Beto O'Rourke vs. Ted Cruz and the Fight for America

Ted Cruz is misunderstood, Ted Cruz tells me.

Out behind Mama Jack's Road House Cafe, the most prominent eatery in Kountze, Texas, the senator is hunkered down in the passenger seat of a Texas-size pickup truck, watching through Ray-Bans as his staffers re-arrange vehicles in his traveling caravan. It's the last stop on a five-day campaign tour—Cruz's tepid counterpoint to the marathon barnstorming that his Democratic opponent, Beto O'Rourke, has become famous for.

At hundreds of town halls, in the most far-flung corners of the state, the size of O'Rourke's worshipful crowds has been growing month after month. Not even well-wishers in his own party know quite what to make of it. This is, after all, Texas, a place where no Democrat has won a statewide election since 1994 and where no Democrat has won a Senate seat since 1988. The psychological impact of such a drought is difficult to overstate: For liberals in Texas, the institutional memory of their old party, or even what it feels like to win, has long ago slipped through the hourglass. And yet this has been the summer of Beto—a giddy campaign season during which descriptive clichés like “Kennedy-esque” and “punk-rock Democrat” have abounded.

O'Rourke's strengths—his charisma and optimism—are Cruz's weaknesses, and the hype that surrounds his opponent is not lost on the senator. You might think Cruz would be sweating things. But he isn't. According to him, the media has this race all wrong—just as it has long gotten him all wrong.

In Cruz's view, he's been maligned and unfairly portrayed for years as a surly right-winger. That's a press concoction, he says. “The nature of the modern media world,” he tells me in his methodical style, “is that in different periods of time, different narratives take hold. Typically those narratives are overstated or caricatures.” The storyline on Cruz, when he first came to power, was that “I was this wild-eyed bomb thrower,” he says. “That was never accurate.”

The truth, Cruz wants me to know, is that he's always been a more lighthearted fellow than he's been given credit for being. “I like to have fun. I enjoy life. I like to make jokes,” he tells me. “In 2013, during the Obamacare filibuster, I read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor. I did a Darth Vader impression. Turned to Mike Lee and said, ‘Mike, I am your father.’ During the presidential campaign, I did Simpsons impressions and re-enacted scenes from The Princess Bride.” Politics these days has gotten so serious, he complains.

This pivot toward congeniality makes some sense for Cruz, who's re-emerging from the humiliation of his 2016 loss to Trump—and no doubt looking to improve some dismal favorability numbers. No surprise then that this amiable side of Cruz was on display earlier in the day, inside Mama Jack's, where he spent nearly a third of his 12-minute speech discussing a well-publicized charity basketball game he'd played against Jimmy Kimmel. But his constituents had more pressing concerns.

When it came time for questions, one of the first, from an older woman, was about a recent viral video showing a man wearing a MAGA hat getting a drink lobbed in his face. It upset her.

“All of us are horrified at how divided our society is. How much anger there is. It's really sad to see,” Cruz told her. The senator, who for years was the most well-known plotter in the reactionary rebellion against President Barack Obama, seemed pained by the rancor of our times.

Liberals had forgotten that “we live in a society where we can disagree with each other with civility. We can have fun; we can laugh! You don't have to take yourself that seriously.”

But this crowd was in a pretty serious mood. A man rose and began railing against the Deep State in alarming terms, mumbling something about Ruby Ridge. As Cruz listened, the man reasoned that the FBI was a greater threat to Americans than ISIS, because terrorists could be dispatched with violence, whereas “it's against the law to shoot the FBI.”

Cruz ditched his kumbaya act. “I share your frustration. And it is a frustration that millions across this country share,” he said. He pointed out that the FBI was awash in partisan shenanigans that required urgent attention: “I'm trying to do everything I can” to expose the lies of “[former FBI director] James Comey and [former FBI deputy director] Andrew McCabe.” The answer, Cruz said, was “to get rid of partisan players who are abusing their position and to restore the rule of law.” In other words, more purges. He'd help lead the way.

For all the talk of image softening, here was Cruz being Cruz. And if there's one thing that unites those who aren't fond of him—whether on the right or on the left—it's the feeling that he's playing a character, that he's an insincere opportunist.

O'Rourke's message suffers no such authenticity trouble. His approach, while sometimes light on specifics, favors what feels good and right in the moment—an uplifting, improvisational DIY crusade. Cruz, in response, is doing what he has always done, and perhaps what he can only do: reaching out, once again, to the agitated conservative base. His voters have pulled even further right, and Cruz—despite the lighthearted demeanor—is sprinting after them.

Polls, though scattered, often report that O'Rourke and Cruz are separated by only a single-digit margin in what is now the most watched Senate race in the country. Should Cruz win big, he'll likely vanquish some of the humiliation suffered two years ago at the hands of President Donald Trump and re-invigorate plans to succeed his old nemesis.

If O'Rourke prevails or even does well, such an upset—likely to hinge on suburban and women voters—has the potential to reorder Texas politics and the nation's, too.

