WASHINGTON - Beto O'Rourke, the Democrats' latest, best hope of turning Texas "blue," recalls a refrain he's heard on the national fundraising and endorsement circuit: "I've had my heart broken by Texas before."

The memory comes as the congressman from El Paso sits in a bare office near the U.S. Capitol, a faraway look in his eyes as he recites a long list of dusty border towns he's toured on the campaign trail, sometimes combined with family camping trips juiced by the sight of scorpions under the stars.

It's been more than two decades since a Democrat won a statewide election in Texas. In the last attempt, state Sen. Wendy Davis spent some $40 million and lost the 2014 governor's race by more than 20 percentage points to Republican Greg Abbott.

Now comes O'Rourke, a three-term congressman from the far west corner of the state, challenging a political dragon-slayer in his own right: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a tea party icon who proved to be Donald Trump's most enduring rival in the Republican presidential primaries of 2016.

Cruz's evident ambition - seen in his first trip to Iowa, within months of being sworn in as a senator - will be central to O'Rourke's case as he crisscrosses Texas trying to rally long-marginalized Democrats, independents, first-time voters, Latinos, the anti-Trump "resistance," and anyone else who might have grown weary of post-Trump Republicanism.

Race not like Alabama

Strategists on both sides know that the backdrop for the U.S. Senate race in Texas - possibly one of the marquee races of the 2018 midterm elections - will be the push or pull of Trump, who bested Hillary Clinton in Texas by 9 percentage points.

For O'Rourke, a Spanish nicknamed, fourth-generation Irish-American from El Paso, that is a source of hope. But first, the 45-year-old ex-punk-rocker with the toothy, Kennedyesque smile will have to prove it can be done - even as he eschews polls, Beltway consultants and, most importantly, political action committee money.

"They have to know it's possible," O'Rourke said of the grass-roots volunteers he hopes to mobilize.

His case might have become slightly more plausible given the Democrats' upset victory in a hotly contested Senate race in deep crimson Alabama.

Within minutes of Doug Jones' win over scandal-scarred Republican Roy Moore in early December, O'Rourke's campaign fired off an email to potential donors: "Tonight, the eyes of the nation were on Alabama. Tomorrow, Texas and 2018."

Texas Republicans are quick to point out that even though Cruz backed Moore, he's a very different breed of cat from the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice tarred with allegations about pursuing teenage girls.

Like Moore, Cruz might have become a lightning-rod of criticism from liberals and traditional conservative Republicans in the Senate. But his personal rectitude has not been seriously questioned beyond the Trump campaign's clumsy attempts in 2016 to tie him to tabloid stories about the JFK assassination and extramarital affairs.

The son of a Southern Baptist preacher who emigrated from Cuba, Cruz, who himself was born in Canada, knows how to speak in the cadences of Texas' politically influential Christian Right. Combining mathematical rigor and Harvard law erudition, Cruz has built one of the most formidable fundraising and grass-roots organizing machines in American politics.

Harnessing the energy of a resurgent Democratic base, O'Rourke was able to best Cruz in the money chase in the second-quarter of 2017, but he entered the fall with some $3 million in his campaign kitty, about half of Cruz's total.

O'Rourke could boast of 7,000 more individual donors than Cruz through the end of September, when their last financial reports were filed. But from a modern campaign perspective he will be fighting with one hand behind his back: Though he's accepted campaign contributions from political action committees in the past, O'Rourke has sworn off PAC money in the race against Cruz. He also says he's dispensing with polling. This stands in contrast to Cruz who, while once positioned as a Washington "outsider" taking on the political establishment, now commands one of the city's best data analysis operations.

The digital tools that his 2016 presidential campaign developed contributed mightily to his victory in the Iowa caucuses, arguably the epicenter of conservative evangelical political strength outside the South.

"You can quibble about whether Ted Cruz continues to be the head of the conservative movement," said senior Cruz adviser Brian Phillips, in a February post-mortem on the 2016 elections. "But the movement is still there, and we've got the keys to the engine."

Looking for 'blue wave'

Texas Democrats are hoping that after a year of tumultuous Trump leadership amid the ongoing Russia probe, the gas might be running out of the conservative machine, or that their own tanks are being freshly filled with new energy and vigor.

"A blue wave is rising in the Lone Star State," said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa. "Texas Democrats are marching, organizing, and stepping up to serve."

O'Rourke, counting on the growing friction between Trump, the Republicans, and the Hispanic community over immigration, already has started making a play for Texas' burgeoning Latino population, using his fluent Spanish to do interviews on Spanish-language radio and television.

The flip-side of that strategy, however, may be the Republicans' overwhelming advantage among white voters in rural Texas, a demographic where Democrats know they will need to make inroads.

One problem confronting O'Rourke is that while Democrats are stepping up to run in every Texas congressional district for the first time in decades, there will be no other high-profile Democrat running statewide to help him draw voters to the polls.

Apart from Texas U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, who considered a Cruz challenge, no other Democrat with statewide name recognition was willing to take on the job.

In many ways, O'Rourke is running on his own. Until he kicked off his campaign last summer at a rooftop rally in El Paso, he was largely known as a youthful congressman from West Texas who favored marijuana legalization and opposed a border wall. Facing a Republican with nearly universal name recognition across the nation, he could barely register a blip even in Texas polls.

