How Ted Cruz pulled off a decisive win and kept his White House hopes afloat

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during the debate with U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, in Dallas. (Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune via POOL)

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In the weeks leading up to Election Day, a series of polls found that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was in a familiar position: fighting for political survival in a state where other Republicans were routinely dominant.

But Cruz’s team felt confident. They were better positioned this election cycle overall and they’d identified what they saw as their ace in the hole: Democratic challenger Colin Allred’s record on transgender rights — specifically, the issue of transgender children playing in youth sports. The year before, Allred, a Dallas congressman, had voted against GOP legislation that proposed cutting off federal funds for school athletic programs that allowed “a person whose sex is male” to participate in women’s sports. The law defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”

Cruz and his allied political groups blitzed the airwaves with ads highlighting that vote and Allred’s other stances in favor of transgender rights. The ads, often featuring imagery of boys competing against girls in sports, reflected what Cruz’s team had found from focus groups and polling: Among the few million voters they’d identified who were truly on the fence, the transgender sports topic was most effective in driving support to Cruz, said Sam Cooper, a strategist for Cruz’s campaign.

“We felt like it was a double whammy for us, that it was an issue that, one, we had Allred dead to rights on, and two, it cut across all of our persuasion universes,” Cooper said. “It helped us with college-educated whites, which we needed, and also helped us with Hispanics,” for whom it was “the No. 1 persuadable issue.”

In the end, Cruz walloped Allred by nearly 9 percentage points, winning a majority of the statewide Latino vote and proving the polls dead wrong. Though the anti-trans ads may have contributed, Cruz also received a healthy boost from GOP nominee Donald Trump — who carried Texas by a whopping 14 points — and from voters’ sour outlook on the economy and immigration under Democratic management. About half of Texas voters cited one of those as the most important issue driving their vote, a bloc among which Cruz won more than 85%, according to exit polls.

Fresh off a 2018 reelection where he narrowly avoided becoming the first Texas Republican to lose statewide in decades, Cruz is emerging from last week’s win with his biggest jolt of political momentum in years, primed for an even bigger role on the national stage that could allow him to lay the groundwork for a future presidential run. He’s in line to head the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee under Trump's presidency. And he will retain a big megaphone with his nationally syndicated podcast and as a fixture in the conservative TV and talk radio ecosystem.

Terry and Janette Wages wait in a long line to see Cruz at a campaign rally in Longview on Oct. 5. Cruz's bus tours in the last weeks of the campaign covered large swaths of the state, ending in the Rio Grande Valley the Sunday before Election Day. (Credit: Michael Cavazos for The Texas Tribune)

The decisive win “reestablished what we’ve always known,” Cooper said. “He’s one of the most popular politicians in Texas and, despite what folks say, is going to be very hard to beat now and into the future.”

Talk of the next presidential race is years away, but Cruz has made clear that another White House run is on the table. And at least for now, he has preserved his place as a potential contender— not just by winning, but also avoiding a second straight nail-biter, following his tight 2018 reelection over Beto O’Rourke, that could have raised questions about his ability to compete on the national stage.

“I think this performance keeps him in the conversation nationally,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas who is unaffiliated with Cruz. “If he would have won narrowly, his political standing would be very different than what it is now, which is resounding defeat of a Democratic opponent and the ability to say, ‘We helped keep Texas red.’”

How Cruz won

For Cruz, the decisive win was especially sweet coming off a 2018 cycle that had made him seem vulnerable.

This time, Cruz mounted a more aggressive fundraising operation heading into the campaign, restocking his war chest to help him compete with the flood of Democratic cash that came pouring in like clockwork. He and his allies hit Allred early, tying the Dallas Democrat to party standard-bearers Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are unpopular in Texas.

Cooper, the Cruz strategist, identified two pivotal moments in the campaign. The first was in late September when Allred signed onto a letter, along with dozens of other House Democrats, that urged GOP lawmakers to remove from an annual defense policy bill restrictions on “medically necessary care for transgender service members or their family members.” A pro-Cruz super PAC made that the centerpiece of a widely circulated ad, featuring a veteran who lost both his legs in Vietnam calling Allred “too extreme for Texas” because he “demanded sex-change operations in the military.”

The other key moment also revolved around transgender rights. In response to the ads attacking his stance on transgender issues, Allred cut his own ad accusing Cruz of lying about his position.

"Let me be clear: I don't want boys playing girls' sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying,” Allred said in the direct-to-camera spot, which began airing in early October.

Cases of transgender kids trying to play on sports teams are exceedingly rare, and examples of kids losing out on athletic opportunities to their transgender peers are almost entirely confined to the college or professional level. Still, public polls have consistently found that a wide majority of Texans oppose the idea of allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports.

Allred’s response was easy to refute, Cooper said, because the Cruz campaign could point to contradictory examples in the Democrat’s voting record. From that point on, Cooper said, the message was “not only is he radical, he's also a liar.” Cruz countered with an ad highlighting Allred’s votes, including his opposition to the 2023 GOP transgender sports bill, and his signature on the letter opposing restrictions for transgender members of the military.

Such efforts were a response to what Democrats saw as attacks on the transgender community from not only Republicans in Congress, but also state legislatures around the country, where GOP lawmakers have restricted transgender children’s access to gender-transitioning care and youth sports. Allred tried to articulate that in his lone televised debate with Cruz, saying that he simply believed “folks should not be discriminated against” and calling on Cruz to explain “why he thinks they should.” But in the end, it was Allred’s response ad that got the lion’s share of the attention.

The issues surrounding transgender rights proved radioactive for Allred, according to Cooper, who said the campaign had tested “a battery of issues” among focus groups of persuadable voters. No other issue caused such intense reactions among voters or stuck with them to the same degree — even though Texas lawmakers had already banned student athletes from playing on teams that didn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth.

