BUMP

Battleground Texas volunteers.

Battleground Texas was created in 2013 with the help of former campaign operatives who worked for former President Barack Obama. Their mission was to more aggressively register voters in Texas, a place that has a history of making it difficult to register to vote, Silva said.

He said the group made gains in voter registration despite Texas laws that he says “criminalizes voter registration.” In Texas, groups cannot help voters register unless they go through spe- cific training in counties they want to work in. If someone wants to register voters in another of the 254 counties in the state, they must get retrained in that county. And the training sessions vary from county to county.

Silva said his group has more than 22,000 people who are certified to register people to vote in Texas. But Texas law requires all of those certifications to expire at the end of the cycle. All of those people must go through a new round of training to start registering voters again.

Texas saw record-shattering voter registration since 2014. Since then, Texas saw its voter rolls grow by al- most 1.8 million voters. In the four years prior to 2014, Texas added just 756,000 voters.

The close margin of victory between Cruz and O’Rourke is something Cruz’s camp had been bracing for. Cruz chief strategist Jeff Roe told a conference of political consultants in Austin this week that in the closing weeks of the campaign, O’Rourke was surging.

“Waking up on Election Day, I knew it was going to be close,” Roe said.

He said the national environment was filled with stories about the Florida pipebomber sending packages to CNN and Democratic leaders. And then there were news accounts of the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Roe said internal polling showed O’Rourke getting another half point closer for each of the final 10 day.

“The last 10 days of the campaign was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Roe said.

O’Rourke really surged along the I-35 corridor. In the counties from Laredo to the Oklahoma border, O’Rourke beat Cruz by more than 440,000 votes. Four years earlier, Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn easily carried that corridor by more than 300,000 votes. Over the last 12 days of the campaign, O’Rourke made at least 25 stops in counties along the corridor, compared to three for Cruz.