Houston Chronicle By Kevin Diaz 8/12/2018
EL PASO — Beto O'Rourke likes to tell the story of a campaign stop in Archer City, a highway junction of about 1,750 souls on the north central plains that was portrayed as a dying Texas town in "The Last Picture Show."
On his way to a town hall at Murn's Cafe, O'Rourke says a local approached him with a picture of his dad posing with Lyndon Johnson in 1948. As far as anyone could recall, LBJ's stop — he landed in a helicopter in front of the courthouse — was the last time a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate had campaigned there.
O'Rourke's visit came during a sweep of all 254 counties in Texas over the past year. Many of the miles were clocked in a white Dodge Grand Caravan. It was a trip that would have been easy to dismiss as a one-time campaign stunt. But this month, he was back in rural West Texas as he launched a 34-day road trip across the state.
It's a new playbook, born of Democratic futility in Texas.
The first three days of O'Rourke's journey took him 765 zig-zagging miles — from a friendly, Latin-flavored send-off in downtown El Paso to sparsely-attended stops in gun-friendly Republican strongholds like Muleshoe, in Bailey County, where he would get quizzed by skeptical locals about the Second Amendment.
The time and effort the El Paso congressman is investing in small-town Texas has become a hallmark of his small-dollar, no-PAC campaign to unseat incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, a former presidential candidate and conservative icon who won the state by 16 points in 2012.
It also represents a quantum shift in Democratic strategy in the Lone Star State, which has always relied on running up the numbers in the large urban enclaves of Austin, Houston and San Antonio. The desolate cow towns that dot the state's vast expanses make wonderful backdrops for homey political campaigns, but the resources O'Rourke is throwing at his statewide strategy suggest that it's about more than creating a Norman Rockwell tableau.
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