Colin Allred Will Defeat Ted Cruz, Flip Texas Senate Seat

• The Senate race between Colin Allred and Ted Cruz could reveal a lot about Texas’ identity.
• The Lone Star State has been a GOP bastion for decades, but voting shifts are changing that dynamic.
• BI spoke with Colin Allred in Houston about the race and how he views Cruz’s tenure.

For decades, Democrats have sought to recapture their former glory in Texas, but have repeatedly come up short.

The party hasn’t won a statewide race in the Lone Star State since 1994, largely stripping it of the kind of bench Republicans have cultivated for years through their dominance of state government.

So then rep. Colin Allred — a three-term lawmaker representing the Dallas area’s 32nd Congressional District — entered this year’s Senate race against two-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, many Democrats felt his bipartisan credentials would strengthen his race.

Allred, 41, believes he can be a change agent for Texas. And with less than a week to go until the election, he is still locked in a contest with the 53-year-old Cruz.

At the end of October New York Times/Siena College investigation showed Cruz with a four-point lead over Allred (50% to 46%) among likely voters, but in the same poll, former President Donald Trump led Vice President Kamala Harris by ten points (52% to 42%). And other polls of the race, including those from Marist College, Morning Consult and the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs, all showed Cruz with single-digit leads.

The competitiveness of the race led the Senate Majority PAC — the Democratic political action committee affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York — pour $5 million into the competition in recent days, as the Texas race is now widely viewed as the party’s best opportunity to flip a red seat this year. In all, Allred has raised more than $80 million for the Senate race, according to his campaign.

But one important fact remains: Allred will have to overcome the state’s Republican lean to oust Cruz.

Reproductive rights and economics

I sat down with Allred before a recent block walk kickoff event in Houston, where the former NFL player and civil rights attorney laid out his case against Cruz’s re-election bid.

But something significant stood out during our conversation.

In the past, red-state Democrats often avoided speaking out too forcefully on reproductive rights. But after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, along with the passage of Texas’ strict abortion ban, Allred criticized “extremism” that he argued would severely affect the economy.

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In the Times/Siena poll, likely voters in Texas ranked the economy as their top issue, with 27% of respondents expressing this opinion. (The issues in second and third place were immigration and abortion, with 15% support for each issue.)

“The individual stories of people being denied abortion care or denied care when pregnancies were not viable and having to leave the state are horrific,” Allred told me after speaking at a reproductive rights-focused rally headlined by Harris, who also included a performance. by Beyoncé. “I know many of these women who have come forward. It’s personal. It also affects every other aspect of life in Texas, from our medical schools to our universities to our business climate.”

The electoral card

In 2018, then Rep. Beto O’Rourke traversed Texas during his Senate campaign, visiting all of the state’s 254 counties in the process.

While Cruz eventually won, he edged O’Rourke by just 2.6 percentage points, or by about 215,000 votes out of more than 8.3 million ballots cast.

O’Rourke’s campaign that year worked to energize Democratic voters—focusing on young and progressive voters—and his town hall events became a signature part of his campaign.

Allred’s campaign approach is slightly different from that followed by O’Rourke, who represented the El Paso area in Congress from 2013 to 2019. He also seeks to maximize Democratic turnout, but he has done serious outreach to independents and Republicans to be a part of his moderate campaign.

“I have a record of being the most bipartisan Texan in Congress,” he told me during our conversation.

That’s the kind of ethos Allred is taking with her on the campaign trail across Texas, a behemoth of a state that contains huge cities and dozens of mid-sized and smaller cities and towns in between. It can take about thirteen hours to drive across Texas from east to west.

“This is a massive state, and what happens in one part of the state is not always known in the other part of the state,” Allred told me, adding of his experience, “I don’t run into any Texans looking for a handout, but I run into Texans looking for someone to be on their side.”

Democrats in Texas are already performing strongly in cities such as Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. But in the Trump era, Democrats have also increasingly won more suburban voters, a phenomenon that has helped the party immensely in other Sun Belt states like Arizona and Georgia. And if Allred is to defeat Cruz, he will need to put up extremely strong numbers with suburban voters across the board.

Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told me in an interview that Cruz is in a tougher spot compared to other Texas Republicans because he lacks significant “crossover” support. For decades, Republicans have flexed their political muscle in the state based on their strong support from party loyalists and conservative-leaning independents.

But Cruz, a former GOP presidential candidate, has cut a polarizing profile both in Texas and on the national stage.

“He doesn’t appeal much to the kind of soft Republicans, independents and moderate to conservative Democrats the way that Gov. Greg Abbott or Sen. John Cornyn do,” Jones said. “And it’s not a huge amount, but he’s starting at a disadvantage in that he has to basically win the entire Republican vote and make sure the Republicans show up.”

Cruz ‘too small’ for Texas

On the campaign trail, Allred has targeted Cruz’s infamous 2021 trip to Cancún, Mexico, which took place while many Texans were without power due to a severe winter storm.

During our conversation, Allred portrayed Cruz as someone who doesn’t have a broader vision for one of the fastest-growing states in the country, which now boasts over 30 million residents.

Business Insider has reached out to the Cruz campaign for comment.

“Texas is incredibly diverse and dynamic, but we’ve been ruled by extremists who I think have put everything positive about our state at risk,” Allred told me. “Ted Cruz in particular is someone that I think is too small for Texas. His vision is too small for us. And to me, that’s kind of the opposite of the Texas that I know.”

Allred, who would be the first black senator from Texas if he were to defeat Cruz, also spoke about the difficulties of change in a state where Republicans have long held a firm grip on power.

“When you have a one-party rule state for so long, you can get the impression that there is no change,” Allred told me. “There is always a feeling that we need change. But can we break through?”