Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has officially walked away with his election to a third term in Washington by a margin of about 9 points over his well-funded Democratic challenger, Congressman Colin Allred. That victory is narrower than Donald Trump’s 14-point blowout in the state (the worst presidential result in Texas for Dems since 2012), but it’s nevertheless another devastating disappointment for Democrats. With a dire national Senate map for incumbents elsewhere and some fairly promising polls in the final stretch, Dems had hoped Allred would be able to deliver the ouster that Cruz narrowly avoided six years prior when Beto O’Rourke came within 3 points of victory.
But, as Trump gained everywhere and among practically everyone across the state while Kamala Harris fell flat everywhere and among practically everyone in Texas, Cruz rode Trump’s coattails well enough to make Allred’s slight overperformance insignificant.
Texas Democrats’ pathway to statewide competitiveness all but collapsed Tuesday as they not only failed to run up especially big numbers in the blue urban counties, ceded recent gains in the fast-growing suburbs, and, according to exit polls, bled support among voters of color. Most importantly, per the exit polls (take at least a small grain of salt), they appear to have lost the Latino vote to Trump and Cruz by fatal margins.
Allred, a Dallas congress member who flipped a GOP seat back in 2018, ran a carefully modulated campaign centered primarily on targeting independents and moderate Republicans with a message focused heavily on the harms to Texas women from the state’s extreme abortion bans. That post-Dobbs strategy fell flat here—and for Democrats all across the country–in the face of the visceral reactionary forces around the economy and immigration summoned by Trump.
Allred’s prototypical red-state Democrat approach, with various and facile run-to-the-middle policy gambits and tens of millions spent on TV ads, failed to secure any gains among independents and Republican voters in Texas, and his notable lack of grassroots panache failed to rally the liberal base—and mobilize volunteers—behind the cause of taking out Cruz.
While Allred raised a record amount of money—over $80 million—and performed decently enough in public polling to maintain a perception of viability leading into Election Day, there was none of the organic enthusiasm that Beto O’Rourke summoned in 2018 with his 254-county odyssey of come-one-come-all mass rallies. This was sold as a sort of shrewd strategery on Allred’s part. Keep your head down, don’t make too much noise, and perhaps you might sneak through without awakening the red monster. In hindsight, the strategy may have been more about obscuring the fact that few could be bothered to come out to see the former NFL linebacker on the stump.
His GOTV rallies in places like Houston and Dallas were underwhelming—even with the help of high-profile surrogates like Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock—and coupled with yet more made-for-TV roundtables. Meanwhile, Cruz ran the same playbook as 2018 with a simple message that Texas is tough (and so is he) and must remain so by thwarting radical leftists like Allred. Cruz spent the final weeks of the campaign barnstorming rural Texas on a multi-week bus tour delivering the anti-woke gospel to throngs of large crowds and spending tens of millions on attack ads focused on transgender kids in sports.
For all the handwaving away of O’Rourke’s roadshow strategy as naively wasted stray voltage or of his constant Facebook live-streaming as hokey, it was new, it was novel, and it was massively successful in getting people to tune in and show up. Plastering the major TV ad markets with primetime ads about how you’re not, in fact, a raving lunatic and are, in fact, tuff on the border, isn’t novel or compelling—nor a substitute for shoe-leather campaigning and basic charisma.
Given the nationalization of politics, it is increasingly a less impressive (or important) feat for a Texas Democrat to raise boatloads of money. But there’s no amount of campaign funds that can make up for the fact that Democrats don’t have a playbook (let alone a track record) for running successful statewide campaigns and that Texas Republicans are in fact very good at winning elections. After the blue surge of 2018, the GOP machine adjusted accordingly and went right back on the offensive. Democrats, meanwhile, have now failed to build upon that year in three straight election cycles.
It’s not all on Allred—when the Democratic presidential candidate barely wins Harris County, the cornerstone of the party’s electoral strength, we’re dealing with forces far beyond matters of campaign tactics and messaging. And like other Senate Democratic candidates, Allred outran Harris by several points. While Trump flipped the Rio Grande Valley, Allred still carried the region.
It’s hard to envision a different Democratic candidate doing all that much better than Allred in this atmosphere (though, to be fair, no one saw 2018 O’Rourke coming until he arrived). What is easy to see, though, is that Texas Dems have a whole lot of soul-searching to do before they even consider boisterously trotting out the line again that Texas is the biggest battleground state in the country. Right now, it’s the biggest red state in a big red nation.
