EL PASO — Texas didn’t turn blue Tuesday night. It didn’t turn purple. But it is pinker now — largely because of Beto O’Rourke.
...The midterm election in Texas was unlike any the state has seen in decades. Here are five takeaways as Republicans and Democrats try to understand what happened.
Mr. O’Rourke lost on Tuesday by the narrowest margin in years for a Democrat running for statewide office. His Republican opponent, Senator Ted Cruz, won by a little more than two percentage points — a difference of about 200,000 votes, according to state elections data. So even Mr. O’Rourke’s defeat had tinges of victory for Democrats, helping to rekindle a notion that many had believed was years away from reviving in Texas: the two-party state.
Republican rule of Texas remains intact but weakened, as Mr. O’Rourke’s high-profile, high-energy campaign helped deliver victories for a number of Democrats in down-ballot races.
His coattails helped Democrats flip 12 State House seats, two State Senate seats and two congressional seats, and Democrats managed to win the largest county in the state — Houston’s Harris County. Not a single Republican county-level elected official was left standing there, including the county’s top elected official, County Judge Ed Emmett, who had helped lead the region through Hurricane Harvey. Mr. O’Rourke carried much of urban Texas and scored surprising victories in battleground suburbs like Fort Bend and Williamson Counties — though that success was ultimately undermined by losses in rural West Texas, East Texas and the Panhandle.
“This was the first statewide election since 2002 when the outcome of the statewide contests was not a completely foregone conclusion before the polls closed on Election Day,” said Mark P. Jones, a political-science professor at Rice University in Houston. “Beto’s success should serve as a wake-up call for scores of Texas Republicans that they can no longer count on winning simply by having an ‘R’ next to their name on the ballot.”
Before the election, Mr. Cruz called Fort Worth’s Tarrant County “the biggest, reddest county in the biggest, reddest state.” Tarrant County is tied to the mythic Texas cattle country, so friendly to conservatives that Republicans have regularly hosted their state conventions in Fort Worth. For years, Tarrant County was the red exception to the blue rule: The biggest urban counties in Texas are all blue — around Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas — but Tarrant is red. Tarrant, over the years, went for Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, Donald Trump — and also Mr. Cruz, who crushed his Democratic opponent in 2012 in the county by 16 percentage points.
But Mr. O’Rourke did what Hillary Clinton and many other Democrats could not — he won Tarrant County, by a statistical hair: 49.89 percent of the vote compared with Mr. Cruz’s 49.27 percent. And Mr. O’Rourke’s supporters had a hand in defeating a Republican state senator and longtime Cruz ally in the county, State Senator Konni Burton, who lost to the Democrat, Beverly Powell. (It was the State Senate seat that previously had been held by another Democrat, Wendy Davis.)
Post-election on Wednesday, there wasn’t much celebrating going on at the headquarters of the Tarrant County Republican Party, in a nondescript industrial office complex in Fort Worth. The chairman, Darl Easton, a retired Air Force officer, sat at a large desk, empty except for a laptop and a red MAGA hat.
He was on the phone with one of his precinct chairmen. “Did you go to the watch party last night?” Mr. Easton asked, telling the chairman moments later, “Oh my gosh, pretty sad down there. Wasn’t good, that’s for sure.”
Afterward, he seemed determined to put a good face on things. “I think we’ll bounce back,” he said. “It’s a warning bell to us to re-energize our base.”
...Republicans have long claimed the pop culture of Texas as their own — the barbecue joints and country music stars and pickup trucks. Mr. O’Rourke embraced those Texas symbols and reclaimed them for Democrats, jamming with Willie Nelson, steering his San Antonio-built Toyota pickup truck through rural Texas and air-drumming post-debate in the drive-through lane at Whataburger. It used to be an awkward counterculture stretch to be a Texas Democrat. He made it cool.
...Mr. O’Rourke failed to turn a well-funded, well-publicized and well-run campaign for Senate into a win. Now, strategists are asking a question: If he couldn’t do it, then who can? And if not now, then when? One of the other Texas Democratic stars — Julian Castro, the Obama-era secretary of housing and urban development — may be booked up in 2020, as he is seriously considering a run for president.
Could even bigger things also be in store for Mr. O’Rourke? He is that rare Texas Democrat whom even Republicans generally have nice things to say about. In the wake of Tuesday’s election, an unlikely voice seemed to be urging Mr. O’Rourke to consider running for president in 2020, even though he has said he’s not interested. That voice belonged to Mr. Roe, Mr. Cruz’s chief strategist.
“I don’t predict Democratic politics, but the fervent following that he has nationally, no one else compares to him on their side,” Mr. Roe told reporters at the Houston hotel ballroom where Mr. Cruz held his victory party. “No one does. He is in a league of his own in the Democratic Party, and if he doesn’t use that to run for president, I don’t know what he’d do with it.”
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