The most spectacular part of the Beto O’Rourke narrative—beyond the fact that he’s come within spitting distance of Ted Cruz in a Texas Senate race, or that he’s a skateboarding Kennedy doppelgänger, or that he may be the most exciting thing to happen to today’s sluggish Democratic Party—is that he’s somehow managed to manifest all of these qualities in his money game. O’Rourke first shocked the country when he consistently out-raised his well-financed rival, often more than doubling Cruz’s numbers, largely through small donations. On Friday, O’Rourke announced another eye-popping sum for his final-quarter haul: $38.1 million, the all-time, single-quarter record for any Senate candidate in history. “The people of Texas in all 254 counties are proving that when we reject PACs and come together not as Republicans or Democrats but as Texans and Americans, there’s no stopping us,” he said in a statement. (Cruz, by comparison, raised $12 million.)

But as Bernie Sanders demonstrated back in 2016, a massive, sustained influx of grassroots cash does not guarantee victory, and the numbers are there to prove it: though O’Rourke certainly has the cash and the press to elevate his profile, he still lags behind Cruz by a considerable margin. The Real Clear Politics average for October places Cruz ahead of O’Rourke by an average of 7 points, citing polls from The New York Times (which has him up by 8 points) and Quinnipiac (up by 9 points), among others. While it’s not the double-digit margin Republicans usually boast in Texas, it’s wide enough that election watchers are largely placing Texas in the “leaning red” category—that is, barring a completely possible last-minute surprise.

O’Rourke’s lag makes sense within the context of the Texas electorate itself: he has low name recognition in the rapidly growing Hispanic demographic, who he will need to turn out in order to secure victory. (Despite their strong animus against Donald Trump, whose child-separation policy is still reverberating along Texas’s southern border, Hispanics accounted for less than one in five voters in the 2016 election.) Cruz, on the other hand, has an enthusiastic base of white conservative evangelicals who regularly vote in midterm elections, and who gobble up Cruz’s message that O’Rourke is a Texas version of a coastal liberal elite, citing his appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, his sordid punk-rock days, and the fact that both Hollywood and the Democratic machine are fund-raising for him in earnest. At one point, Cruz tweeted a photo of the Hollywood sign being changed to “Betowood,” mocking a fund-raiser hosted by Bravo’s Andy Cohen, and an upcoming one hosted by Judd Apatow. (One could, of course, point out that Cruz also benefits from out-of-state dark money, but fracking billionaires don’t carry the same stigma in Texas as decadent entertainment figures.)

The obstacles O’Rourke must overcome in order to win Texas have prompted several pundits to wonder whether “Betomania,” as Politico’s Jack Shafer put it, is simply the product of a Democratic yearning for a handsome young man to win a red state. “Not since the press corps fell in love with Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign has such a sirocco of worshipful candidate profiles and commentaries appeared in the national press,” he wrote, suggesting that O’Rourke is “lauded and cuddled by reporters for the simple reason that he’s not Ted Cruz, the Skeletor of American politics.”