Texas Senator Ted Cruz easily won his reelection bid against Democratic challenger Colin Allred, scoring a two-digit lead with 80% of the votes tallied, according to NBC News. Concretely, the incumbent is getting 54.1% of the support compared to Allred's 43.8%, a much larger margin than what practically all polls projected.
As well as the unexpected margin, another noteworthy factor of Cruz's victory is the sheer amount of support he got among Latinos, actually winning the demographic, according to an exit poll by NBC News.
The outlet showed a whopping 35-point difference between the last election, in which he narrowly beat Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke, and the current race: Here, the Republican won by six percentage points compared to his 29-point loss in 2018.
Many Latinos have seemingly shifted their support toward the Republican party, with another passage of the outlet's exit poll showing Kamala Harris narrowly beating Donald Trump at the national level: 53% to 45%. The figure compares to the 65% who supported Joe Biden in 2020, with 32% backing Trump.
The shift comes after Cruz largely focused on immigration, promising to back conservative policies that would "keep Texas, Texas."
Polls throughout the race showed both candidates neck to neck, with some of the surveys even favoring Allred. Both campaigns raised more than $130 million in total, making this one of the most expensive Texas Senate races in history.
Allred outpaced Cruz in every quarter. His campaign reported collecting 1.8 million individual contributions and $68.7 million in total receipts since its launch, along with contributions from 252 of Texas' 254 counties and an average donation of $36.57. The money was mostly used on televised ads targeting key voter blocs. However, the funds did not help Allred make the race a competitive one, with Cruz quickly getting an unsurmountable lead early in the night.
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