A real race or a red redux?

Last Friday night, more than 20,000 attendees packed a downtown Houston stadium for a Kamala Harris campaign rally with perhaps the Bayou City’s most famous emissary, Beyoncé, delivering an endorsement (but not an appearance) for the vice president. A Democratic presidential candidate had not run as deep into the Lone Star State election since Bill Clinton in 1992. The event was meant to give a national stage to the specter of Donald Trump-driven 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 has made the government’s crackdown on reproductive rights a focal point of his campaign, was given a marquee platform to make his case to oust two-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz to a boosted base of voters in a city that is the key to his options.

“Everything is bigger in Texas, but Ted Cruz is too small for Texas,” Allred said in her speech, which came about an hour before Beyoncé and then Harris appeared.

Allred went after Cruz for enabling the failed effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, recalling how he stood bravely at the entrance to the House floor ready to fend off the riotous mob while Cruz “hid in a broom closet .” (More precisely, Cruz has referred to room, where he claimed he had searched with other Stop-the-Steal Republicans to play out their next move like “a supply closet with stacked chairs.” Then Allred confronted Cruz at this point to his face during their only debate, Cruz laughed uncomfortably.)

Allred, a congressman from Dallas, former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney, attacked Cruz for fleeing to a resort in Cancun 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 disappear.) And Allred criticized the senator for spending his time in Washington focusing 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 under way, and everyone is wondering about signs of what’s to come. And like the biennial ritual, many in the state and nationally are asking: Will Texas go 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 opinion polls of likely voters have shown a split race dead even to tilt 7 points in favor of Cruz. Average calculated by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight pay out about a 4-point win for Cruz. The same websites peg Trump’s edge in the state at about seven percent.

Through relentless digital inquiries, Allred has been successful surpassed then-Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 fundraising record with a haul of $80 million. Allred has spent much of it blasting the state’s major media markets with television ads touting himself just as hard for border security and with the stories of women who have suffered under Texas abortion laws.

Beto O’Rourke’s ousted run against Cruz six years ago, which the El Paso Democrat lost by just 2.6 points, reinvigorated liberal voters in Trump-era Texas. O’Rourke also set the benchmark for statewide candidates who ran in subsequent cycles.

O’Rourke’s greatest strengths in 2018—his free-wheeling style, his distaste for traditional campaign strategy and his idealistic embrace of post-partisan politics—changed the stale pack of moribund statewide campaigns in Texas. But some members of Democratic campaigns, including old hands who worked in politics back when the party could still win statewide races, believed those same qualities helped cluster what could be won. (Hindsight is 20/20, but less so when the last example of success is decades in the rear view.)

O’Rourke, his detractors cited, had lacked the necessary discipline, saying and doing things that might sound good in the moment but came back to bite him. His stubborn refusal to go on the offensive against his eminently attacking opponent, Cruz, had cost him. And his decision not to spend any meaningful portion of his massive fundraising haul on TV ads, effectively handing the airwaves to Cruz, was a key blunder.

With the proper adjustments, and the rapidly changing political terrain in Texas, Democrats could steadily improve on O’Rourke’s performance in watersheds. But since then, that number has looked more like a cap, a one-time benefit benefiting from the favorable tailwinds of the early Trump era and a uniquely vulnerable incumbent still reeling from a humiliating presidential defeat. In 2020, Democrat MJ Hegar lost to longtime Republican Sen. John Cornyn by about 10 points; and in 2022, O’Rourke’s doomed encore against Gov. Greg Abbott fell short by a similarly dismal margin.

In a presidential election cycle that has been analyzed in terms of “vibes,” the 2024 Texas Senate race has been remarkably subtle in its vibrations.

In trying to oust Cruz, Allred has copied a bit of O’Rourke’s approach. He has taken a more restrained, cautious approach. Excessively disciplined, he often comes across as dry, static, a little too buttoned up. But he has 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 the light of the setback. for autumn Roe vs. Wade.

The informal metrics that capture how much a candidate resonates — armies of grassroots volunteers, large crowds packed into small spaces in the state’s far reaches — have been lacking for Allred throughout the campaign.

Apparently it has been by designat 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—particularly suburban women—while tapping the presidential primary to help turn out the base.

Back in March, Allred handily defeated his Democratic primary opponents, including underdog state Sen. Roland Gutierrez. For months afterward, the congressman largely kept his head down as he raised money and made TV news hits. It wasn’t until September that Allred began to seriously increase his campaign presence across the state, still holding mostly smaller events on a variety of select issues. Allred has also strongly touted the support of former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans.

Allred set out from the start to neutralize the main issue for Republicans and many independents in Texas — the brew that consists in small part of real-world challenges and in large part of racialized resentment fueled by Fox News-style propaganda that most often becomes labeled “the border” — by trying to distance itself from the Biden administration and wrap itself 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 border policies.” A few months earlier, he praised the administration’s decision to resume construction of the border wall in Texas, something Allred had previously ruled “racist.”

One of the most important ads that Allred released a few months ago was a classic “tough at the border” ad lifted straight from the GOP playbook, featuring himself at the border wall with pickup trucks and sheriff’s deputies, calling Cruz “all hats and no cattle” for the senator’s vote against a bipartisan border security bill. It’s the kind of reactive tack that many Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have taken in response to the GOP’s relentless drumbeat of messages 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 track, he still runs the same playbook as he did in 2018.

He has tried to define Allred as another radical liberal who wants to destroy 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 storming the large rural areas of Texas where he needs Republican voters to rush to the polls.

He delivers a basic message of “Keep Texas Texas” (a more detailed upgrade from his “Texas Tough” in 2018). That means the Harvard-educated lawyer is once again leaning on Texas bravado about freedom and trucks, arguments about sending Allred to California, and suggestions that veep candidate Tim Walz won’t wave in a sufficiently masculine way.

On the airwaves, Cruz and his allied super PACs (including one questionably funded with proceeds from his podcast) have spent tens of millions of dollars on nasty, misleading anti-trans ads claiming Allred wants to let boys play in girls’ sports.

The Cruz attack apparently caused enough damage that Allred felt compelled to put up her own ad earlier this month in response to the attacks. In a direct-to-camera proclamation, Allred proclaimed, “I’m a father. I’m also a Christian. My faith has taught me that all children are God’s children. So let me be clear. I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of the ridiculous thing that Ted Cruz says.”

This defensive nonsequitur had the effect of both upsetting some in the Democratic base who saw it as compromising anti-trans propaganda and also giving more oxygen to the Cruz camp, which has continued to make transgender children into sports to the core of their offensive against Allred.

The University of Texas poll in October, which had Cruz up by 7 points, also showed Allred, like O’Rourke before him, leading among independent voters and competing well in the suburbs. But Cruz, who in 2018 came off a failed presidential run that brought his approval numbers home, appears to be on firmer ground now.

To secure re-election, the Republican senator will certainly count on the same rural red wall that held against O’Rourke six years earlier, but he will also seek reinforcements in the high turnout among conservative suburbs. If he can close the gap in his home county of Harris and cross over with Hispanic voters, it’s the ball game.

The road to victory for the Democrats remains the same as ever: Allred must run up the margins as much as possible with massive turnout in the Democratic polling centers of Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, while building on the gains of O’Rourke in 2018 and Biden in 2020 – but not O’Rourke in 2022 – in key suburbs. Even with that, the Dallas congressman also has to turn a significant number of Republican voters who are looking for a politically confused needle in a haystack of 30 million Texans after the Trump-Allred vote.