O'Rourke has sought to change that with a peripatetic campaign strategy that will take him to all of the state's 254 counties by Election Day. He started a "Town Haulin' Across Texas" tour last summer, hoping to contrast his take-all-comers town halls to Cruz's predilection for more controlled business, party or activist settings.

Looking for signs of a wave, Democrats point to Trump's relatively modest victory in Texas over Clinton in 2016. That 52-43 percent split was significantly narrower than Mitt Romney's 16-point margin, 57-41 percent, over President Barack Obama in 2012. In 2008, John McCain bested Obama 55-43 percent, a difference of 12 points.

Republicans confident

Republicans, meanwhile, look at the same numbers and see a ceiling for Democrats in Texas in the low 40s. Even in the face of conservative skepticism and establishment Republican disdain, Trump still won Texas by some 800,000 votes, meaning Democrats have a lot of ground to make up.

"There is no reason to believe that Texas is turning into a Democratic state," said Texas GOP pollster Chris Wilson, a top strategist in Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign.

Like Davis, O'Rourke's hope for a Democratic resurgence in Texas has garnered national attention, with profiles in the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone ("Beto O'Rourke: Ted Cruz's Punk-Rock Problem").

Even if midterm elections generally favor the opposition party, Democrats in 2018 will be defending 10 U.S. Senate seats in states carried by Trump. Cruz, no matter how much liberals dislike him, is unlikely to become a top national target for Democrats or their donors, even as they vie to overcome the GOP's one-seat majority in the Senate.

If the 2018 Texas Senate race comes down to money and built-in party infrastructure, most analysts give it to Cruz hands down. But if it becomes a referendum on Trump, even Republicans are bracing for a fight.

"In 2018, we could see a reversal of what Obama did," Wilson said. "Obama motivated Republicans. Trump motivates Democrats."

But if voters turn on Trump in 2018, as they did in Alabama, New Jersey and Virginia in 2017, Cruz has some cards to play. He will run under the Trump banner of tax cuts, Obamacare repeal and a border wall - 180 degrees the opposite of O'Rourke's liberal politics - and yet his personal clashes with Trump during the 2016 GOP primaries could give him more latitude to run as his own man.

He also will be running with a nod from GOP maverick and ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who has turned on much of the GOP's Senate leadership.

"Cruz has played the Donald Trump issue as well as can be expected," said University of Houston political analyst Brandon Rottinghaus. "He's been able to articulate a role where he's both a team player and an outside bomb-thrower, and that's a hard needle to thread."

Clinton's Texas campaign chairman, Garry Mauro, the last Democrat to win a statewide race when he was re-elected Texas land commissioner in 1994, still sees the 2016 Cruz-Trump smackdown a chink in Cruz's armor.

Mauro believes Cruz should have suffered permanent damage when he bent his knee to Trump after the brash New Yorker insulted members of his family in campaign interviews and on Twitter. Mauro sees that as an affront to rugged Texas values. "I don't see how Texas' U.S. senator can support Trump after what he said about his wife and father," he said.

But O'Rourke, temperamentally intellectual and issue-oriented, seems an unlikely attack dog. Like Cruz, he has an Ivy League pedigree, having studied English at Columbia University. He served for six years on the city council in El Paso, where he made a name for himself as a champion of brotherly love between El Paso and its cross-border neighbor, Ciudad Juarez.

He's convinced that Texans, even many conservatives, see the border as a source of pride, not a threat. "Texans live the border," he said, "It's something they're proud of and understand as a source of strength."

On the flip side, he also was an advocate of downtown development, an agenda that got him cross-wise with Mexican-American activists who feared the gentrification of their neighborhoods.

The Cruz campaign's opposition research team will have no trouble unearthing old ethics complaints alleging conflicts-of-interest involving O'Rourke's wealthy father-in-law, William Sanders, a real estate investor who was involved in one controversial redevelopment plan. The charges were dismissed by an independent commission.

In his first run for the council, O'Rourke also had to live down two youthful indiscretions which come back to haunt him from time to time: a 1995 burglary arrest involving a prank climb over a fence at the University of Texas in El Paso, and a DWI in 1998. Both charges were dismissed.

O'Rourke calls his behavior in both incidents "stupid," offering no excuses, not even his youth. "It does nothing to diminish how dumb it was," the married father of three says.

Using social media

If O'Rourke has his own secret weapon, it's his own openness and facility with social media, which he has used to great effect in Congress. He raised hackles when he used Facebook Live to stream the Democrats' House floor protest pressing for gun legislation in the aftermath of a mass nightclub shooting in Orlando. The images went viral on the Internet, as they would again when he teamed up with San Antonio Republican Will Hurd on a cross-country road trip of bipartisan comity during weather-related flight cancellations.

Video streaming has become a standard feature of his travels across the state, inviting viewers along for the ride between campaign stops, where they can listen to him expound on the weather, history, music, family life and politics.

It's a classic underdog strategy, one that Democrats hope will level the playing field, pull back the veil on politics, and excite the ranks for what promises to be a steep, uphill climb through big media markets and small-town Texas.

"At 50,000 feet," Democrat Mauro said hopefully, "Beto O'Rourke is the classic reform candidate who comes in and wins against Ted Cruz, the classic machine politician."