PLACID, Texas _ JoAnn Randall, a writer and rancher in Placid, a dot on the map 145 miles northwest of Austin in the geographical center of Texas, describes herself as a political independent.
Randall and her husband, Bill, a blues and rock guitarist, vote in the Republican primaries in McCulloch County because that's the only game in town.
But, this past election, JoAnn Randall was smitten with Beto O'Rourke.
"All you have to do is get in the presence of him and it's contagious, especially if you're a woman because he's so danged good-looking," said Randall, who is 79 and has lived in the county for 25 years. "The charisma just emits."
When O'Rourke came to McCulloch County, population 7,957, and neighboring San Saba County, population 5,959, for well-attended town halls on April 6, Randall was his guide.
They were stops 231 and 232 of O'Rourke's tour of all 254 counties, and, Randall wrote at the time, "It was one of the most exciting, enlightening and hopeful days of my life."
Seven months later, O'Rourke won just 400 votes in McCulloch County, or 15 percent of the vote.
That was half a percentage point less than Hillary Clinton received in 2016, 3 points less than Barack Obama's total in 2012 and 9 points less than Obama's tally in 2008.
O'Rourke's 11.9 percent of the vote in San Saba County told the same story.
Rural Texas, it seems, was immune to Betomania, or, more accurately, it had symptoms of both the phenomenon and the antibodies creating a rural firewall that saved U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, from defeat.
"It pulled every Republican out of the woodwork," said Jerry Blankenship, the San Saba County GOP chairman.
In his 2.6-percentage point victory, Cruz out-polled O'Rourke by 214,921 votes thanks to the Republican's lopsided margin of 446,693 in the state's 172 rural counties.
Overall, O'Rourke did make some small progress over recent Democratic performances, winning 25.6 percent of the state's rural vote, a small rebound from the last two cycles, in which Hillary Clinton won 24.3 percent against President Donald Trump in 2016 and Wendy Davis won 23.5 percent against Gov. Greg Abbott in 2014.
But as recently as 2002 _ eight years after Texas Democrats last won statewide office _ Democrat Ron Kirk won 40 percent of the rural vote and 44 percent of the urban vote running against U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, for an open seat in the U.S. Senate.
In the weeks since the election, Democrats have been left to puzzle over why a candidate as good as O'Rourke gained so little ground in rural Texas after covering so much ground to introduce himself, and if there is anything he might have done differently to coax just enough additional votes from these sparsely populated precincts to have won. And, considering O'Rourke's quick turn from losing Senate candidate to potential presidential prospect, what might his poor showing outside the state's largest metro areas reveal about O'Rourke's strengths and weaknesses as a possible national candidate in 2020?