The day after Cruz's rally, O'Rourke is in Hutchins, a small town in Dallas County. Though he and Cruz are roughly the same age—45 and 47, respectively—O'Rourke looks and talks like a much newer model. The fervor that greets him verges on the messianic. (A state representative speaking at the event invoked Nelson Mandela.) He feels like a candidate tailored for the moment.

His campaign's product—what Beto offers—is an opportunity for dispirited Democrats to take part in something hopeful. But as Election Day has drawn closer, the tone has slowly shifted. It's gotten more urgent and a bit darker. Our country is in peril, he tells the crowd in Hutchins, and if there isn't a change in 2018, things could get worse: The “slip that we took in 2016, if unchecked in 2018, could become a slide,” he says, and “we could lose the things that have made us who we are for 242 years and counting.” Time is running out. “No pressure, folks. The entire fortune and future and fate of this country rests on our shoulders,” he says. O'Rourke calls the 2018 election the “moment of truth.” There is not the slightest bit of ironic distance here, and the crowd loves it. Somehow, it's cathartic.

Later that day, in the well-off suburb of Farmers Branch, over a thousand people pack a college gymnasium to hear O'Rourke speak, shutting out hundreds more. Even those unable to get into the rally are excited about the attendance. “Wonderful. Awesome,” one turned-away latecomer says. “It's so good that people are coming out.”

Standing in the shade with me near his campaign minivan after the event, O'Rourke acknowledges the tough road ahead—while noting that much good has already been done. His rallies, he says, are about something bigger than the current Senate race. “There's so many things going on right now that literally can't wait until the next election,” he says, still fired up just after having taken selfies with a line of hundreds.

Win or lose, the fervor brought about by the campaign could be leveraged on other issues, he says. “I feel that judgment of my kids and of history if we fail to do this. I mean, it is going to be on us. They won't say that Trump [alone is to blame], because they'll know that this is a democracy that all of us had a chance to participate in. They'll say, ‘Those pendejos in 2018, they were the ones who screwed this up.’ We can't screw this up.”

Cruz, for his part, offers none of that flower-power stuff; it's not in his nature. His campaign is keenly aware of the divisions that exist between people, and he says this race features the starkest difference between two candidates of any campaign in the country. He's probably right, and not just on policy grounds. The two men seem custom-built to oppose each other.

Just a few points of distinction: The half-Cuban Ted Cruz—born Rafael Edward—took an Anglo nickname as a kid, while his opponent, Robert O'Rourke, of Irish extraction, took a Spanish one. When O'Rourke was growing up in El Paso, immersing himself in the local punk scene, Cruz was touring with the Constitutional Corroborators, a youth group that discussed the text of America's founding documents in front of rotary clubs. When Cruz was securing a clerkship with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, O'Rourke was living in a loft with his bandmates in Brooklyn.

Whereas Cruz, as Texas solicitor general, was tasked with upholding a dildo ban, O'Rourke, as a city-council member in El Paso, was pressing to legalize weed. Earlier this year, as O'Rourke was baking in the sun along the Mexican border in the town of Tornillo, assailing Trump's family-separation policy to a crowd over a megaphone while border-patrol agents eyeballed him through binoculars, Cruz was in Houston, playing basketball with Kimmel.

Even the campaign vehicles that the two use are opposites. O'Rourke has been roaming the state in a Dodge minivan, straight out of a youth-soccer pickup line. Cruz prowls it in his muscular pickup. Like the cowboy boots he wears, it seems both genuine and inauthentic at the same time, a part of his persona more than a part of his person. In Kountze, while he slouched in the passenger seat, Cruz again bemoans the somber turn of contemporary politics. “Now no one can take a joke, no one can laugh,” he says. People want to take part in something “joyful.”

I ask: Didn't O'Rourke appear to be running a joyful campaign? “He seems to be having fun,” Cruz tells me. “I will give him that.” Cruz rarely talks about O'Rourke directly, but he grants that O'Rourke appears “genuine,” which Cruz says he appreciates. He likens O'Rourke to Bernie Sanders, whom he calls an “honest socialist.” (In truth, O'Rourke's political history since his time on the El Paso city council has been pragmatic and generally pro-business.) “That's refreshing, because it means we can have a real contest of ideas,” Cruz says. Their race, he says, provides a good opportunity for debate, a stage upon which to fight for the “American free-enterprise system.”

As for actual debating, Cruz only recently consented to squaring off—on five Friday evenings, up against high school football (an old scheduling trick in Texas to minimize the events). What he wants most to do is turn out his voters, not help O'Rourke reach a big audience.

The real story of the race, Cruz posits, as with so much else in the past few years, is the vast difference in the semi-sealed-off worlds that the two candidates' most passionate supporters inhabit. “The Democratic Party, more and more, has become the party of coastal elites,” Cruz tells me matter-of-factly. “No offense, but the party that reads GQ—your target demographic—are successful, urban professionals with a fair amount of disposable income. That's the heart of today's Democratic Party. That's the heart, by all appearances, of Congressman O'Rourke's campaign. But that's not the bulk of Americans.”

There are two Americas, Cruz declares: “GQ America” and what he calls “Field & Stream America.”

“The bulk of Texans are working hard to put food on the table,” he says, “and they don't appreciate being looked down on by people richer than they, in more privileged positions.”

