HOUSTON — Beto O’Rourke didn’t make it to the promised land in his bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Tuesday, but he did lead Texas Democrats to the Red Sea where they could witness the waters begin to part.

O’Rourke, a three-term Democratic congressman from El Paso who gave up a sure bet for re-election to run for the Senate seat, came within less than 3 percentage points of Cruz, a stunning outcome, achieved by enlarging the electorate beyond expectations to very nearly presidential year levels. He also demonstrated the coattails to carry some down-ballot candidates to victory or surprisingly strong showings, in a synergy that worked in both directions.

Texas Democrats flipped two congressional seats — and put a scare into a handful of other Republicans like U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul of Austin, who beat Democrat Mike Siegel by 4 points, and John Carter of Round Rock, who beat Democrat MJ Hegar by 3 points — and they won a dozen GOP state House seats and two GOP state Senate seats.

"There's no doubt that Beto O’Rourke had coattails, but it is also the case that Beto benefited from strong, well-funded congressional races in and around the urban areas that he needed to turn out for him," said Josh Blank, manager of polling and research for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. "This is what happens when a party actually organizes and recruits good candidates and runs good campaigns because the fact is that Beto O'Rourke couldn't be in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin at the same time."

Gov. Greg Abbott thumped Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez by more than 13 points.

Abbott strategist Dave Carney said Wednesday that Abbott's huge win disproved a Democratic article of faith that Republican candidates couldn't win if turnout soared. He said the Abbott campaign could have run up bigger margins against Valdez, but it didn't strive to get 700,000 Abbott-O'Rourke voters it had identified to the polls — though many voted anyway — because it didn't want to hurt Cruz and down-ballot Republican candidates, whose campaigns were depending on the Abbott turnout operation to compete with O'Rourke's upstart field operation.

'Enlarged electorate'

But Matt Angle, a veteran Democratic strategist, noted that Abbott's re-election margin was down from a 20-point spread in 2014, and "that has nothing to do with either Wendy Davis or Lupe Valdez. That has to do with the enlarged electorate."

In heralding his son's surprisingly narrow victory Tuesday, Rafael Cruz declared at the Cruz victory party Tuesday night that "Texas remains bright red."

But O'Rourke outperformed his opponent in eight of the 10 largest counties in the state, while Cruz, on his way to winning 222 counties, earned 50.1 percent of the statewide vote, the weakest performance for any Republican Senate or presidential candidate since 2008.

O'Rourke won 32 counties, including six Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, among them Williamson and Hays counties in Central Texas and Tarrant County, a seedbed of the tea party activity that came in reaction to the Obama presidency. Tarrant has come to be known as the most conservative large urban county in America, and O'Rourke was buoyed by local campaigns, especially Beverly Powell's success in reclaiming Davis' former state Senate seat from the incumbent Republican, Konni Burton.

Fewer straight tickets

By topping the ticket, O'Rourke also appears to have seriously disrupted Republican straight-ticket voting, which for years had yielded results in which there was little fluctuation in the margins achieved by GOP candidates for state office up and down the ballot. But that was not the case this year, with Abbott winning by nearly 14 points, while Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, despite huge advantages in name recognition and resources over Democrat Mike Collier, won by only 4.9 points. Likewise, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller defeated Democrat Kim Olson by 4.9 points, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for securities fraud for most of his term, hung on to defeat Democrat Justin Nelson by less than 4 points.

Also, even as O'Rourke fell short overall, according to the CNN exit poll, he won 58 percent of voters under 45, and 71 percent of voters under 30. Cruz won 58 percent of the votes of those 45 and older. O'Rourke, according to the exit poll, won 34 percent of white voters. Four years ago, Wendy Davis captured only a quarter of the white vote.

What made the difference?

"They are different white voters," part of O'Rourke's expanded electorate, said Blank.

After victory was secure, Cruz's campaign manager Jeff Roe described O'Rourke to reporters Tuesday night as "a phenom" who "grew in the campaign. We could watch it as it happened."

"I can't imagine that he doesn't take that on the road," said Roe, who ran Cruz's campaign for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. "The fervent following he has nationally, no one compares to him on their side, no one does. He is in a league of his own in the Democrat Party, and if he doesn't use that to run for president, then I don't know what you do with it."