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It was the kind of gusher of hopefulness that ORourke at his boisterous rallies, in his prolific, small-dollar fundraising, trucking across Texas has met with ever since he burst into the national consciousness in his U.S. Senate run in 2018 and continued to inspire among Democrats in the early stages of his presidential campaign two years later.

But even here in Democratic-heavy Austin even to many of ORourkes supporters it is looking more and more like it may not add up to enough.

In other states, ever since the Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade in June, Democrats have been performing better than expected in the rejection of an anti-abortion rights ballot measure in Kansas and in special congressional elections in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York. President Joe Bidens public approval ratings have ticked up. But if the political winds of a post-Roe summer were lifting Democrats elsewhere, they do not appear to be blowing into Texas.

In a survey released in mid-September by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler, ORourke was running 9 percentage points behind Abbott in the race for governor. A University of Texas/Texas Project poll put the margin at 5 points. A few days after the church service, ORourkes deficit registered in a Quinnipiac University poll at 7 points.

Those arent encouraging numbers for ORourke. And the top lines arent even the worst of it. In their lone debate, in an empty studio on Friday night, ORourke cast Abbott as extreme on abortion rights and as a failure on immigration and in his response to the school shooting in Uvalde in May. But when pollsters asked voters recently what mattered to them most, it was as though Texas hadnt changed at all. Immigration and border security not abortion or gun violence ranked first. And on immigration, Texans trusted Abbott over ORourke by double-digit margins.

Abbotts controversial busing of migrants out of state? A majority of Texas voters support it.

Near as we can tell, said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, the things that made the summer look good for Democrats and lead us to ask perhaps why isnt this race tighter theyve proven to be a little more ephemeral and not able to disrupt what is the basic pattern of politics in Texas.

The narrative in my mind is, we spent the summer talking about abortion, looking at the unending string of bad news and bad responses to Uvalde, and the difficulty that Abbott and his team had handling or not handling that, Henson said.

At least in the polling, it didnt appear to stick. What seemed like an apparent, potential shift in the issue agenda for the election, Henson said, seems to have not taken hold.

At the church, ORourke lingered until the line of photo-seekers was gone. And the morning after, on his 50th birthday, he rallied with supporters at the University of Texas at Austin. They wore T-shirts that said Beto for Texas or Beto for Yall, and four of them spelled out BETO in blue and white paint on their shirtless chests. They gave ORourke a cupcake and sang Happy Birthday. They stood in line to take photographs with him and to shake his hand, and they rang cowbells.

Yet if Texas Democrats adore ORourke as much as they did in 2018, the experience of his last two elections is now tempering their expectations.

Four years ago, when ORourke captivated Democrats with his Senate run against Ted Cruz, his near-miss represented the promise the states shifting demographics could have for the party, with a younger and more diverse electorate verging on turning the nations second-most populous state blue. But then came 2020. Donald Trump carried the state by nearly 6 percentage points while over-performing in the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley. Democrats in Texas failed to make gains down ballot after picking up state house seats in 2018, while ORourkes presidential campaign imploded.

In government [class], we learn how to calculate if a candidate will win, Suly Ramirez-Hernandez, a student at the University of Texas at Austin rally, told me.

It was an imperfect kind of calculation, based in part on past performance. She said she hadnt done it for ORourke: Im scared it might not come back how I want it to.

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Beto O'Rourke Is Making His Last Stand in Texas - POLITICO