"The people of Texas in all 254 counties are proving that when we reject PACs and come together not as Republicans or Democrats but as Texans and Americans, there's no stopping us," O'Rourke said. 
 
 Cruz -- referring to O'Rourke as "Comrade Beto" -- on Friday predicted that his opponent's gusher of cash wouldn't translate to the ballot box. 
 
 "Liberal, left-wing activists are flooding Texas with cash," he said at a campaign event in Houston. "But at the end of the day, you can't buy Texas." 
 
 Fundraising at this pace is typically reserved only for presidential campaigns. And it shows the collective power of many relatively modest donations. 
 
 ActBlue, the online Democratic fund-raising platform, makes it easier than ever for candidates to collect small sums from many people, and to prompt supporters for recurring donations. O'Rourke has brought in at least $25 million that way this year, and based on the latest tally, likely far more. 
 
 The Democrat's campaign said its staggering sum came from 802,836 individual contributions, most of them coming from Texas. 
 
 O'Rourke said Friday, during a meeting with The Dallas Morning News' editorial board, that his funds are being used to get his message on television in expensive media markets. But he added that the bulk of the money is being used to support a voter turnout operation in every corner of the state. 
 
 "Much of it's spent," O'Rourke said. "We are running the largest grassroots campaign in the history of this state. We have so many field organizers and volunteers and pop up offices, not just in Dallas and DeSoto, but ... all over the place. We're really putting our resources into people." 
 
 The Democrat's financial edge is now almost certainly insurmountable. 
 
 With $38 million, O'Rourke has the opportunity to blanket the airwaves in Texas, clutter every Texan's Facebook feed with ads, provide a yard sign to anyone willing to plant it, and put an army of volunteers on the streets knocking on doors and prodding voters to the polls. He can also afford a private jet to barnstorm the far reaches of the vast battleground. 

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 PDF Document 

 
 
 Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, at an event in Austin in September. (Erich Schlegel/Reuters) 
 
 No doubt about it: Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.) is a Democratic star the likes of which the party hasn’t seen in a Senate candidate in years. But is he too hot for the Democratic Party’s own good? 
 
 On Friday, his Senate campaign announced it raised $38 million in just the past three months. 
 
 That will go down in history. What O’Rourke raised in three months is what some presidential campaigns raise. It blasted through a fundraising record ($22 million in one quarter) that no Senate candidate has been able to touch in 18 years. 
 
 To put that money in perspective in Texas, $38 million was more than half of what O’Rourke — who was already raising insane sums of money — raised during the rest of his entire campaign. The $62 million he has raised so far is more than twice as much as his opponent, incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, has. 
 
 'It’s an astonishing number — and done with all people, no PACs," said Adam Bozzi with the End Citizens United PAC, which supports candidates like O’Rourke who have said no to political action money from special interests. O’Rourke’s campaign didn’t share much detail about his fundraising, but he did say the contributions averaged $47 from roughly 802,000 people, about half of whom were in Texas. 
 
 But that does not mean O'Rourke will win a Senate seat in Texas. He's still behind in the polls, and the fundamentals of the conservative state suggest it might not be ready to elect a Democrat to statewide office. 
 
 And if a fired-up Democratic base is so willing to pour money into big Senate races, you could argue that at least some of that money would be more useful going to fellow Democratic candidates in red-leaning states like North Dakota and West Virginia and Montana and Tennessee, all of whom have a much better chance of winning than O’Rourke does. 
 
 The Texas Senate race is still remarkably competitive. But let’s put this $38 million — and O’Rourke’s chances in Texas — in perspective. 
 
 He’s behind in the polls: O’Rourke hasn’t led in a single high-quality public poll since this race began. Some polls this spring and summer had the race too close to call. But since September, Cruz has been well ahead. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Cruz ahead of O’Rourke by 9 percentage points, mirroring Republican private polling showing Cruz ahead. Polling closer to Election Day tends to be more accurate since more likely voters start paying attention. 
 
