Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac DeVare.

The joy that I feel in being in a room in Huntsville, Texas, with 400 people that I've never met before who are so excited about the future of this state and so eager to share with me what's on their mind.

I love that. And I just, I've never seen, I've never experienced campaigning like that before.

There's, there's some real joy, not just for me or from me, but from people who are coming

to this. Joyful was aware that Hillary Clinton would sometimes use to describe her campaign and

must be scratched what I just, what I just said. Delete. Today's guest, Beto O'Rourke, the Texas

and Democratic nominee against Ted Cruz in Texas for the Senate seat, Cruz has held since 2013.

We're going to be doing a lot of candidate conversations this year, but there's a reason I want to start with O'Rourke.

He's running a race that most people expect him to lose, and he's going for it anyway.

And he's doing it as a Democrat counting on changing political prospects in the state

that's generally seen as the heart of the Republican Party's political prospects.

Democrats have been talking for years about turning Texas blue, and it never happens.

The other thing that struck me about O'Rourke, and this is what I covered in the article up on the Politico website about this interview, is that he has not become the kind of national democratic cause that others have.

No, John Ossoff, for example. He's also not Wendy Davis. I talked to for the article. She was the 2014 candidate for governor who told me that if O'Rourke is going to win, he's going to need to raise the money to stay competitive, and that means getting a little more attention. Then again, she lost by 21 points. O'Rourke has a whole anti-establishment routine, but he loves doing interviews. So I started this one off talking to him about the two things I see come up most, that he was in a punk band in college and that he looks like a candidate.

Both those things are true.

So I think this becomes the first off message that includes a candidate quoting his own punk lyrics, which I guess we can stack up next to that Carol King tribute song Jay Inslee told me a few weeks ago that he wrote. Ted Cruz's spokesperson didn't respond to me about getting his views into the story that's up

on the site, but I'm hoping he'll be here for a podcast soon.

I've asked.

In the meantime, we have an awesome lineup coming up.

Pete Buttigieg on what he's up to politically and whether he's running for president.

Congressman Matt Gates on Russia conspiracy theories that he thinks might be true.

Michael Tubbs on being the 27-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, and Puerto Rico Governor

...