Republicans enter the 2024 Senate races needing to pick up two seats to regain control, but a loss in the Lone Star State could threaten their prospects.
When Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) announced his candidacy in May 2023 to challenge incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Cruz was considered in some quarters to be the most vulnerable Republican Senate incumbent in the 2024 election.
Now, 15 months later, amid the August heat and with the campaign about to enter the decisive post-Labor Day phase, Cruz maintains a consistent lead of 5 to 7 points among surveys of Texas voters, while Allred, the former NFL linebacker with the Tennessee Titans, has been unusually quiet.
The race remains among the most watched because, with the Senate presently divided 51–49, Republicans need only gain a couple of seats to regain a majority. Twelve GOP incumbents—including Cruz—must face voters in November, and losing just one seat could make the difference for Republicans.
The Dallas Democrat has been silent during a dramatic past month. President Joe Biden withdrew from his reelection effort following a lackluster debate performance against former President Donald Trump, who subsequently survived an assassination attempt, and Vice President Kamala Harris quickly got the top spot on the Democratic ticket.
Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright said that Allred is doing exactly what he should be at this stage of the campaign, contending that Republicans would make a serious mistake by being over-confident.
“A quiet campaign is a great campaign. I think you don’t want the national situation to define a Texas race,” Seawright told The Epoch Times.
“Allred has, and he is building the right infrastructure, he is focusing with the right messaging, and I think he’s doing the smart thing of introducing himself to the voters, and in some cases reintroducing himself, so his opposition cannot define him by a certain position.”
Asked about recent surveys showing Cruz with a significant lead, Seawright dismissed them as too early in the campaign.
“This roller coaster ride that we’re all going to experience between now and November is going to change the race dramatically,” he said.
Texas-based GOP campaign strategist and Must Read Texas founder Matt Mackowiak sees the contest as “close” but believes that “Cruz reflects the policy views of a majority of our voters, and in a presidential election year, that will be enough.”
Mackowiak told The Epoch Times that “Cruz is taking the race deadly seriously, and he expects to be outspent 2 to 1.”
An average of seven surveys conducted in June and July and compiled by FiveThirtyEight shows Cruz leading Allred by six points. In three of the seven, however, Cruz leads by only three points, reminding some of the close call in his 2018 reelection bid, when he defeated former Rep. Beto O’Rourke by 2.6 points.
In that 2018 contest, Cruz did well across the vast reaches of rural Texas, but O’Rourke was strong in urban areas including Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, and came closer than expected in suburban precincts surrounding the big cities.
Democrat strategists think the more moderate image projected by Allred could put him across the finish line in 2024.
One encouraging sign for Democrats is that Allred raised more campaign funds—$9.5 million—in the first quarter of the 2024 race than the $6.7 million raised by O’Rourke in 2018, and was all but even with the $9.7 million received by Cruz in the period.
Second-quarter filings in July showed Allred receiving $10.5 million, again beating O’Rourke’s total for the same quarter but trailing Cruz, who raised $12.6 million from April through June.
O’Rourke’s attempt to unseat Cruz is among the most well-funded statewide efforts ever by Texas Democrats. The last Democrat to win a statewide office in Texas was Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock in his 1994 reelection bid, and former President Jimmy Carter was the last national Democrat to carry the Lone Star State, in 1976.
Allred also is counting on his “Texas Offense,” a statewide Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign that he described during a July 28 launch in Houston as “the first effort of its kind in more than 20 years.”
Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told The Epoch Times that a statewide effort such as Allred’s get-out-the-vote campaign was also mounted in 2018 and again in 2022 by O’Rourke, although the latter effort was not nearly as successful as the former.
Democrats also see an advantage in Allred’s portrayal of himself as a moderate Democrat. That image has been bolstered via immigration issues, particularly a January House vote in which Allred was joined by two other Texas Democrats, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, in supporting a Republican resolution condemning Biden’s border policies.
In assessing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the two Senate candidates, Jones said that Cruz “doesn’t have 100 percent of the Trump voters locked down. There are still maybe one in 10 Trump voters who isn’t a Cruz voter right now.”
By contrast, Jones said, “Allred would have gotten all of the Biden vote; now, he’ll get all of the Harris vote, whereas a non-trivial slice of the Trump vote is either undecided or going to Allred.”
The Rice scholar was referring to Cruz’s being the last Republican presidential aspirant to drop out of the 2016 primaries and concede the GOP nomination to former President Donald Trump. The Texas senator has been a vocal Trump backer in the years since then.
“Trump will defeat Harris by a bigger margin than Ted Cruz will beat Colin Allred, if he does,” Jones said.
“Right now, we’re still not in a situation where I would predict that Allred will defeat Cruz, but I think he is better positioned to make it a much closer race than Kamala Harris is vis-a-vis Donald Trump.”