 Money can mean momentum, but it doesn’t always equal momentum: In 2014, Democrat Wendy Davis launched a buzzy run for governor in Texas. At one point she outraised her Republican opponent (though not nearly as much as O’Rourke is outpacing Cruz), earning her lots of national headlines and even more buzz. 
 
 She ended up losing the governor’s race by 20 points. It was the worst showing of a Democratic candidate for governor in the state in 16 years. 
 
 That’s not to say O’Rourke is going to lose as Davis did. But that a Democrat in Texas can raise tens of millions and still lose badly underscores our next point, that: 
 
 The fundamentals in the state still favor Republicans: There is plenty of evidence that Texas Democrats are motivated to vote in November — not an easy thing to do in a state where general elections are usually foregone conclusions for the Republican. 
 
 In this spring’s primary, Democrats doubled their turnout from 2014 to 2016, breaking 1 million voters. At the state level, Democrats are challenging Gov. Greg Abbott (R), 14 of 15 state Senate seats and nearly 90 percent of the state’s 150 state House seats. Texas Democrats haven’t put up that kind of defense in a quarter-century. 
 
 “The energy in the Lone Star State is palpable,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said. 
 
 But Republicans set their own primary vote record with 1.5 million votes. And they didn’t have to stretch that much to do it; 1.5 million votes was a slight uptick from the last midterm election cycle. Cruz got twice as many votes in his Republican primary than O’Rourke did in the Democratic one. And O’Rourke ceded 38 percent points to two much lesser-known, less-hyped challengers. 
 
 Democrats in Texas say that if the state votes like it looks (meaning minority and younger voters vote Democratic and vote in high numbers), it can be blue. But so far there’s little evidence that’s happening, at least to the degree Democrats need. 
 
 [Signs of the blue wave in Texas? Not so fast.] 
 
 There are a lot of other places this money might be more useful: One GOP operative calculates that what O’Rourke raised in three months is more than three times what Democrats have spent in North Dakota so far. It’s more than double what Democrats have spent in Tennessee and West Virginia. 
 
 Not every state is created equal, of course. It costs more to buy TV ads in Dallas than in, say, Fargo, N.D. But those three Senate races all have something in common that O’Rourke’s doesn’t: The Democrat is more likely to win. 
 
 Texas doesn’t even make the top 10 of the Fix’s latest rankings of the most competitive Senate races. Democratic Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Bill Nelson (Fla.) and Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen in Tennessee are all on the list. Some of those candidates, especially Heitkamp, are fighting for their political careers. And their races are crucial to helping Democrats take back the Senate. 
 
 [Why is Heidi Heitkamp voting against Kavanaugh?] 
 
 Republicans to whom The Fix spoke couldn’t be happier to see so much Democratic money go into Texas instead. 
 
 “Every dollar that’s going to Beto," said one Republican operative watching the race closely and granted anonymity to speak candidly, “is a dollar that is not going to Florida or Montana or North Dakota.”
– Small-dollar donations have been the hallmark of the campaign of US Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, who hasn't accepted PAC money in his attempt to grab Ted Cruz's Texas Senate seat. But like snowflakes that form an avalanche, all those more modest donations have converged to become what the Dallas Morning News says may be an "insurmountable" financial line for Cruz to reach. O'Rourke has crushed fundraising records and brought in $38.1 million from July through September, more than three times the $12 million raised by Cruz during the same three months. It's the country's most expensive midterms race, with the Morning News noting not even presidential campaigns typically bring in that much cash that quickly. In total, O'Rourke has raised $61.2 million in 2018 to Cruz's $24.9 million. "No one could predict or expect it," GOP consultant Bill Miller tells the Morning News, calling it "beyond surprising." Two recent polls, however, show Cruz with a single-digit lead, though the Cook Political Report still says the race could go either way. "You could argue that at least some of that money would be more useful going to fellow Democratic candidates in red-leaning states ... [that] have a much better chance of winning than O'Rourke does," Amber Phillips writes for the Washington Post. A Democratic strategist shrugs that off, noting other Democratic challengers are still raising good money. "Obviously, money doesn't win elections," he tells the Morning News. "But being broke sure loses a bunch of them."