Photo: Richard W. Rodriguez, FRE / Associated Press

The members of San Antonio for Beto gathered last Thursday at the Bang Bang Bar to launch a political experiment.

Susan Korbel, a consumer research specialist actively involved in the effort to elect Beto O’Rourke to the United States Senate, had crunched some voting numbers. Korbel found a cluster of Bexar County precincts (many of them on the far west side) that vote overwhelmingly, as in 85-95 percent, Democratic, but are among the county’s lowest performers when it comes to turnout.

A pessimist could look at that combination of factors and come away frustrated. An optimist, and Korbel qualifies as one, takes that same data and sees endless potential for growth.

In response to Korbel’s findings, San Antonio for Beto used last week’s meeting to form five groups, each responsible for infiltrating one of those low-performing precincts. The idea is for group members to connect with Democratic voters in those precincts and get them to refer their non-voter friends to O’Rourke volunteers.

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It’s an expand-the-electorate strategy totally in keeping with the way O’Rourke has thrown out the old political playbooks and taken his message to non-voters, independents and Republicans.

The El Paso congressman, whose race against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz has generated national attention, created excitement on the campaign trail with a DIY aesthetic: driving himself to rallies, hitting all 254 counties in the state, communicating by live-stream and steering clear of political consultants and the kind of conventional wisdom they provide.

“One of the things that we realized is that the people who are coming out to help Beto are an amalgam of many different types that haven’t come out before,” Korbel said, as Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” pulsated through the house speakers at the Bang Bang Bar, a neighborhood dive off San Pedro Avenue. “Untypical Democrats.”

The standard approach to modern political outreach is to zero in on people who have established a pattern of voting and seem likely to sympathize with your cause. There’s an undeniable logic to this strategy, but it creates something of an echo-chamber effect, in which the same people keep communicating with each other and the disenfranchised and disillusioned drift farther away from the political conversation.

San Antonio for Beto is trying to turn that logic on its head.

“We have a group of people who aren’t afraid to talk to non-voters, because they were non-voters,” Korbel said.

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Korbel identified one South Side precinct in which only 60 people, out of roughly 2,800 registered voters, turned out for this year’s primary runoffs. But 54 out of those 60 voters (90 percent) cast their ballots in the Democratic runoff.

To Korbel’s way of thinking, that means the possibility of 2,500 untapped Democrats in a single precinct who aren’t making it to the polls. If San Antonio for Beto can cut into that apathy, precinct by precinct, they can alter the electoral math of Bexar County.

“It’s a two-step process,” Korbel said. “First of all, we’re going to reach out to the core people who have voted multiple times in Democratic primaries. We’re going to make friends with them, because, obviously, you don’t go somewhere and say, ‘We know what you want.’

“Maybe it’s a school community, maybe it’s a church community, maybe they all sit around at one taqueria every morning and talk. We don’t know.”

While five of the six lowest performing Democratic precincts are situated in a triangular zone southwest of Leon Valley, the Beto for San Antonio turnout brigades initially will spread out to various parts of the county, including one precinct close to St. Mary’s University, one on the near west side and one in the China Grove area.

“Many of these precincts don’t have precinct chairs,” Korbel said. “One of the things that freaked us out was that nobody’s paying attention to these areas.”

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Ernest Gonzales, an electronic musician and 2016 Bernie Sanders supporter, is one of the key players in the effort to energize low-propensity precincts in Bexar County.

On his Facebook page, Gonzales recently broke down O’Rourke’s challenge this way:

“We have to convince at least 1 out of every 4 registered Democrats that didn’t vote in the last election to actually do so in November in every major city in TX.”

On Thursday, O’Rourke debuted his first campaign ad, a one-minute montage of iPhone footage, showing the candidate in constant motion.

Korbel and her precinct teams look to be pretty busy themselves over the next three months.

@gilgamesh470

Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470