Beto in beta: Is Ted Cruz’s young challenger prepared for what’s about to hit him?

The Cruz campaign insisted it did not twist O’Rourke’s words. The attack came hours after two outside groups launched television ads in the race attacking the Democratic Senate hopeful.

But that strategy has some fellow Democrats fretting — especially against the backdrop of recent polls that show that more than a third of Texas voters still say they don’t know much about O’Rourke, in spite of the massive publicity his campaign had been getting from the media and on social networks.

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“My worry is that Cruz and his buddies are going to define Beto before he can really define himself,” said one prominent Texas Democratic strategist, who declined to be named in order to speak more freely about the O’Rourke campaign.

Although O’Rourke has out-raised Cruz over the last year and a half, some Democrats have expressed concern about O’Rourke’s slim political operation heading into the final two months of the campaign. The Democratic congressman has operated largely as his own strategist and has resisted spending money on a traditional campaign apparatus — like a rapid-response team that could go toe-to-toe with Cruz and outside GOP groups who are expected to spend millions between now and Election Day.

Instead, O’Rourke said he plans to invest most of his money into a field operation — one targeted not just at urban areas but also rural counties where Democrats typically don’t compete. But those efforts, too, have been slowly coming together against the backdrop of a heavily organized GOP turnout effort led by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s re-election campaign, which has been working on behalf of all Republicans on the ballot this year to keep the state red.

O’Rourke has openly spoken about his DWI arrest and another in 1995 when he was jailed for burglary after he said he jumped a fence with friends at the University of Texas at El Paso. Although he points out that he was not convicted in either case, O’Rourke has described both as “mistakes” and examples of “poor judgment” and “youthful indiscretions.” (He had just turned 26 in 1998.) And he has used both to argue for criminal justice reform, saying he was given the chance to move beyond his mistakes whereas other Texans, “particularly those who don’t look like me or have access to the same opportunities that I did,” have not.

It was not the first time O’Rourke’s arrests have been used against him. The subject came up in both his 2005 race for City Council and in his 2012 primary campaign against Rep. Silvestre Reyes, an influential Mexican-American who had represented the El Paso area for more than a decade. O’Rourke defied his party to challenge Reyes, who had won prominent endorsements from party leaders, including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and the race turned ugly in the final weeks.

Although some Democrats fret about O’Rourke’s lack of campaign infrastructure, others suggest that given his success so far in defying the odds, maybe he doesn’t need much of one. After all, very few Republicans or Democrats took O’Rourke seriously when he entered the race last year. Outside of El Paso, few people knew who he was, even members of his own party. As one Democratic strategist put it, O’Rourke is where he is because he hasn’t run a typical campaign.

“There are some of us in the profession of political consulting and campaigns in Texas that do have some concerns,” said Colin Strother, a Democratic consultant in Austin, Texas.

“But the reality is, none of us know how to win a statewide campaign, and we all need to shut up and not get between something that’s working and November. And up until now, what Beto has been doing has been just fine. … Let him go out there and cuss and ride a skateboard and eat Whataburger and broadcast it on social. What he’s doing, it’s working.”

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