O’Rourke fundraiser tonight: As I reported last month, Louis Susman, a big Chicago fundraiser for Obama — who later appointed him U.S. ambassador to Britain — along with wife Marjorie Susman, are chairing tonight’s O’Rourke fundraiser, according to the invitation.

Sponsors also include Chicago-area political players, most with Obama ties: Austan Goolsbee, a prominent economist and onetime adviser in the Obama White House; Stephanie Sutton, who worked in the State Department during Obama’s presidency; Michael O’Neil, who worked on the Obama campaign and in the White House; John Oxtoby, another White House staffer who now works at Ariel Investments along with wife Roxana Oxtoby, the vice president of sales and product development at Fresh and Ready Foods in Chicago; and Todd Segall, whose LinkedIn page notes he’s vice president of Sales at Tubi.

Near dusk on a muggy Saturday night in Cedar Rapids, more than 80 Iowans stood patiently in a slow-moving line in the parking lot of a strip mall near downtown. The attraction: the chance to question or take selfies with Beto O’Rourke, dressed in an open-neck blue shirt and grey pants.

Those in line at the opening of O’Rourke’s local headquarters ranged from retired nurse Connie McCall (“Beto really relates. He looks right at you”) to trucking executive Lance Voutrobek (“I like his appeal to the centrist, more moderate group, instead of the far left”).

At the same time almost to the minute, the Des Moines Register was releasing its Iowa Poll of likely caucus-goers that showed O’Rourke—once a darling of the political handicappers—with dismal 2-percent support. Sunday morning that minuscule poll number led George Stephanopoulos’s ABC interview with O’Rourke.

In covering presidential politics, there are moments when you have to choose between the polls and what you see with your own eyes. After following O’Rourke for most of two days, I am going with my instincts: the solid, attentive crowds of more than hundred that he attracted for Friday town meetings in smaller southern Iowa towns like Ottumwa and Knoxville don’t seem like a short-lived mirage to me. Nearly eight months before the opening-gun caucuses, his presidential campaign just doesn’t feel like a futile gesture by an also-ran who instead should be running for the Senate from Texas.