Turning Texas blue is a persistent Democratic fantasy. And giving Ted Cruz a sound thrashing amounts to a bipartisan passion, although Republicans might prefer that he keep his Senate seat. In 2018, these hopes will collide, supplying an irresistible political drama. Cruz, for several reasons, has a dangerously low approval rating in Texas—38 percent—and the Democrats have a young, charismatic challenger named Beto O’Rourke, who’s running a campaign similar to Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia, positioning himself as a politician for all Texans. He’s looking to pick up the voters that Cruz has alienated with his relentless rightward tacking, his absence from the state as he focused on his presidential campaign, his acrobatic flip-flops on Donald Trump, and his notorious unlikeability. View more “I am not smart enough, and I haven't hired, you know, the political consultants or pollsters who are smart enough—or think they are smart enough—to have some grand strategy on how to exploit this issue or that person or micro-target this population or the other,” O’Rourke said in an interview with the Hive. “I’m just going everywhere, listening and talking with everyone . . . I want to know what is on their minds, what they care about and what they expect from their next senator. Then I want to make sure I can deliver on that.” The 44-year-old El Paso congressman is a former punk rocker who played in a band called Foss. He has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and started his own technology company. He speaks fluent Spanish and took his wife, Amy, across the U.S.-Mexico border into Juarez for their first date. And as Austin-based political strategist Brendan Steinhauser put it, it doesn’t hurt that O'Rourke “looks like a damn Kennedy.” In recent years, Democrats and Texas have had a relationship much like Charlie Brown and the football. The Hillary Clinton campaign fantasized about winning Texas, but lost it to Trump by a nine point margin. In the 2014 gubernatorial race, Wendy Davis—the Ivy League-educated, telegenic state senator who rose to national prominence for her marathon filibuster of an anti-abortion bill—was supposed to turn the tide. She lost to former Texas attorney general Greg Abbott by 20 points. “Wendy had all the money, all the energy, the story, the narrative and did no better,” Steinhauser, who served as Senator John Cornyn’s campaign manager and worked for the conservative PAC FreedomWorks, said. Even many Democrats don’t believe that 2018 is the year Texas could change color after a decades-long Republican winning streak in statewide elections. Congressman Joaquin Castro, who, along with his twin brother, former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development head Julian Castro, is often pointed to as the future of the Texas Democratic party, passed on a run earlier this month. The talk in Texas is that he’s saving his ammo for a campaign against Cornyn, who’s up for re-election in 2020, a presidential year when turnout, especially minority turnout, is likely to be higher. But there’s a school of thought that President Trump changes the equation. Harold Cook, a long-time Democratic strategist in Texas mused, “In a typical year . . . the only thing you have to do in Texas to win an election is be the Republican nominee and avoid getting hit by a bus before Election Day.” But Cook also believes that 2018 could be the atypical year Democrats have waited for. He characterized Beto O’Rourke’s entry into the race as “an embarrassment of riches” that he is “not exactly sure Texas Democrats deserve” at a time when the party could actually break the Republicans’ winning streak. “It is not just wishing because Ted Cruz is an ass. It’s more than that,” Cook said. “To separate this from wishing, you really do have to have an overriding, probably national, cloud over the Republican brand. I can’t think of a bigger cloud than Donald Trump.”

Texas Republicans claim to be salivating over the prospect of an O’Rourke matchup. “We have never seen anybody with his ideology elected in Texas. If elected, he would be one of the most liberal senators in the nation. He would rival Elizabeth Warren,” one long-time Republican operative said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There are places for people like that and there are districts they are likely to represent, that is probably not the Texas Senate.” When O’Rourke announced his Senate run at the end of March, Cruz was quick to launch the first of a torrent of attacks on the congressman’s progressive credentials. “A liberal Democrat is announcing a campaign today to try to turn TX blue,” he tweeted with a link to his campaign Web site. And in the weeks since, Cruz has tried to tie O'Rourke to the boogeymen of the right, Rosie O’Donnell and George Soros. Hyper-partisanship, O’Rourke said, is a “pretty f--ked up way to run a country.” But Cruz has work to do among his own party in Texas. Cruz and his arch-conservative obstructionist antics have never been popular among the state’s moderate and chamber of commerce Republicans. “I think there are some [Republicans] in the moderate middle that are certainly not going to support him,” Steinhauser said. “There is a huge divide there, so they are going to look at somebody else.” Then there was Cruz’s unforced error at the Republican National Convention when he declared he “was not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and who attack my father” and declined to endorse Trump. His favorability rating among Republicans was nearly halved almost overnight, prompting him to reverse course on Trump two months later. Cruz is politically toxic enough in Texas that even Cornyn, the state’s senior senator and G.O.P. whip, won’t endorse him in his 2018 re-election bid. Cruz’s unpopularity means that there’s only marginal benefit in further tarnishing him personally. So O’Rourke’s attacks, at least for now, are subtler. “I think almost everyone has formed their opinion or made their judgment on Ted Cruz, and they have watched what he has done over the last four years, which was extraordinary in terms of his accomplishments as a presidential candidate . . . But that certainly came at the loss of his constituents in Texas and the people that he was supposed to be serving during those four years and did not,” O’Rourke said when pressed about his opponent. “As in any campaign, part of it is the difference between you and the incumbent if you are the challenger. And part of it—I think the more important part of it—is what you want to achieve for the people that you are campaigning to represent.” By Drew Anthony Smith/Getty Images. Cruz, aligned with the Tea Party and the House Freedom Caucus, is a paragon of partisan politics and dysfunction in Washington, while O’Rourke—like Ossoff—makes plenty of centrist noises. The congressman characterized the enduring reluctance in Congress to reach across the aisle as a “pretty f--ked up way to run a country” and said, “I am not a rocket scientist, but the only way you can get something done in D.C. when you have Republican majority control in the House and the Senate is to work with Republicans, so I am going to work with Republicans.” In recent elections, the focus among G.O.P. candidates in Texas has shifted away from the general election—which they are assumed to win—toward the primary races, where moderate candidates get crowded out. This dynamic has resulted in an outpouring of hyper conservative legislation from Texas—despite a steady shift in demographics over time that traditionally favors Democrats. “What that does is it protects you in the next election. What it doesn’t do is grow a political party. In fact, over time, it will shrink one,” Cook said. “Anger, one of these days, is going to be a powerful motivator in this state.”