By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Beto O’Rourke and his surprisingly durable challenge against Ted Cruz in bright red Texas. You’ve heard about how he’s visited all 254 Texas counties in his Toyota Tundra. You’ve seen videos of him sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls. You’ve watched the rangy 45-year-old congressman skateboard through a Whataburger parking lot in Brownsville. And if you’re following the 2018 midterms, you know that O’Rourke only trails Cruz by a single digit while running an unabashedly progressive campaign, making Democrats around the country salivate at the prospect of a blue wave crashing everywhere from Galveston to El Paso.

That’s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat’s campaign points to something rather obvious: O’Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race—and yes, even if he loses—O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O’Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.

The most appealing thing about O’Rourke is both delightfully uncomplicated and extremely powerful: he talks about politics like you and your friends do. “I am so sick of the stuff that’s been made safe for politics,” O’Rourke told me earlier this month as we drove in his truck through East Texas, between a pair of town halls in Beeville and Corpus Christi. “It’s so bad. It has no impact. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t excite me. I want to do what excites me. That’s my goal at least.”

“Democrats in Texas have been losing statewide elections for Senate for 30 years,” he said. “So you can keep doing the same things, talk to the same consultants, run the same polls, focus-group drive the message. Or you can run like you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s what my wife Amy and I decided at the outset. What do we have to lose? Let’s do this right way, the way that feels good to us. We don’t have a pollster. Let’s talk about the things that are important to us, regardless of how they poll. Let’s not even know how they poll.”

I was following O’Rourke and Cruz around Texas for an episode of Good Luck America, Snapchat’s political documentary series. Cruz, too, is working hard and not taking the race for granted. He’s accessible to the media and packing in supporters at meat ’n’ threes across the state. Cruz’s theory of the race is that Texas is fundamentally red, that there simply aren’t enough Democrats in the state for him to lose. “There are many more conservatives than liberals, and many more common-sense Texans,” he told me. And he has a point: in modern times, no Democratic candidate has hit more than 42 percent in a statewide election. But O’Rourke’s theory is that he can yank new voters out of the woodwork, and when we arrived in Corpus Christi after our drive, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, there were some 4,000 people waiting for him in a bingo hall on the outskirts of town. For a midterm candidate. In August.

O’Rourke riffed on climate change, background checks, teacher pay, health care for veterans, cost-of-living adjustments for public-sector retirees, and the importance of a free press. He lashed the idea of a border wall and the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. And unlike Washington consultants who say that Democrats should only be talking about health care this election season, and not the scandals swirling around Trump, O’Rourke seems to understand that it isn’t really that hard to do both. Because Democrats want to hear about both, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. He blasted Trump’s obsequious press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. “He actively, on a stage in another country, defends the interests of another country against the interests of the United States of America,” O’Rourke said. “The collusion in action taking place right in front of our eyes.” It was the second biggest applause line of the night, after his boast about refusing to take corporate campaign donations.

“I would like Texas to be the example, to be the bridge over the small stuff, the partisanship, the bickering, the pettiness, the meanness, the name-calling, the bigotry, the racism, the hatred, the anxiety, and the paranoia that dominates so much of the national conversation today,” he implored them, catching his breath. “I would love for us to be the big, bold, confident, ambitious, big-hearted, aspirational answer to all that small, weak crap that dominates the national news every single night that has kept us from who we are supposed to be as a country.”

His communications director, Chris Evans, live-streamed shaky, grainy video of the whole event, as he does with every town hall, as the crowd rose with applause. There were college kids and veterans and old women standing up out of their wheelchairs to catch a glimpse of him. One woman cried at the touch of his hand. Afterward, O’Rourke stayed for more than an hour posing for selfies with giddy fans, as he does after every event, then stayed even longer to chat with a local reporter. A few days later, I e-mailed a Texas beat-reporter friend to ask her about O’Rourke’s crowds. It seemed like a silly question. In our data-focused world, crowd sizes aren’t supposed to be meaningful political guideposts. But that’s also the same logic all of us smarty-pants reporters used to dismiss Trump’s early crowds.

“I wasn’t in Iowa in 2007,” she responded, a reference to the early buzz around Barack Obama back then. “But it seems like Iowa in 2007.”

I was in Iowa in 2007. And yeah, it feels a lot like that.

