Democrats see signs of growing momentum in Texas Senate race

Democrats are seeing signs of growing momentum in the Texas Senate race between Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and Rep. Colin Allred (D), fueling the party’s hopes that this year could be the breakthrough they’ve been seeking for multiple cycles.

While Cruz remains the favorite to win — and while Allred’s campaign has lacked the grassroots buzz of Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 challenge to Cruz — the race’s margins are shrinking.

One recent sign of that: The Cook Political Report this week shifted the race toward Democrats, from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” as polls suggest a tightening race and Democrats boost spending.

Even if Cruz wins, the fact that he is having to work for it is an encouraging sign for Democrats.

There’s “a real race going on” for the Texas Senate seat, said Matt Angle, founder and director of the Lone Star Project, a PAC in the state that has spent 15 years quietly turning Texas’s urban counties blue.

That doesn’t mean an easy race for Allred, Angle emphasized.

“Getting close and winning are two different things, so some good things need to happen over the next six weeks,” he said. “But I feel good.”

He contended Cruz looks like he’s “panicking” — putting out mailers warning supporters that Texas could go blue without their enthusiastic response — as the polls suggest Allred is closing in.

An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey published last week found Cruz up by 4 points over his Democratic challenger, and a poll from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation put the incumbent up by 3 points.  A Morning Consult poll in late August found Cruz up 5 points, while another in early September found Allred ahead by 1 point, according to a tracker from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).

The polls suggest Cruz still has the edge, but the incumbent has struggled to cross the 50-percent mark, which observers say spells trouble for him. Most analysts believe the race will come down to the 6 percent of self-described “undecided” voters seen in the Emerson polling.

“Fundamentally, the race is closer than it should be,” said GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak, citing Allred’s fundraising — though he said he still expects the Republican to win handily.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) last week announced a multimillion-dollar ad buy in Texas and Florida targeting Cruz and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). The move was a surprise to some, as Democrats are on the defensive as they try to protect vulnerable incumbents like Montana Sen. Jon Tester (D). But DSCC Chair Gary Peters (Mich.) said the party has been preparing “all cycle long” to “take advantage of Sens. Cruz’s and Scott’s damaged standings in their states.”

Mackowiak, the Republican strategist, argued that this spending was pro-forma, an attempt to keep donors happy without spending too much scarce money on a race he argued Democrats were likely to lose.

Meanwhile, the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has faced some questions about whether it is doing enough to protect its own incumbents, like Cruz and Scott. A spokesperson for the National Republicans Senatorial Committee (NRSC) rejected that criticism last week.

Six years ago, O’Rourke came within 3 percentage points of unseating Cruz as a broader “blue wave” swept that year’s midterm elections. Some in the state are skeptical Allred can lasso the same energy this cycle, but others argue Cruz’s reelection bid is dogged by new issues that have changed the game since 2018.

Cruz is still dealing with political fallout following an ill-timed trip to Cancún, Mexico, as Texas faced power outages and freezing temperatures that killed hundreds of people back in 2021. And abortion, which has been a winning issue for Democrats in recent cycles, could also hamper the incumbent amid ongoing pushback to the state’s 2021 near-total ban.

The latest Emerson polling also found the incumbent’s net favorability was slightly underwater, while Allred has a positive net score — though a notable 15 percent said they still had not heard of the Democrat.

“Cruz is six years less liked now than he was then,” Angle contended. “So I think that the potential for Allred to break through is a little bit higher than it was for Beto.”

That is a comparison Republicans told The Hill is unfavorable for Allred; the Dallas representative has not commanded the enthusiasm that O’Rourke did in his 2018 campaign. In the Austin suburbs where GOP strategist Brendan Steinhauser lives, that election saw “momentum” among grassroots Democrats that simply isn’t there for Allred, he said.

“The proverbial suburban women with a college degree — they were talking about Beto, there were yard signs up, he was getting a ton of media attention,” Steinhauser said.

But while Angle, the Democratic strategist, conceded that Allred’s campaign had been quieter, he argued that this was an asset in a race that will be decided by moderates — and even conservatives — tired of Cruz, whom Allred has aimed to characterize as a selfish show-boater uninterested in actual governance.

Cruz, by contrast, made his largest ad-buy yet targeting Allred for his support of the Equality Act, which bars gender discrimination in public places.

In a red-meat election, with an opponent hitting him on the culture war, Allred “has avoided the peril of doing the ‘turn Texas blue’ pep rally,” Angle argued. “When you do that, you excite your Democrats, but you also alert all the Republicans, and you signal to them that they aren’t part of your coalition.”

The Allred campaign said in a memo shared with The Hill that the Democrat’s “unique coalition of voters, the resources and work of his campaign, and Cruz’s weaknesses all put the Texas Senate race in play,” touting the recent polls and the Cook Political Report shift.

Texas has voted red in White House races since 1980, though it took 15 years for state executive offices to go Republican and more than 20 years for the GOP to take its current command of the state Legislature. That margin has narrowed in recent decades: The state went to the Republican candidate by 16 points in 2012 and 9 points in 2016. President Biden narrowed that margin to roughly 6 points in 2020.

Before Biden’s historic exit from the presidential race this summer, DDHQ’s polling averages had him down by 9 points in the Lone Star State. Vice President Harris appears to have closed that gap, and she’s now trailing former President Trump by 5 points.

That is a promising sign for Democrats seeking inroads in Texas, which boasts 40 Electoral College votes, though it’s not enough to suggest a presidential race flip is on the table this fall.

To Angle, whether Allred wins or not, the broader trajectory is toward winning populous urban and suburban counties that Democrats lost decades ago and have been slowly recapturing.

In 2006, for example, the Lone Star Project flipped Dallas County from Republican to Democrat, followed by Houston’s Harris County in 2008. In 2012, then-President Obama took the county with less than 600 votes — a margin that Democrats had expanded to 218,000 by the election of 2020.

Now, Angle said, only Tarrant County — home of Fort Worth, and the state’s third largest urban county — stands in the Republican column, and his organization is seeking to flip its local executive races this cycle.

The path for Democrats in this election and others, Angle told The Hill, is “urban out, border up.”

That dynamic may not deliver Democrats statewide wins this year, a result which would still rely on everything breaking in the party’s favor.

“For Democrats to be competitive here, in addition to having a uniquely disliked Republican candidate at the top of the ticket, they also need all the fundamental features of an election to go their way. And right now, it’s not clear to me that that’s what’s going on,” said Josh Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.

Blank said it wouldn’t come as a surprise if Cruz ends up doing better than he did in 2018 but worse than Trump did in 2020.

But long term, he said, the party is in trouble.

He predicted the state would be truly competitive by 2032 — and potentially 2028, particularly if Trump wins this election and provides Democrats with an antagonist to organize against.

To Republican strategists, the narrowing vote totals don’t yet represent a serious threat.

“I think in the end, Trump’s margin in Texas will surely be large enough that Cruz will win reelection,” Mackowiak said. “The question is, how much will Cruz underperform Trump?”

But Steinhauser worried that in an increasingly young and majority-minority state, the approach offered by Cruz and Trump risks pushing the party into trouble.

“We have a good message and good policies,” the GOP strategist said, but he warned against a national conservatism that “makes people feel like the only people that matter are white Christian males.”

“That is not going to fly [for voters who] are not all those things — or not two out of the three, or even out of the three,” he added.

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