Dallas Congressman Colin Allred has announced his decision to seek the Democratic nomination for U. S. Senator from Texas. But should he win the nomination, he will nonetheless lose the 11/24 general election to Ted Cruz. Despite Allred’s strengths, the overwhelmingly Republican electorate will reject him and elect Cruz to his third term in office.
This is not to say Allred won’t be a strong candidate for both the nomination and, should he win it, the general election as well. He’s personable, moderate in temperament, and by no means identified with the progressive Democrats such as AOC and the Squad. He has a reputation for reaching across the aisle to Republican colleagues to try to fashion bipartisan public policies. He’s not given to wild proclamations such as those made by Beto O’Rourke in his ill-advised 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, wherein O’Rourke pledge to go “door to door” to confiscate assault weapons and work to take away the tax exempt status of conservative Christian churches whose pastors would not perform same-sex marriages. He’s done nothing as idiotic as fleeing to Mexico, as Cruz did when we were hit by the Big Freeze and related power outages in 2021.
But though Allred is probably the strongest candidate the Democrats can field against Cruz, his strengths won’t be enough to defeat Cruz because Cruz has an advantage definitely overwhelming and probably insurmountable: Cruz is a Republican in an overwhelmingly ruby-red Republican state.
No Democratic presidential nominee has carried Texas since 1976, and no Democrat has been elected to statewide office in Texas since 1994. The Republicans have all the statewide elected executive and judicial offices as well as both U. S. Senate seats. Moreover, the GOP has majorities in both houses of the state legislature and on Texas’s delegation to the U. S. House of Representatives.
And the Texas GOP may be getting stronger. 2018 was as good a year for Texas Democrats as they’re likely to experience for the foreseeable future. Though failing to win any statewide offices or win back majorities in either the Texas legislature or the Texas congressional delegation, they nonetheless racked up some impressive victories in the legislative arena. They flipped about a dozen state House seats as well as several U. S. House seats (Allred himself won his first term in Congress by ousting a Republican), and cut into the majorities by which Republicans were elected in 2014. With 48% of the vote, Beto O’Rourke came abnormally close to defeating Ted Cruz for re-election.
But the GOP fought back. Before the 2020 Republican state convention stupidly removed him from office, then-state GOP chair Jim Dickey implemented successful programs to recruit quality (and ultimately victorious) candidates for office and find and register more Republican voters to support them. Former President Trump, advocating fossil fuel development, law and order, and abortion restrictions, won 45% of the Hispanic vote in Texas in the 2020 presidential election, thereby showing how the state GOP can make progress to winning enough votes in Texas’s largest and most rapidly growing voter group to retain control of the state for years to come. In essence, the Democratic advances of 2018 were halted and, in some instances, reversed.
So what does this all mean for the respective political fortunes for Colin Allred and Ted Cruz in November of next year? Simple: The single most powerful factor shaping a voter’s choice at the polls is the respective party affiliation of each candidate at issue. Most voters, whether they’re Democratic or Republican, vote along party lines.
Moreover, the typical voter uses party affiliation as a “perceptual screen” to analyze a candidate’s personal characteristics and stands on the issues. For example, Republican voters will dismiss both Allred’s virtues and Cruz’s foibles as irrelevant. Voters who’ve thought little of the issues themselves will adopt the stances of the nominees of their respective parties. And all this will work to the advantage of Ted Cruz, given the fact that Texas has way more Republican than Democratic voters.
Colin Allred could emerge as another Democratic superstar, like Wendy Davis in 2014 and Beto O’Rourke in 2018. But like Davis and O’Rourke, Allred will fall to the GOP juggernaut in 2024.
Advantage: Cruz.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville and taught politics and government at Tarleton since 1987. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990 to the present). He was Mayor Pro Tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He is a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the Stephenville Rotary Club and does volunteer work for the Boy Scouts of America. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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