right-winger. That's a press concoction, he says. “The nature of the modern media world,” he tells me in his methodical style, “is that in different periods of time, different narratives take hold. Typically those narratives are overstated or caricatures.” The storyline on Cruz, when he first came to power, was that “I was this wild-eyed bomb thrower,” he says. “That was never accurate.”

The truth, Cruz wants me to know, is that he's always been a more lighthearted fellow than he's been given credit for being. “I like to have fun. I enjoy life. I like to make jokes,” he tells me. “In 2013, during the Obamacare filibuster, I read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor. I did a Darth Vader impression. Turned to Mike Lee and said, ‘Mike, I am your father.’ During the presidential campaign, I did Simpsons impressions and re-enacted scenes from The Princess Bride.” Politics these days has gotten so serious, he complains.

This pivot toward congeniality makes some sense for Cruz, who's re-emerging from the humiliation of his 2016 loss to Trump—and no doubt looking to improve some dismal favorability numbers. No surprise then that this amiable side of Cruz was on display earlier in the day, inside Mama Jack's, where he spent nearly a third of his 12-minute speech discussing a well-publicized charity basketball game he'd played against Jimmy Kimmel. But his constituents had more pressing concerns.

When it came time for questions, one of the first, from an older woman, was about a recent viral video showing a man wearing a MAGA hat getting a drink lobbed in his face. It upset her.

“All of us are horrified at how divided our society is. How much anger there is. It's really sad to see,” Cruz told her. The senator, who for years was the most well-known plotter in the reactionary rebellion against President Barack Obama, seemed pained by the rancor of our times.

Liberals had forgotten that “we live in a society where we can disagree with each other with civility. We can have fun; we can laugh! You don't have to take yourself that seriously.”