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 unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Cruz was considered in some quarters to be the most vulnerable GOP 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 is maintaining a consistent lead of five to seven 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 incumbent GOP senators—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, in which President Joe Biden dropped 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 getting 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 re-introducing 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 two to one.”
In the 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.
O’Rourke’s attempt to unseat Cruz was 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.
Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told The Epoch Times, that a statewide effort like 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, Rep. Henry Cuellar and Rep. 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.”