It’s the final stretch of the 2024 campaign trail, and Vice President Kamala Harris announced an unexpected move this week: She’s heading to Houston, Texas on Friday. There, Harris will make her final pitch to voters by pinning the state’s devastating abortion ban on Donald Trump—and she’ll be joined by none other than Houston legend Beyoncé.
Polling from September shows Trump anywhere from four to 12 points ahead of Harris in the Lone Star State. But there’s another, much closer race that might be the Democrats’ closest shot at winning a state-wide race in Texas for the first time since Ann Richards was elected governor in 1994.
In 2018, after weeks of deadlocked polls and frenzied speculation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) narrowly won a second term in the U.S. Senate, defeating his charismatic, young opponent, Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, by about two points. O’Rourke’s loss felt like a gut punch, but it also inspired hope: Cruz—and Texas Republicans—finally appeared vulnerable.
This time, Cruz’s opponent is Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), a former NFL star who’s currently running on his outspoken support for abortion rights. Over the last two weeks, polls put Cruz between one to six points ahead of Allred, and earlier this month, reports surfaced about panic inside the Texas GOP over internal polls giving Cruz a mere one-point advantage. Cruz, himself, has very publicly blamed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for sabotaging his campaign, alleging that McConnell’s PAC isn’t sending him enough money.
On the national level, Allred is riding a wave of excitement, aided, in part, by Cruz’s vast unpopularity. Earlier this month, all eyes were on the 41-year-old rising Democratic star when he read Cruz for filth at their first and only debate. “You’re not pro-life,” Allred told his opponent. “It’s not pro-life to deny women care so long that they can’t have children anymore. It’s not pro-life to force a victim of rape to carry their rapist’s baby. It’s not pro-life that our maternal mortality rate has skyrocketed by 56%. … So, to every Texas woman at home, every Texas family watching this: understand that when Ted Cruz says he’s pro-life, he doesn’t mean yours.” By contrast, Cruz is dodging every abortion-related question and running from his anti-abortion positions that have defined his political career.
So, could Ted Cruz really lose? Paul Brace, a political scientist and professor at Rice University, told Jezebel Cruz is currently facing the “fight of his political career,” though Brace will ultimately be surprised if Allred pulls it off. “Democrats have been hoping to win state-wide in Texas for 20 years now, but it’s a lot like Lucy and the football in the ground, and they’re always disappointed.”
Still, Brace said Cruz would be the most “obvious” opportunity for Democrats to defeat a Texas Republican. He’s famously “not well-liked” among his peers in the Senate and he’s also not particularly popular among Texans. In 2018, exit polls showed O’Rourke won more native-born Texan voters than Cruz. Since, Cruz has only further alienated voters by notoriously attempting to flee his state to go on vacation during a natural disaster, earning him the nickname “Cancun Cruz.”
And then, of course, there’s the issue of abortion rights. Texas became the first state in the nation to enforce an abortion ban when SB 8 took effect in September 2021. At the time, Cruz called the ban, which offers no exceptions for rape and incest, “perfectly reasonable.” Since, two dozen women have sued the state in a highly publicized lawsuit, alleging Texas’ total abortion ban almost killed them. Despite this, Cruz has evaded simple questions about where he stands on exceptions to abortion bans, as recently as Monday. (“Getting a real answer from Ted Cruz on abortion is like getting an ex to apologize,” one Allred staffer tweeted. “He’ll always shirk responsibility and find a way to blame you.”)
On Friday, four women who nearly died as a result of Texas’ ban railed against Cruz in a searing feature by Newsweek. One, Lauren Miller, said Cruz skipped a Senate hearing on the state’s abortion ban, which she testified at, and wondered whether Cruz “was too busy podcasting or whatever” to show up. Another woman called Cruz a “disgrace” to the state. All called him a “liar.”
At the debate, Cruz claimed he shares Trump’s position that abortion should be left up to the states. But we know he supports a national ban because he literally introduced one alongside Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in 2021. And regardless, all that really matters is that he vehemently supports Trump. If elected, Trump can bypass Congress to enact a national ban himself, as detailed in Project 2025. Republican senators like Cruz will then confirm anti-abortion extremist judges who will uphold the national ban.
The Texas Democrat is a “strong campaigner,” Brace says of Allred. He also pointed to the wave of successful abortion rights ballot measures in both purple and red states since 2022, as well as the 2022 midterms, which were set to be a bloodbath for Democrats. Instead, Democrats only narrowly lost the House and won key races up and down the ballot across the country, as voters appeared to mobilize for abortion rights. Still, pretty much everything else remains stacked against Allred, from Cruz’s incumbency advantage to Texas’ aggressive voter suppression efforts, which target likely Democratic voters (like communities of color and working-class voters) by design.
Mark Jones, another political scientist and professor at Rice, told Jezebel that in any given state-wide race in Texas, a generic Republican starts with a six to eight-point advantage. Clearly, Allred has chipped away at that, but Texas is an innately “difficult, incredibly expensive state to run in” due to its massive media market, which stretches campaign dollars exceedingly thin. “Could Ted Cruz lose? Yes. Will he? Probably not,” Jones said.
In the final stretch of the race, there could be an opening for Allred if support for Trump wanes—but if anything, Jones said, it looks like the opposite. The presidential race remains neck-and-neck, but polls show Harris has actually lost some ground to Trump. According to Jones, Cruz and Allred’s race could be decided by voter turnout. “All Cruz supporters are locked in and all Allred supporters are locked in. There don’t seem to be undecideds to win over,” Jones said. “It will come down to who votes and who stays home.”
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