Cruz vs O'Rourke prediction

[GreatTailedGrackle]

Cruz is an incumbent, but an unpopular one in a Democratic-leaning year, so I would shocked if Cruz matches Donald Trump's margin of victory, so let's say +8% Cruz is the point where I am amazed at his performance.  Beto could win, but if he hits a 2% margin I will be astonished.  If I average the numbers I consider stretching plausibility, I get a +3% margin for Cruz.  This is slightly better than FiveThirtyEight is giving O'Rourke, but not by much. 

I am not going to try to figure in Neal Dikeman's share, but I will say that seeing as I was going to vote for Dikeman and the only people I know who reacted to the Kavanaugh hearing by vowing to vote Democratic (who weren't voting Democratic already) have been small-l libertarians (I read a few Twitter threads, so it's not just my disproportionately libertarian social circle), and also considering that people seem more willing to vote third party when races aren't close, I do expect him to underperform relative to normal Libertarian candidate performance in Texas.

On the other hand, Dikeman's website is full of political cartoons he drew himself which are so bad they're halfway back around to being funny.  If he can get them about 42% worse, maybe he and his awful cartoons can go viral.