O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the NFL player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,” he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.

The clip simply captured O’Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a retweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He’s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he’s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn’t be competitive. It’s not a stretch to say that he’s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. Senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can’t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.

Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your news feed who used to play in a punk band and who’s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? If you picked the former option, you probably watch Morning Joe too much.

Bernie Sanders is perhaps the only other name that comes to mind, but Sanders was also unable to dispatch Hillary Clinton, one of the most unpopular candidates in American campaign history, in the last presidential race. Sanders is also 76. And his fellow putative front-runners, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, will also be in their 70s if they decide to run next year. Maybe that won’t matter, but millennials are now the largest voting-age population in the country, and as Florida’s 39-year-old Democratic nominee for governor Andrew Gillum demonstrated this week, it’s helpful to speak the language of young, diverse voters who increasingly make up the beating heart of the Democratic Party. History also bears out an important pattern: since Vietnam, Democrats have only captured the White House by nominating youthful outsiders who offered a clean break from their predecessor. Jimmy Carter was inaugurated at 52, Bill Clinton at 46, and Obama at 47.

I interviewed Biden last year and asked him about his own presidential ambitions. It was clear he was queasy about the idea of getting back into the arena, but said he would consider running “if no one steps up.” You hear that a lot from Democrats these days. They look uneasily at the current crop of potential candidates, and keep waiting for their Obama-like savior to surface. The thing is, it might be happening right now in Texas.

The blue checkmark Twitter experts will say that O’Rourke can’t run if he wins in November, especially after attacking Cruz for his own presidential run in 2016. That might be true. Winning a Senate race and flying straight to Iowa would be audacious, way more brazen than Obama’s decision to run after just two years in Washington. But what the wise men of Washington are absolutely wrong about is this: O’Rourke can absolutely run for president if he loses. Who is the Democratic primary voter who would care? Does that person exist? He’s a star who would pack any room in Des Moines or Nashua, end of story. Since 2008, there is simply no evidence that voters in either party care more about ladder-climbing credentials than personality and vision. Our last two presidents have been a half-term senator and a reality-television star, and even Orange County attorney Michael Avenatti is currently getting “buzz” as a possible White House contender. So on what planet is Beto O’Rourke not a presidential contender? Only on planet Twitter, where most people are wrong.

In little over a year, O’Rourke has built a thriving political movement in the country’s second largest state, with a strategy built purely on hustle, grassroots organizing, and his hunch that the standard-issue campaign playbook met its final demise in 2016. O’Rourke has raised over $23 million so far, all from small donors and a lot it from out of state. But his campaign money hasn’t gone to television ads or consultants. It’s gone to online advertising (Sanders’s digital firm, to be precise) and a T-shirt vendor in Austin tasked with pumping out thousands of heather gray “Beto for Senate” shirts. He’s Spanish-fluent and hails from a border city, El Paso, in a moment when immigration has become the hottest-burning political issue in the country. And at a time when Americans view politics through their mobile screens, O’Rourke passes the ever-fetishized “authenticity” test by a mile. That’s partly because he has a habit of sharing almost every moment of his day, from his morning runs to his burrito lunches, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook. But it’s also because, so far, O’Rourke doesn’t appear to be performing a version of himself. Nothing feels practiced. The voters I spoke with in East Texas all said the same thing when I asked why they liked him: he seems “real.”

And that seems to be O’Rourke’s defining characteristic. It’s not ideology that’s carrying him as much as relatability. When I asked him in our car ride to define some kind of intellectual architecture around his campaign, he didn’t talk about Medicare for all or comprehensive immigration reform or income inequality. He reached instead for a tale about his old punk band, Foss.

“I don’t have a good label for what we are doing,” he told me. “The closest thing that I can think of to what we are doing now was being in a station wagon with three other friends touring the country and playing music in a punk band,” he said, remembering a time when he had a ponytail and played bass. “We wrote our own songs, started our own label, booked our own tour, bought the ‘Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life’ guide that listed all the bar owners and kids who let you play shows in their living rooms or parent’s basements or church halls. And we just hit the road and did it on our own and didn’t let anyone decide what we could or couldn’t do. We are just out here sharing our story—asking people of Corpus Christi or McAllen or Lufkin to tell us their story. To me that’s the most powerful way to connect.”

Peter Hamby is the host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America.