We were walking, my wife and I, from our parking space to the door of the Beto O’Rourke campaign office in south Dallas on the evening of its official opening celebration. Beto, running to unseat Ted Cruz in the US Senate, was scheduled to appear. Even before we got to the door, we could see a crowd of people around it and more like us converging from their own parking spaces. Coming up alongside us was Daniel, who I recognized from numerous other political events.

I recognized him, in fact, from that first meeting of the Indivisible chapter that had formed in the central Dallas neighborhood where I live not long after the 2016 election. The Unitarian church offered a space, and about forty people had gathered, all of us still shell-shocked and raw. People were standing up, speaking out, expressing their pain and dismay. “But what can we do?” was the predominant message. Daniel made one of those speeches.

After that first meeting, I committed to becoming credentialed to register voters. Daniel was the other person who showed up at the county office for training. In the following weeks, on several Saturday mornings, we set up registration tables in libraries. At the university where I teach, I let folks know I could register them, and I got a handful of takers. All told, I probably signed up a couple of dozen. Although the weekly news kept bruises fresh, I let the business of life take precedence, and my interest in the nuts-and-bolts part of the work waned.  At first I was showing up at everything, then about half of everything, and then being too busy became an acceptable private excuse.

Daniel followed a different trajectory. I’d read in a Facebook post that he was racking up the registrations. Greeting him there on the way to the Beto office opening, I asked how many he’d filed.

“Six hundred,” he said, and then added, “This year.”

What?! I remembered those mornings in the entranceway of the local branch, people ignoring us, hardly anyone stopping by. He must have figured it out. I asked him, “What’s the secret?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Last night there was a line of people waiting to get into the Bomb Factory to see a show. I got twelve.”

Daniel was diligent. Also maybe it had gotten a little easier. The three of us threaded through the crowd at the door and into a large room packed tight with people. Beto had not yet arrived. People were waiting as, up on the stage, a local Rolling Stones cover band was playing “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” The guitarist was an old bandmate of mine. He’d been at that first Indivisible meeting, too, as had his wife, whose activism ever since had been Daniel-like in its intensity. In fact, as I looked around I noticed several, sprinkled here and there, who’d been at those first few Indivisible chapter meetings, when hope was in such short supply. Now they were outnumbered fifty or sixty to one, and hope was running in a current, lifting us all a few inches off the ground.

Maybe Texas, I let myself think, was going to have its blue wave, after all.

Lawrence Wright’s book, God Save Texas, came out last spring, and I read it not long after with great pleasure. Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He won a Pulitzer for his book on 9-11, The Looming Tower. A baby boomer, Wright grew up in Dallas and has lived in Austin since 1980. In this latest book, he covers all the important aspects of his home state– its cities, its regions, its history and music– but his main topic is politics. Texas politics have always had a “burlesque side,” Wright acknowledges, a “recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues,” and now it’s as bad as it’s ever been. The problem is that the state’s size renders it especially influential. “Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation,” Wright believes.

Whether it’s because of this influence or despite it—that’s unclear—but Texas is not all that different politically from the great middle bulk of the nation these days. In the 2016 election, Wright points out, its party margins mirrored those of Ohio. When he looked at vote distribution, “it was hard to see where Texas ended and the rest of the country began.” Yet the state’s right wing zealotry is misleading, Wright argues. It isn’t representative of “the actual political demography of the state.”

I took heart at this, but is it mere apologetics? Wright doesn’t downplay the bad in Texas. The state ranks near the bottom in education achievement and spending per student. It’s near the bottom, too, in upkeep and condition of its infrastructure. For a state that that “is projected to double in population in thirty years, Texas has done little to prepare itself,” says Wright. “The refusal to face these challenges head-on seems to me not only imprudent but decidedly un-Texan.”

Un-Texan? That’s what I mean by apologetics. How will non-Texans take that last sentence, I wonder? Hiking one evening this summer in a park in Quebec, my wife and I got turned around, and a couple from Montreal helped us. We walked along with them for a while until the conversation turned to where we were from. My wife told the truth before I could stop her, and the couple sped along pretty quickly after that. Part of being a Texan is never being sure just how much contempt those outside the state hold for us, whether it’s more than we think they do or less.

I’ve been an apologist for Texas culture at times in my life. It was always a strain, but I gave it up completely about the time George W. Bush became president. To be honest, I’ve had a hard time feeling at home here with the ascendency of the current state leadership, who, it’s often remarked, make W. look Lincolnesque in comparison. W. and I reside in the same city, and once in a while I hear of sightings, all of which betray a grudging fondness. The smirk and the swagger have evaporated. The man now exudes humility, I’m told. Characteristic of this is the fact that he’s content to devote himself to painting without pretending to have any talent for it. Oh, I’m sure I could generate some of the old scorn with only a few reminders, but there’s so much more to be concerned about now.

Waiting for Beto, the crowd continued to grow, and the AC wasn’t up to the challenge. The bald pate of the man in front of me ran sweat in rivulets. Seven-by-five handouts were going around, slick cardstock, printed in full color, with photos and platform points of special interest to south Dallas. Immediately they were everywhere flapping, employed as fans. As The Stoners played “Satisfaction,” Beto came into the room through a rear door. A local hopeful introduced him, and he took the stage.

Self-effacing and affable, warming up to make his pitch, the candidate made a big deal about the band. “You know if this Senate thing doesn’t work out,” he said, “I might ask if the Stoners need a fifth member.” There were a few laughs, some clapping, but the comment was not well received overall. In this climate, this close to the election, people didn’t want to contemplate a loss.

“It’ll work out!” someone yelled.

“Ted Cruz can be the fifth member!” another shouted.

What was Beto like? What did he do and say? I won’t belabor this much further. You can get a look at him and hear him speak in any number of settings—the video links on Youtube are legion. His answer to a town hall question about kneeling during the anthem has recently gone viral, for whatever that’s worth. This was my third time to see him live, however. The first time was on a corner at a march in support of immigrants, before many knew who he was. The second time was well into the race, in the Texas Theater, the old movie house where they arrested Oswald, and there was a line down the block to get in. So how did this third time compare?

He led with his more radical positions—the ones listed on the 7-by-5 card: ending the school-to-prison pipeline; legalizing marijuana and expunging the records of those formerly jailed for the offense; a living wage and health care for all. His voice was hoarse, and yet he spoke with more volume. This may be a matter of calibration. The election is not that far away.

I’ll end with a passage from Wright, one where he demonstrates his attention to history.

Texas leads the nation in Latino population growth. Latinos account for more than half the 2.7 million new Texans since 2010. Every Democrat in Texas believes that if Hispanics voted at the same rate in Texas as they do in California, the state would already be blue. ‘The difference between Texas and California is the labor movement,’ Garnet Coleman, a Houston member of the Texas House of Representatives, told me. In the 1960s, Cesar Chavez began organizing the California farmworkers into a union, which didn’t happen in Texas, a right-to-work state. ‘Labor unions create a culture of voting and political participation,’ Coleman observed. In Texas politics, Coleman believes, ‘everything is about race. It’s veiled as public policy, but it encourages people to believe that their tax dollars are going to support lazy black and brown people.’ Political views have become more entrenched because of redistricting, and yet the demographic majority in Texas is far more progressive than its representatives. Coleman predicts a showdown. ‘This is the battle about the future of the country, based on a new majority, and we have to have this out.’

We left the Beto event feeling part of the new majority. The people in that room are ready to have it out.