In these rural areas, Beto is essentially drilling for oil. “There are a lot of votes out there,” Beto says. “There are 7 million people who didn’t cast a ballot who were eligible in 2020.” There are the first-time voters and the Democrats who need an extra push to vote in the midterms and the people who don’t stick to party lines. “I would say they are persuadable,” he says.

And then there are the votes no political scientist could tell him how to find. In Dumas, a Panhandle city that’s 55 percent Hispanic, truck driver Pablo Campos tells Beto he woke up at 3:30 a.m. so he could complete half his work shift and have enough time to go to the town hall gathering during his break. There, Mary Jane Garcia, 47, a devout Catholic, stood up to talk about the “spontaneous abortion” that saved her life when she miscarried at 17, and how scared she is that her daughters might be denied that medical care.....

That frenzied scene eclipses anything from his Senate run, says Glenn Melancon, Democratic chair of Grayson County, who introduced Beto in Whitesboro. He was a sensation in 2018, but he was new and unproven — a relative nobody around the state, even as El Paso’s three-term congressman. Now people across Texas feel as if they have a relationship with him. “The first time around, there’s some excitement,” Melancon says, “but then he came back and he came back, and more and more people get to know it’s not a show. It’s real.”......

This is pretty much how they did it in 2018. Only this time, Beto says, they’re more organized. They’ve invested in data to better target voters. Over the past five years they’ve built an army of 80,000 volunteers who knocked on 100,000 doors in June.

He’s also gotten more aggressive. In the Senate race, Beto says, “I wish I’d done more to prosecute the case against Ted Cruz and help people realize how dangerous it was for him to stay in office.” Now, everything he says, he links back to Abbott. “People need to know why their electricity bills are going up, why their property taxes are going up, why the lights didn’t turn on last February,” he says. “It’s Greg Abbott, and just be really clear about that.”