Filmmaker Richard Linklater debuted a third attack ad against incumbent Texas senator Ted Cruz Saturday. As in Linklater's previous spots, Sonny Carl Davis reprises his role as the straight-shooting small-town sage he played in the director's 2012 film Bernie to take jabs at the incumbent senator. This time, Davis knocks Cruz's absence-heavy Senate record: Cruz's term in the upper house was interrupted by his 2016 presidential bid, which found him straying far afield from D.C. and Texas.

"I like a guy who travels around the whole state of Texas and meets people he wants to represent," says Davis, referring to Cruz challenger Beto O'Rourke's successful goal of campaigning in each of Texas's 254 counties. "Ted’s been to every county… in Iowa!" continues Davis, while the ad notes that Cruz's attendance record places him in the bottom 10 percent of Senators. "I’m not paying for that anymore. Six more years of your aspirations? You go, Ted! Don’t let us get in your way."

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The ad follows on the heels of a spot that found Davis giving his take on a burger-based beef, backing O'Rourke's allegiance to local chain Whataburger and criticizing Cruz, whose time spent traversing the country apparently gave him a taste for the exotic flavors of out-of-state-chain White Castle. The spat got its start when a Cruz spokesperson inexplicably dubbed O'Rourke a "a Triple Meat Whataburger liberal who is out of touch with Texas values.”

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Though each ad is incredibly funny, their impact on O'Rourke's campaign is unclear. Davis's character, who in Bernie described Austin as the "People's Republic of Austin, with a bunch of hairy-legged women and liberal fruitcakes," is a likely surrogate for the types of borderline Trump supporters O'Rourke's campaign hopes to peel away. Such voters may be repulsed by Cruz's infamously unlikeable persona, even if they aren't totally onboard with O'Rourke's progressive policies. Cruz is making his own effort to build even more support among the President's base—Trump will be appearing at a rally Monday night at Houston's 19,000-seat Toyota Center to support the Cruz's re-election bid.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

But Linklater, though a proud Texan who in films like Bernie, Dazed and Confused, and Boyhood created amazing cinematic love letters to his home state, is just the sort of liberal Austinite that Davis's character mocks as a crazy Marxist. And urban progressives are one voter base O'Rourke isn't struggling to fire up. The ads are a gas, but a liberal filmmaker hiring an actor to play an "authentic" Texan is a tricky balancing act, one that could easily backfire in Cruz's favor. The commercials play best with the progressive voters whose support O'Rourke already commands, take a gamble to appeal to white Trump voters, and offer little to the Latino voters his campaign desperately needs to turn out.



Luckily, O'Rourke—a native of the border city of El Paso and a fluent Spanish speaker—has seemed responsive to criticism that his campaign neglected Latino voters. Vice reported that as of this month O'Rourke was, though much belatedly, expanding his presence by setting up offices in Latino communities. As much fun as the Linklater ads are, that's likely the kind of work that can truly move the needle in this tightening race.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io