There's something off about this analogy—for one thing, it misstates the demographic coalition O'Rourke wants to assemble across an economic spectrum—but it fits with the blunt-force logic of Cruz's political project. Though Cruz's team would love to start repairing his weak favorability numbers across the state, they know that the surer bet is to energize the conservative base. Cruz may be a one-trick politician, but in Texas, for the foreseeable future, that's still the most useful trick a Republican can employ.

For all the attention O'Rourke's campaign has gotten, the most impactful question for Americans might be the one least asked in the race. Assuming Cruz wins re-election, what does his political future look like? Few observers expect him to limit himself to the Senate forever. Cruz has been a loyal soldier for Trump since the 2016 election, but he became one after some pointed out that not doing so could cost him his re-election. What will he do once he's secured it?

No doubt he envisions another run for the presidency—this is a guy who dreamed about high office as a kid; a political animal who, as a child, sent cash to Jesse Helms. He seems initially reluctant to dwell on 2016. I ask him about Trump's penchant for starting meetings with Cruz by rehashing the fractious GOP-nomination battle—a war, you'll recall, in which Trump effectively called Cruz's wife ugly and implicated his beloved father in the Kennedy assassination. Is it true that he loves to chat about the race, I ask Cruz in his pickup truck. “Yeah,” he says, gazing straight ahead at the parking lot. It is his tersest answer.

But then he, like Trump does, returns to the campaign. “We went head-to-head, and I beat him in a significant number of states,” he says. “In virtually every state in the primary, either Trump was one and I was two, or I was one and he was two.” He emphasizes that he had run especially strong in the Republican youth vote—college campuses, he reminds me, had been split between his and Sanders's campaign.

Cruz had to dismantle his presidential machine after Trump won, but he still very clearly hopes to contest the party's future. And in case things go south for the president, Cruz is one of just a few Republicans with the credibility to attack Trump from the right.

Already O'Rourke has surpassed the low expectations that Texas Democrats had for him when he first took aim at Cruz. Whatever the result in November, this is the first statewide campaign in some two decades that the party can feel genuinely good about, and that's a win of its own. Even if he loses, the questions that O'Rourke has raised in this race aren't going anywhere. Chief among them: Can Texas “turn blue”?

The debate over whether the state can swing Democratic often revolves around immigration figures and the state's changing demographics, since, traditionally, Hispanics tend to vote Democratic. But there's more to the story. Hispanic voters in Texas are some of the most conservative in the country, and the Republican Party needs only a sizable minority of them to stay in power, provided the GOP continues to dominate the share of the white vote.

The conversation among Texas Democrats focuses now on the extraordinarily shabby party infrastructure. In much of the state, the party barely exists and organization remains surprisingly wobbly. O'Rourke's simple though important decision to tour the state—visiting all 254 counties—has already done a lot to spread the seeds of the party in distant corners.

O'Rourke entered the race with significant shortcomings, name recognition chief among them, and is being asked to overcome all of his own problems and then the party's, too. That's a tall ask, to say nothing of the fact that the electorate in midterm-election years skews whiter, more conservative, older, and more affluent than the electorate in presidential-election years. Those are just a few of the reasons why local observers are less optimistic about O'Rourke's chances than his national supporters are.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here, though, that O'Rourke can help them solve. The party needs a “good loss” in order to really start building its infrastructure—that is, in order to start luring good candidates and donors and volunteers who see winning as feasible. But even earning that first “good loss” takes some organizational and operational help from the party, and nobody in years has been able to jump-start it. The hope among many Texas Democrats is simply that O'Rourke closes the gap and loses by less than ten points, which many would take as an encouraging result, something to build on. It would spur other prominent candidates to jump into more races. It might even help O'Rourke lay the foundations for a future run.

Of course, this is the sort of pragmatism that a candidate doesn't express in the middle of a race. And O'Rourke, for his part, seems completely unfazed by the pessimism that hangs over the party. “I will very often get disappointed at myself or disappointed with our team if I feel like we didn't reach what we were supposed to reach or achieve,” he tells me in Farmers Branch. “What I never do is leave [a rally] like this with anything other than the feeling that, ‘Holy shit, there are so many amazing people.’ ”

In the line to meet O'Rourke that day is a woman who had lost part of her foot to diabetes. “She wheeled over to [me],” O'Rourke recalls, “and she said, ‘I have no reason to feel this way, but I am so hopeful right now.’ You meet that person and you're like, ‘How can I not also be hopeful and make sure that we deliver on the hope that we're all raising among each other?’ ” He would keep pushing. “I'm very lucky to be a part of that.”

He seemed to mean it—O'Rourke is a man without guile. Back into the minivan he went, off to the next event. He is not a guy who agonizes over the construction and deconstruction of narratives and calculates subdivisions of the electorate. History most often belongs to the analysts, but from time to time what's needed is a person to step up and do the thing. Maybe—just maybe—he will.

Christopher Hooks is a writer based in Austin. This is his first story for GQ.

This story originally appeared in the September 2018 issue with the title "This Fight Is Bigger Than Texas."