Allred and Cruz at their sole debate, held in Dallas on Oct. 15. (Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune via POOL)

Cruz’s team felt that Allred’s last real chance to “draw blood,” Cooper said, was in the televised debate held the week before early voting began.

Through the hour-long back-and-forth, Cruz repeatedly sought to tie Allred to Harris, saying the two “voted in favor of open borders over and over” and were both responsible for fueling a surge in inflation under the Biden administration. Allred, meanwhile, attacked Cruz as a partisan bomb-thrower with few legislative accomplishments and blasted him for torpedoing “the toughest border security bill in a generation” earlier in the year. Cruz also declined to stake out a position on Texas’ abortion ban and its lack of exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, which polls show that a majority of Texans favor.

Overall, though, Cruz’s team felt that he emerged from the bout unscathed and was in a strong position heading into early voting.

They also sensed that there was a political shift underway among Latino voters and felt that Cruz had a chance to win an outsized share of the bloc that had reliably favored Democratic candidates for decades. Though Cooper said “the intensity of the switch was surprising” — a majority of Latino voters backed Trump and Cruz in Texas, exit polls found — the campaign still worked to harness what seemed like a possible sea change. Cruz campaigned in South Texas the weekend before Election Day, and earlier in the cycle poured millions into an ad campaign targeting Latino voters with a mix of English and Spanish-language advertising. One such ad — titled “El Valiente Senador,” or “The Brave Senator” in English — portrayed Cruz as a fighter battling high taxes and working to keep Texas “free and safe.”

A "Hispanics for Cruz" sign at a campaign rally in Huntsville on Oct. 8, 2024. (Credit: Hope Capwell for The Texas Tribune)

“It wasn't just the cultural issues, it wasn't just the economic issues,” Cooper said. “It was the fact that he showed up. It wasn't an accident that our fourth-to-last rally — Sunday night before the election, typically your biggest rally — was in McAllen.”

Upwards of 700 people packed into a burger restaurant in downtown McAllen to hear Cruz on the stump — reflecting the massive GOP surge that would be borne out days later in the Latino-dominated Rio Grande Valley and across much of Texas’ broader border region. The shift was particularly striking in the valley, the four-county region at the southern tip of Texas where Trump won a majority of the vote, eight years after drawing only 29% there. Cruz ran slightly behind Trump, losing the Rio Grande Valley vote by 5.5 percentage points after trailing O’Rourke there by 35 points in 2018.

Cruz ended up defeating Allred by nearly 1 million votes statewide, according to unofficial tallies. The margin was about 5 percentage points and nearly 600,000 votes closer than the presidential contest — suggesting that Allred could have overcome a much narrower Harris loss, as Democrats did in Senate races in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. But Senate Democrats also suffered much closer losses in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio — leaving party power brokers to wonder if their millions spent in Texas should have gone elsewhere.

“Pushing this thing to nearly double digits I don't think was on anybody's radar,” Cooper said. “I mean, Chuck Schumer was claiming, literally, the day of the election, that they had Texas tied. He legitimately thought they had a shot here.”

Cruz’s political future

With his seat in Washington secured for another six years, Cruz has already turned to what comes next. Speaking on his podcast the day after the election, he outlined a handful of his top priorities for the next Congress, which could be under unified GOP control if Republicans continue their pace to secure a narrow majority in the House.

Among them is renewing the GOP’s massive tax cut package passed in 2017 during Trump’s first term — a priority that Cruz described as “the big kahuna” for the next Congress. If the House remains in Republican hands, Cruz predicted the GOP would extend the tax breaks and make them “bigger and bolder.”

Under Republicans’ new Senate majority, Cruz is in line to chair the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, where he is currently the top Republican. The panel oversees a number of key White House appointments and a huge range of industries and agencies, including telecommunications, transportation, aviation and the broad category of interstate commerce. The committee’s jurisdiction also includes space travel and exploration and the internet, putting Cruz in position to work with Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the SpaceX rocket company and X social media site who emerged this year as a powerful GOP donor and influencer. The committee post could also thrust Cruz into the center of culture war clashes with Big Tech over online privacy and censorship that are catnip to conservative voters.

Campaign buttons at Cruz's election night watch party in Houston. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)

After a campaign where he played up his bipartisan credentials and touted support from local Democratic officials, Cruz appeared in no mood to extend his hand to Democrats relegated to minority status. When the Senate reconvenes, Cruz said on his podcast, “I'll be very curious if any Democrats are looking around going, maybe being wild-eyed, leftist, communist, America-hating lunatics is not a path to victory.”

Still, the coalition that powered Cruz’s reelection — which included historic Latino support and little evidence of major GOP defections — could form the makings of a future White House bid, depending on how things pan out leading into 2028 and beyond, said Steinhauser, the GOP strategist.

“I think that Cruz can make the argument, I'm your grassroots conservative candidate with some hard MAGA credentials, but I can also win a majority of Hispanic Texans, at least, and perhaps in other states,” Steinhauser said. “I think that is a very strong argument.”

Cruz was a top contender in the 2016 GOP primary and has been open about his future desire to make another White House bid, telling the Texas Tribune a year ago, “I fully hope and expect to run again at some point.” But his immediate path to the GOP nomination could be virtually sealed off if Vice President-elect JD Vance runs to succeed Trump and secures the president’s backing.

Steinhauser, though, said things are far from predetermined.

“The presidential race is just gonna be wide open,” he said. “I don't think it's JD Vance’s to lose, because a lot can happen. We don't know what it's going to look like a year from now. So if you’re Cruz, you’ve gotta feel pretty good about your future.”

Cruz speaks to supporters during his election night watch party in downtown Houston. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)