Part of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s appeal, should he run for president in 2020, is how well he performed for a Texas Democrat in his 2018 campaign for US Senate.

The pro-O’Rourke argument is pretty easy to make. He lost by just 3 points in 2018. No Democrat has come that close to winning a Senate seat from Texas since 1988. O’Rourke outperformed the political lean of the state by 10 to 15 points (depending if you use FiveThirtyEight’s or my “weighted average partisanship” calculation) when you look at a slew of elections since the beginning of the decade. That’s especially impressive for someone running against an incumbent.

What these statistics may not take into account is how quickly Texas has undergone a political shift thanks, in part, to President Donald Trump.