Meet the 'new' Texas Democrats fueling Beto O'Rourke's race

FORT WORTH -- Beto O’Rourke is awakening a grassroots movement in Texas — one that’s led by gray-haired, once-loyal Democrats who are aggressively working to end decades of their own political dormancy in Texas.

It’s not the sleeping Latino base that Democrats have long believed would help them flip Texas blue — and whose engagement remains a critical question for the party’s prospects of a full-blown comeback in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976 — or elected a Democrat statewide since 1994.

Yet O’Rourke’s energetic trek through rural parts of the state has electrified a different piece of the base that’s also been missing for his party in recent years: Older supporters with the time to organize the nuts and bolts of a grassroots campaign.

O’Rourke’s army of retirees has spent the last year and a half knocking on doors, filling much-hyped campaign rallies and wallpapering the state with his campaign swag.

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