Last Friday evening, more than 20,000 attendees packed a stadium in downtown Houston for a Kamala Harris campaign rally featuring perhaps the Bayou City’s most famous emissary, Beyoncé, who delivered an endorsement (though not a performance) for the vice president. A Democratic presidential hopeful hadn’t stumped in the Lone Star State this deep into the election since Bill Clinton in 1992. The event was meant to give a national stage to the specter of Donald Trump-fueled abortion bans like those in Texas.
It also gave Colin Allred perhaps the most high-profile moment of his campaign. The Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who’s made government encroachment on reproductive rights a centerpiece of his campaign, got a marquee speaking slot to deliver his case for ousting two-term Republican Senator Ted Cruz to an amped up crowd of voters in a city that is key to his electoral prospects.
“Everything is bigger in Texas, but Ted Cruz is too small for Texas,” Allred said in his speech, which came about an hour before Beyoncé and then Harris appeared.
Allred went after Cruz for enabling the failed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, recalling how he stood bravely at the entry of the House floor ready to fend off the riotous mob while Cruz “hid in a broom closet.” (More precisely, Cruz has referred to the room, where he claimed to have hunkered down with fellow Stop-the-Steal Republicans to game out their next steps, as “a supply closet with stacked chairs.” When Allred confronted Cruz on this point to his face during their sole debate, Cruz chuckled uncomfortably.)
Allred, a Dallas congressman and former NFL linebacker and civil rights lawyer, attacked Cruz for fleeing to a Cancun resort during 2021’s deadly winter storm while his fellow Texans struggled without heat. (In his defense, Cruz has claimed it was his daughters’ idea to abscond.) And Allred castigated the senator for spending his time in Washington focused on divisive stunts, extremist ideology, and me-first politics, as illustrated by his frequent podcasting.
It’s the last week before Election Day, early voting is well underway, and everyone is casting about for signs of what will come. And, as is the biennial ritual, many in the state and at the national level are asking: Will Texas turn blue (whatever that means)? Or, more specifically, can Allred become the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas in 30 years?
In recent weeks, public polls of likely voters show a race ranging from dead-even to tilted seven points in Cruz’s favor. Averages calculated by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight cash out at around a 4-point win for Cruz. The same sites peg Trump’s edge in the state at around seven percent.
Through relentless digital solicitations, Allred has successfully surpassed then-Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s record fundraising total in 2018 with a haul of $80 million. Allred has put much of that into blasting the state’s major media markets with TV ads touting himself as tough on border security and featuring the stories of women who’ve suffered under Texas abortion law.
O’Rourke’s out-of-nowhere run against Cruz six years ago, which the El Paso Democrat lost by just 2.6 points, reinvigorated liberal voters in Texas in the Trump era. And O’Rourke also set the benchmark for statewide candidates who ran in the cycles that followed.
O’Rourke’s main strengths in 2018—his off-the-cuff freewheeling style, his aversion to traditional campaign strategy, and his idealistic embrace of a post-partisan politics—upended the stale packaging of moribund statewide campaigning in Texas. But some Dem campaign operatives, including old hands who worked in politics back when the party still could win statewide races, believed those same traits helped bungle what was a winnable race. (Hindsight is 20/20, but less so when the last example of success is decades back in the rearview.)
O’Rourke, quoth his detractors, had lacked the necessary discipline, saying and doing things that might sound good in the moment but that came back to bite him. His stubborn refusal to go on the attack against his eminently attackable opponent, Cruz, had cost him. And his decision not to use any meaningful chunk of his massive fundraising haul for TV ads, effectively ceding the airwaves to Cruz, was a key blunder.
With the correct tweaks, then, and the rapidly shifting political terrain in Texas, Democrats could steadily improve on O’Rourke’s watershed performance. But, since, that number has looked more like a ceiling, a one-off benefiting from the favorable tailwinds of the early Trump era and a uniquely vulnerable incumbent still smarting from a humiliating presidential defeat. In 2020, Democrat MJ Hegar lost to longtime Republican Senator John Cornyn by about 10 points; and, in 2022, O’Rourke’s doomed encore run against Governor Greg Abbott fell short by a similarly bleak margin.
In a presidential election cycle that’s been analyzed in terms of “vibes,” the 2024 Texas Senate showdown has been notably subtle in its vibrations.
In his bid to oust Cruz, Allred has copied little of O’Rourke’s approach. He’s taken a more restrained, careful tack. Exceedingly disciplined, he often comes off as dry, static, a bit too buttoned-up. But he’s also been more aggressive in going on the offensive against Cruz, casting the latter as a podcasting-obsessed, self-interested coward, who was one of the country’s most vehemently anti-abortion conservatives before adopting more evasive views in light of the backlash to the fall of Roe.
