FILE – Sen. Ted Cruz, D-Texas, asks a question during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Feb. 9, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Mariam Zuhaib/AP hide caption
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Mariam Zuhaib/AP
FILE – Sen. Ted Cruz, D-Texas, asks a question during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Feb. 9, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP
Democrats face a tough US Senate map next year. The party will need to hold on to some vulnerable seats in GOP states, as well as potentially flip a seat or two if they lose any of these closely watched races if they hope to retain control of the chamber.
One of the seats they hope to flip is deep-red Texas, where Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is up for re-election in 2024.
Alex Morgan, the president of the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee that mobilizes Democratic voters during elections, says that when his group began preparing for next year, the Texas Senate seat of the United States was not on their radar.
“It’s a tough state,” he says. “It’s a great state that requires a lot of investment.”
But then Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, a lawyer and former NFL contributor, announced he was jumping into the race to unseat Ted Cruz.
FILE – Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 24, 2020. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP hide caption
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Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
FILE – Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 24, 2020.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Allred flipped a congressional district outside Dallas in 2018, a year Democrats did particularly well in the midterms. He has held the seat ever since.
Morgan says Allred’s announcement excited him about the odds of Democrats flipping that seat.
“You know because he’s battle-tested, he’s known and loved in the state,” she said. “So it’s really coming down to now where Texas becomes probably our best pickup opportunity in the entire country next year.”
Democratic state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a key voice in the state pushing for tougher gun laws after the Uvalde school shooting, recently announced he is also running.
There are a couple of reasons why some Democrats are optimistic
For one thing, the last time Cruz ran for re-election he only won his race against former congressman Beto O’Rourke by less than three percentage points. It remains one of the closest state races in Texas in recent history.
FILE – This Sept. 21, 2018, file photo combination shows Texas U.S. Senate candidates in the November 2018 election, from left, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, left, and former Democratic US Representative Beto O’Rourke. Tom Fox/AP hide caption
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Tom Fox/AP
FILE – This Sept. 21, 2018, file photo combination shows Texas U.S. Senate candidates in the November 2018 election, from left, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, left, and former Democratic US Representative Beto O’Rourke.
Tom Fox/AP
But Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser says he thinks the race was more of a fluke than a sign that a Texas Senate seat is truly within Democrats’ reach.
“Without Beto O’Rourke on the ballot, it will be harder for Democrats to hold the seat,” he predicted. “O’Rourke caught lightning in a bottle. He came out of nowhere. He raised more than $80 million. And he had a huge impact on the race and energized a lot of voters.”
Steinhauser says he doesn’t think Texas Democrats will be as motivated next year as they were in 2018.
But Sawyer Hackett, with the Lose Cruz PAC, a group of Democratic strategists working to unseat Ted Cruz, says there are other big reasons he could be vulnerable next year.
“Ted Cruz is deeply unpopular both in Texas and nationally,” Hackett said. “He consistently ranks as one of the most disliked senators serving in the caucus. But especially in Texas he’s had underwater approval ratings since he took office.”
Another liability, Hackett says, is the reaction Cruz had in 2021 when he went to Cancun to escape a deadly winter storm in Texas that left large areas of the state without power and water for several days.
“I think if you ask people to name one thing they know about Ted Cruz, the first thing they’ll say is Cancun,” he said.
But Steinhauser says he thinks Cruz did a good job handling this scandal.
“I think he saw it as a mistake and admitted it as such and worked to repair some of that damage,” he said. “This is a weekend, if you will, compared to a lifetime and a career of work that I think will point and say, ‘on the issues that matter most, I’m with you and here’s how and here’s to what”.
James Henson of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin says he also doesn’t think Cruz is as vulnerable as Democrats expect.
He says Democrats have long thought Cruz’s likability issues and baggage would ultimately cost him during the election.
“But you know Cruz has proven to be pretty resilient,” he explained. “I think he’s going to have challenges this time. You know that, but I think you still have to understand that the odds are in his favor, although maybe less so than in the past.”
Although the state has changed demographically very rapidly in that time, this has not manifested itself in any major political changes. At least not yet. Henson says state elections are slowly approaching in Texas, but Democrats are still on a long losing streak.
“There hasn’t been a Democrat elected statewide since the 1990s,” Henson said. “And the electoral success of Republicans in the state could be called uniform. That is, Republicans have controlled all three branches of state government here throughout the 21st century.”
