"Terry packed all this?" O'Rourke says, eyes on the road.
"Terry packed all this," says Cynthia. "She has to be a mom. There's napkins, forks, plates. She's very prepared."
"She's awesome," O'Rourke says.
"Thank you, Terry," he continues, glancing at the food. "So Terry came out to the town hall, listened to what we had to say, on the courthouse steps of the Trinity County courthouse, asked good questions, and then came with a full picnic."
"Ding Dongs!" Cynthia announces, smiling at a box of desserts. "Terry, if you're watching, thank-you so much. Thank-you so much."
As this homespun snapshot unfolds, every few seconds a new real-time comment appears and scrolls down the right side of the campaign's Facebook page.
"Ha! Ha! I see those Hostess cupcakes," writes Nancy.
"Thank-you, Terry!" writes Brenda.
"You got this Beto!" says Leroy.
"VOTE BLUE; IT'S TIME FOR POSITIVE CHANGE!" says Sylvia.
The candidate keeps driving while his staff continues making lunch. The comments keep coming. They have been doing this for a year now. One of the results is a metric that political professionals outside Texas pay attention to: breaking fundraising records by raising $6.7 million from 141,000 donors in the first quarter of 2018. But it's not entirely a surprise that O'Rourke has done this. It's reflective of a genuine grassroots campaign that ordinary Texans obviously feel they can be a part of.
Here's how another longtime Texas political consultant put it on background, which means he didn't want his name used because he doesn't want to get in front of O'Rourke's messaging. "Beto's just going to be who he is," he said. "He doesn't do rope lines. This is a guy, who 7,000 people watched him get a haircut. This is like The Truman Show, for lack of a better [analogy]... Everybody hates, in general, politicians. They all do the same kind of stuff that triggers everyone's bullshit detectors. He typically streams all of his stuff. He'll stream in the car. He streams his town halls. He'll be just chatting with someone in the car in the line of LottaBurger. And there will be a lot of people watching that. Why they think that's interesting, I don't know."
But it is interesting. The candidate leaves his cell phone on the roof of the car, remembers too late, then finds it was run over by an 18-wheeler. And it's politically shrewd, because O'Rourke is being seen as the opposite of Cruz in every way. He's open, not closed. He's positive, not negative. He's considerate, not abrasive. He's transparent, not conspiratorial. There's a genuineness about him that starkly contrasts to Cruz's dark rumblings, to say nothing of the daily pathologies displayed by President Trump.
For all this novelty and innovation, there's still a long road to November's vote, and O'Rourke remains a long-shot candidate. As the Dallas-Fort Worth NBC-TV affiliate reported April 3, Ted Cruz is ahead by 10 percentage points in one recent poll by a "left-leaning" firm. That means O'Rourke has to become better known outside his circle of supporters and the press that covers campaigns.
But in a blue wave election year, one thing is clear: Cruz may awaken to the reality that he's facing the fight of his political life in 2018. Come November, the results are going to be much closer than anyone thought possible, and that includes the prospect of Texas electing a Democratic senator for the first time in three decades.
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