Velma Hernandez cast her first vote 40 years ago, but she never considered working on a campaign until last December.

Hernandez, 58, went to see Beto O’Rourke speak and came away a convert.

“I said to myself,” Hernandez recalled, “‘OK, I agree with him on everything that he stands for. I’m going to do what I can to help get him elected.’”

That meant volunteering to serve as a precinct captain with San Antonio for Beto, the local contingent of crusaders determined to get the El Paso congressman elected to the U.S. Senate.

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That effort fell short Tuesday night, as O’Rourke dropped the closest statewide contest in Texas in a generation. Along the way, O’Rourke emerged as a political rock star, with viral videos and endorsements from celebrities ranging from Beyonce to Natalie Portman.

The real story of the O’Rourke campaign, however, came from the dedicated foot soldiers who basically sacrificed a year of their lives to accomplish the impossible for a Democratic Senate candidate, running against the 2016 GOP presidential runner-up, in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in 24 years.

Hernandez is an unsung part of that story. She started block walking for O’Rourke in January and helped execute the Low Voter Precinct Project, an effort by San Antonio for Beto to infiltrate underperforming areas and get people to the polls.

“I was very disappointed when I saw that my precinct was one of the low-voter precincts. So I thought, ‘You know what? You’re going to have to try to do something about it.’”

Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to like the fact that both Bexar County and the state of Texas came out to vote for this midterm election in a way that we’ve never seen. More than 540,000 voted in Bexar County, compared with 304,000 for the 2014 midterms. And Texas early voting numbers exceeded the total 2014 turnout.

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O’Rourke and his followers played a big role in that. His supporters saw the candidate relentlessly crisscrossing the state’s 254 counties, finding joy in the exhausting grind of the political process, and they got carried away with the sense of possibility he offered.

That spirit manifested itself in the Burro Brigade, a group of 30 local volunteers who drove anyone who needed a ride to polling sites on Election Day.

The brainchild of local artist Cruz Ortiz, the Burro Brigade provided 42 rides Tuesday, and perfectly captured the spirit of O’Rourke’s 20-month, do-it-yourself adventure.

Ortiz said Tuesday that one male voter asked his Burro Brigade driver, after he cast his vote, if she could take him for a raspa. Of course, she did.

That spirit also could be seen in the commitment of Ruby Perez, described by fellow group member Susan Korbel as “the queen of the South Side.”

“She’s gone to every single door, every single retail establishment, everything,” Korbel said.

O’Rourke’s defeat couldn’t hide the fact that he put a serious dent in a Republican red wall that had rendered every U.S. Senate race in this state since 1988 a foregone conclusion for the GOP.

The big question underpinning O’Rourke’s campaign was whether it would be the first major step in a Democratic bid to shift the political power in this state, or whether it would be revealed as a trendy, cult-of-personality movement that dies after Election Day.

In other words, would his highly competitive performance be a source of encouragement to long-suffering Dems, or further cause for demoralization, because they invested so much hope in his chances for victory?

ELECTIONS 2018: Results from the General Election in Texas

The coming months will answer that question, but Ernest Gonzales sees this campaign as a beginning, not an end.

Gonzales, a 2016 Bernie Sanders acolyte who joined the San Antonio for Beto group, said the pro-O’Rourke collective is determined to build on what it accomplished this year; to mobilize again, possibly for the 2017 municipal elections.

“I think it’s the start of a blue wave,” Gonzales said.

Even as Democrats fell Tuesday in one statewide race after another, the dominant takeaway was how unexpectedly tight some of these races were; how Dan Patrick had to sweat to retain the lieutenant governor’s office, and how Attorney General Ken Paxton got pushed by Democratic challenger Justin Nelson.

It had the feel of early ’70s elections when then-dominant Texas Democrats could sense that Republicans were gaining on them but didn’t know exactly what to do about it.

“We did the best that we could,” Hernandez said this week.

She was talking about her local volunteer group, but the sentiment could also be applied to her candidate and her party.

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