The informal metrics that capture how much a candidate is resonating—armies of grassroots volunteers, large crowds packed into small spaces in the far-flung reaches of the state—have been lacking for Allred throughout the campaign.
That has seemingly been by design, at least in part, as Allred has tried to avoid making too much noise. His strategy has been to run to the middle in an attempt to capture independent and moderate Republican voters—especially suburban women—while banking on the presidential election to help turn out the base.
Back in March, Allred handily defeated his Democratic primary opponents, including underdog state Senator Roland Gutierriez. For months after that, the congressmen largely kept his head down while raising money and doing TV news hits. It wasn’t until September that Allred really began to ramp up his campaign presence across the state, and he still mostly held smaller events on a curated range of issues. Allred has also heavily touted the endorsement of former GOP Congress member Liz Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans.
From the start, Allred set out to neutralize the top issue for Republicans and many independents in Texas—that brew, composed in small part of real-world challenges and in large part of racialized resentment fueled by Fox News-style propaganda, which most often gets labeled “the border”—by trying to distance himself from the Biden administration and wrapping himself in the law-and-order border security complex. In January, Allred was one of just a handful of Democrats to join a Republican House resolution—nothing more than a partisan messaging stunt—to condemn Biden’s “open-borders policies.” A few months earlier, he praised the administration’s decision to resume border wall construction in Texas, something Allred had previously decried as “racist.”
One of the main ads Allred released, starting a few months back, was a classic “tough on the border” ad lifted straight from the GOP playbook, featuring himself at the border wall with pickups and sheriff’s deputies, calling Cruz “all hat and no cattle” for the senator’s vote against a bipartisan border security bill. It’s the sort of reactive tack that many Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have taken in response to the GOP’s relentless drumbeat of messaging about migrant “invasions.”
Meanwhile, Cruz has made a half-hearted attempt to rebrand himself as a productive bipartisan statesman focused on bringing jobs to Texas. But, on the trail, he’s still running the same playbook he did in 2018.
He’s sought to define Allred as yet another radical liberal bent on destroying the Lone Star State. His closing message has been poetically straightforward: “Colin Allred is Kamala Harris.”
In the final weeks of the campaign, Cruz has been barnstorming the vast rural swathes of Texas where he needs Republican voters to surge to the polls.
He’s touting a basic message of “Keep Texas Texas” (a more verbose upgrade from his “Texas Tough” in 2018). This means the Harvard-matriculated lawyer is once again leaning on tropes of Texas bravado about freedom and trucks, quips about sending Allred on a jackass to California, and suggestions that veep candidate Tim Walz does not wave in a sufficiently masculine manner.
On the airwaves, Cruz and his allied super PACs (including one dubiously financed with revenue from his podcast) have spent tens of millions of dollars on nasty, misleading anti-trans ads claiming that Allred wants to let boys play in girls sports.
The Cruz onslaught apparently caused enough damage that Allred felt compelled to put up his own ad earlier this month responding to the attacks. In a straight-to-camera proclamation, Allred proclaimed, “I’m a dad. I’m also a Christian. My faith has taught me that all kids are god’s kids. So let me be clear. I don’t want boys playing girls sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.”
This defensive non-sequitur had the effect of both upsetting some in the Democratic base who saw it as caving to anti-trans propaganda and also giving more oxygen to the Cruz camp, which has continued to make transgender kids in sports the core of its offensive against Allred.
The October UT poll that had Cruz up by seven points also showed Allred, like O’Rourke before him, leading among independent voters and competing well in the suburbs. But Cruz, who in 2018 was coming off a failed presidential bid that tanked his approval numbers back home, looks to be on firmer ground now.
To secure reelection, the Republican senator will certainly count on the same rural red wall that held against O’Rourke six years prior, but he’ll also seek reinforcements in high turnout of suburban conservatives. If he can close the gap in his home county of Harris and outperform with Hispanic voters, that’s the ballgame.
The path to victory for Democrats remains the same as ever: Allred must run up the margins as much as possible with massive turnout in the Democratic voting hubs of Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, while building on the gains of O’Rourke in 2018 and Biden in 2020—though not O’Rourke in 2022—in key suburban counties. Even with that, the Dallas congressman also needs to flip a significant number of Republican voters, searching, as for a politically confused needle in a haystack of 30 million Texans, for the Trump-Allred vote.
