On Tuesday night, Dallas Congressman Colin Allred bested San Antonio state Senator Roland Gutierrez in the Democratic primary contest for the right to challenge U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in November. In what was seen as a two-way race between the pair, Allred—always the frontrunner—trounced Gutierrez by a margin of more than 40 points as of late Tuesday. By around 9 p.m., networks called the race for Allred, calculating he’d won the nomination without the need for a May runoff. Allred will now feature prominently in national Democrats’ hopes to hold on to a razor-thin margin in the U.S. Senate this fall.
Allred—a 40-year-old former NFL player and civil rights lawyer in the Obama administration—spent recent months tacking to the right and positioning himself as the moderate establishment candidate. He joined Republicans in a misleading condemnation of President Joe Biden’s supposedly “open borders” policies and even praised the announcement of border wall construction in South Texas, something the president himself had described as pointless but out of his hands to stop. Allred also refused, as the body count soared, to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
Gutierrez, a 53-year-old immigration attorney who served more than a decade in the state House before rising to the upper chamber in 2021, had veered in the opposite direction, endorsing Medicare for All, a Gaza ceasefire, and progressive immigration policies. Perhaps more than anything, he pinned his campaign on aggressive gun control measures, beliefs he embraced with passionate intensity after the 2022 Uvalde school shooting that left 21 dead in his district.
But Gutierrez floundered across the state Tuesday, even losing his home Bexar County to Allred by a wide margin.
