A Real Senate Race in Texas?

Trolling through the online insane asylum that is DailyKos today (as I do every day if only for amusement's sake), I found that Kos - who is sadly gaining more and more control of the Democratic Party, which should instead be finding and running more sane rational and admirable candidates like Lieberman - has selected for himself a candidate to run against John Cornyn in Texas. Now my initial thought was that a good Republican like Cornyn would be basically untouchable in so red a state as Texas but Kossacks are crowing about poll numbers that might suggest otherwise. Cornyn's fav/unfav are tighter than a candidate might want going into an election, but certainly not bad (Hillary's are pretty much in the same awful region too).

So who's this newly-crowned "people powered candidate" (and is only Kos's support needed to make him people-powered or do the...um...people actually need to approve too?)? He's a state senator from Houston by the name of Rick Noriega. Compelling resume, I must admit - Afghanistan veteran, KSG graduate - but whether he's got the substance to actually run remains to be seen. Should Noriega prove to be somewhat viable (and get past whatever the Texas DP establishment throws at him), this could be a noteworthy race in Texas. What's always an interesting aspect to Texas politics is the Hispanic dimension as both parties understand the importance of that vote and thus neither engages in the sort of anti-immigrant sentiment that too often boils over into xenophobic/racist anti-Latino rhetoric elsewhere. I love race season.