When a few PETA members gathered to hand out barbecue sauce-slathered tofu outside a Ted Cruz campaign event in Columbus, Texas, they likely knew they were merely handing the senator ammunition for one of his certified great jokes. And boy, did he run with it. According to the Austin-American Statesman, Cruz brought up the protesters in his speech and accused them of being a harbinger of things to come under the potential rule of his opponent, Democrat Beto O’Rourke. “I got to say, they summed up the entire election,” Cruz said of the PETA crew. “If Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.”

This isn’t the first time Cruz has forced a connection between O’Rourke and Big Tofu. Earlier this month, he told a crowd that Democrats want to turn Texas into California, “right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair.” It’s a part of his campaign strategy to, as his campaign spokeswoman Emily Miller put it, define “Texas values” through O’Rourke’s food choices. Never mind the fact that Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is a California-born vegetarian, and that O’Rourke loves Whataburger so much he spent some time skateboarding in their parking lot. And with hip, liberal Austinites embracing a new era of butchering, the Republican method of proving heartland bona fides through livestock seems woefully out of date. Can you even imagine Cruz, a former corporate lawyer and mime, field-dressing a deer?

In his 2015 memoir, A Time for Truth, Cruz owned up to his nerdy reputation, writing that he tried to “consciously emulate” whatever the popular kids did. The problem is that Cruz, Princeton class of ‘92, hasn’t updated his cultural references since. In 2015, he earned a rebuke from Mandy Patinkin for constantly referring to lines from the 1987 classic The Princess Bride. This year, he called Democrats “the Party of Lisa Simpson”—referencing a 30-year-old show in which, as any half-witted fan knows, Lisa is the hero.

Maybe he really does think that the Silicon Valley is still the home of hippies, instead of outrageous rents and scooter wars. And all the while, Texas is changing along with the rest of the country, and the Asian-American population of the state has more than doubled since 2000. He might be safe making tofu jokes in 2018, but find himself eating pad Thai on the campaign trail in 2026.

For now, he’s content to count on old-fashioned Texas values, and seemingly not really care if his jokes land at all. This month, Chris Wilson, a Cruz pollster, told Texas Monthly that the campaign isn’t concerned: “For a guy that nobody likes, they sure keep voting for him.”