WASHINGTON _ Beto O'Rourke can raise tens of millions of dollars, fill concert venues with his supporters and motivate a group of voters whose help Democrats badly need to defeat President Donald Trump.
But can he do it from his couch in El Paso after his defeat by Ted Cruz in one of the highest-profile races of 2018?
O'Rourke moved from unknown congressman to liberal sensation over just a few months, and friends and allies say he has plenty of motivation to turn around another race _ perhaps even for his party's presidential nomination.
His staff has already begun discussing what it would take to put together another campaign.
Plus, after swearing off money from political action committees, O'Rourke raised nearly $70 million as of the most recent reporting period _ more than any Senate candidate in history.
"Beto ran a historic, authentic campaign that inspired (small dollar donors) in a way we've never seen," said Adam Bozzi, spokesman for the liberal campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, which supported O'Rourke in the Senate race.
But veteran Democrats, even many who were enthusiastic about his Senate campaign, warn that he will have to adjust his message and tactics if he wants a chance at even bigger office after losing to Cruz.
The campaign's lack of negative ads, O'Rourke's unwillingness to campaign with some Texas Democrats and his penchant for speaking his mind, they say O'Rourke needlessly rejected some of the basic campaign principles that could have helped Tuesday end differently for a candidate who has plenty of political talent.
Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a senior Democrat who has spent years pushing his party to invest in campaigns in Republican territory, last month said that if O'Rourke wanted to win, he would need to reach beyond his Democratic base in a contest against an incumbent who is already disliked by some moderates in the Republican Party.
"I don't care what you say on the stage with 55,000 people in a stadium," Clyburn said while pointing to a photo of O'Rourke's September concert in Austin with Willie Nelson. "Those people who need to hear, ain't gonna hear."
O'Rourke, a former El Paso city councilman, found an audience of supporters looking for bipartisanship when he livestreamed a road trip to Washington with neighboring Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican, in 2017.
He continued to livestream his travels when he began his campaign to unseat Cruz, building a following that put his race on the national radar despite national Democrats' best efforts to keep expectations low in an expensive Republican state.
That division grew quickly when embraced the culture war that President Donald Trump was so eager to wage in ways that made national Democrats uneasy.
While party leaders urged Democrats to remain focused on health care, taxes and other pocketbook issues, O'Rourke's was calling to impeach Trump and abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, putting him at odds with even would-be political allies.
"I know right now people think of ICE and they think of immigration and removal, but ICE also does things like enforcing human trafficking laws," Rep. Joaquin Castro, another rising star in Texas's Democratic circles, said in a recent interview. "We're not going to just do away with all those other functions."
O'Rourke's eccentric campaign had many attributes that Democrats would like to replicate in Texas and beyond.
As of Nov. 2, for example, Texas had a more than 500 percent increase in participation from the 2014 election among voters under 30 _ a demographic national Democrats say is crucial to their efforts to unseat Trump in two years.
O'Rourke also took the unusual step of ignoring both Trump and Cruz to run only positive ads, a strategy that has had some success with young voters, more of whom turned out for the first time in early voting this year than every other state combined, according to the Democratic data firm TargetSmart.
But it's exactly that kind of straying from the course that has national Democrats say needs to change if O'Rourke wants to pursue office again. Democrats trying to help him say he missed an opportunity to peel support away from Cruz _ a major setback in their efforts to flip Texas Democratic.
"I've said more than once that I wish that he had gone negative and sharpened his attacks earlier," said Chris Lippincott, an Austin Democrat who formed a super PAC in late October to run ads saying Cruz would allow insurance companies to deny health coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. National Democrats consider that ad their most effective attack on Republicans nationwide, one nearly every other GOP candidate was exposed to this cycle.
"Elections are about choices," said Lippincott, who is a veteran Texas political strategist. Of the ads hitting Cruz on health care, he said it was "the critical issue in the 2018 election cycle from coast to coast."
O'Rourke's campaign drew interest in recent weeks from out-of-state supporters who don't want him to stop after Tuesday night's loss.
After watching O'Rourke for several months, Eric Smith, a Chicago lawyer traveled to Houston to volunteer for the Democrat's campaign. Praising O'Rourke's attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, Smith said the Texan was a piece of what the Democratic Party should aspire to be more like on a national level.
"The goal shouldn't just be getting to the next office," Smith said of a potential 2020 candidacy for O'Rourke. Listing candidates with longer political resumes than O'Rourke, Smith suggested that O'Rourke "work with people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and help them turn out people the way he has in Texas."
Other Democrats who've tried to make a similar turnaround warn the excitement around a campaign dies down quickly without an opponent to run against.
"When you build a campaign from scratch that no one really thought could happen from the start, and it takes so much energy and effort to do it, it is hard to focus on anything but that when it's going on," said Abe Rakov, a Democrat who ran Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander's close but unsuccessful race against Sen. Roy Blunt in 2016.
O'Rourke said he has no interest in running for president, and that he plans to return home to El Paso with his wife, Amy, and their three children 12 after finishing his term in Congress this year.
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(Jessica Koscielniak and Emma Dumain contributed to this report. Drusch is the Washington correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.)
