Democrats hope for Texas upset in Allred-Cruz race

Rep. Colin Allred (D) is homing in on suburban voters to pull him over the finish line with a week to go in Texas’s increasingly tight Senate race.

Polls have shown Allred closing the gap with incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R), with some recent surveys showing a tie. Though Allred is still seen as the underdog, Democrats hope that by peeling off voters in the middle, he can clinch an upset victory in what is shaping up to be among the closest-watched Senate races this cycle.

An Emerson College/The Hill poll last week found that even as former President Trump was pulling away from Vice President Harris in Texas, Allred was closing in to just 1.5 percentage points behind Cruz in what is effectively a dead heat. And a recent internal poll shared with Politico found the two candidates deadlocked at 46 percent. Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena College poll found Cruz leading among likely voters, 50 percent to 46 percent.

“The race remains in a competitive range that is making a lot of Republicans nervous. There's no question about that,” said GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak, who nonetheless said he expects Cruz’s “boat rises with Trump’s” in the homestretch to Election Day.

Over the next jam-packed week before Election Day, Allred is targeting the Texas suburbs that surround its blue-leaning big cities, where he hopes to turn out enough occasional Democratic voters and flip enough Trump-voting Republicans to send Cruz on what suburban state Rep. James Talarico (D) on Sunday called “a permanent vacation to Cancún,” a nod to the senator’s ill-timed 2021 trip that has dogged his reelection bid.

Allred spent Friday night in Houston with Harris, who hammered Trump over abortion, an issue the Senate hopeful has leaned into heavily along the campaign trail.

Both candidates need their supporters to turn out in big numbers on Election Day. But while Cruz’s team is doubling down on firing up the base, Allred’s team also appears to be putting major focus on persuading voters who will turn out for the presidential race but haven’t made up their minds downballot.

Democrats are in a “‘border up, cities out’ election,” Matt Angle of the Lone Star Project, a progressive effort aimed at flipping urban and suburban counties in the state, told The Hill. To win, he argued, Allred needs to drive turnout in the Big Five urban counties — Travis, Tarrant, Harris, Bexar and Dallas — and win them by healthy margins.

The first priority for Democratic ad buys and door-knocking campaigns has been to turn out urban and suburban Black and Latino Texans. Angle added that, in the state with the largest number of Black eligible voters, “the best use of the next available dollar is to talk to a Black voter.”

But Allred also needs to peel off Cruz voters in the growing suburbs around those cities. Angle argued that Allred needs about a third of the total votes in the 10 biggest exurban counties, and solid wins in several of them.

“At this point, it's not a base turnout election — it's a competition for the middle [and] suburban swing voters," said Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser, who lives in the suburbs of Austin.

In addition to appearances in the major cities, Allred is campaigning in suburban counties, including Williamson, Collin and Fort Bend. These fast-growing counties are flush with both prosperous immigrants from overseas and new domestic migrants from Democratic-leaning states such as Massachusetts and California. Steinhauser said these voters, many of whom lean fiscally conservative and are driven by concerns over taxes and the economy, are “very much attainable by either party.”

But experts told The Hill that many in those regions also value policies that Democrats are running on: strong public schools, access to health care and reproductive rights and a “don’t tread on me” view of state and local government increasingly out of step with the far-right politics ascendant in the recent civil wars within the modern Texas Republican Party.

As the race has narrowed, Cruz's focus has as well, and the incumbent is swinging through the state on his “Keep Texas, Texas” bus tour, aimed more at turning out his base.

In the homestretch, Cruz has doubled down on language and policy aimed at convincing those already furthest right not to sit the election out.

“Every two years, every four years, politicians come around to us and they say, 'This is the most important election of our life,'” he told Republicans in Boerne, outside San Antonio, in a stump speech he has given across the state.

But this one, Cruz tells voters, actually is that critical. "I don't think there's ever been a race with a starker divide than between me and Colin Allred.”

In the speech, Cruz decries the “invasion” over the U.S.-Mexico border, falsely accuses Allred of supporting bans on fracking and gasoline cars and goes on a long riff caricaturing Democratic platforms on support for LGBT youth as putting the audience’s “daughters” in locker rooms "next to a fully naked, grown-ass man."

The senator is delivering his riffs in rural Republican strongholds and contested suburbs: midsized towns such as Waxahachie, Huntsville and Longview and small cities such as Waco, Amarillo and Abilene that guaranteed the incumbent’s narrow 2.6-point victory over Beto O’Rourke in 2018, and where he needs high turnout to make up for those areas’ relatively low, and declining, population.

Lana Hansen, executive director of Texas Blue Action, an Austin-based Democratic advocacy group, said base turnout has long been a priority for Democrats in Texas, given low turnout in the party — but this cycle is different, she argued, with Harris’s fast-tracked bid at the top of the ticket and some in the GOP souring on Trump and Cruz.

“I've always come from the space that, with our turnout in Texas being so low, that really, before we're running persuasion programs, we should be turning out the base,” Hansen said. “But I think what we're seeing politically in this climate, particular to this election, is that there are a lot of those [voters] that just aren't sure for the first time.”

Hansen pointed to the presidential primaries early this year, when Trump glided to victory in Texas, while his former rival, Nikki Haley, scored nearly 18 percent of the state’s GOP ballots. Haley voters, Hansen said, could easily be Allred voters.

Another main target is urban Latinos, including Spanish speakers who often “aren't contacted in their native language,” Hansen said, as well as Black voters.

Low-propensity voters "are going to be the folks that make a difference here, because the base is going to turn out,” Hansen said.

Part of the Allred campaign strategy to that end is getting him to speak at small events across the state’s 30 media markets where he can garner local coverage as he delivers focused speeches on his key themes: social security, Medicare, the border, abortion, abortion, and abortion.

Allred played the hits during the rivals’ contentious debate earlier this month, calling out Cruz for the 2021 Cancún trip and ripping the senator as a “threat to democracy.” He’s also knocked Cruz’s focus on transgender issues as a problematic distraction from threats to reproductive rights.

To Democrats, Cruz’s turn back toward his right-wing base is a hopeful sign. The incumbent’s tone has turned more “shrill” as the race has tightened, Angle argued — a change, he said, visible both in the surge in messaging on transgender issues and Cruz’s complaints about money.

Earlier this month, Cruz told 300 supporters in Waxahachie that he is being “massively outspent” and that their “election turnout matters enormously.”

Democratic strategists are painting Republicans as opposed to the very sorts of personal freedoms that Texas once stood for in the national consciousness, Angle said.

“People are starting to associate personal freedom and personal liberties with Democrats,” Angle argued. For these voters, he added, freedom ties into more practical concerns: "Your piece of the American dream, to be able to control your health care, to be able to give you a good education for your kids.”

Some traditional Republicans have been willing to make that pitch for Allred. Many Texas voters "are going to look at Colin Allred and say, 'He is that moderate in the middle,'" Glen Whitley, former Republican judge of Tarrant County, the state's last competitive urban county and a base of the state's MAGA movement, told KXAN News.

Allred’s surge has given Democrats a glimmer of hope as they have long sought inroads in Texas in the presidential race.

The Hill/Decision Desk HQ polling averages show Trump up by 6.6 points over Harris. But presidential margins have narrowed for decades since the Republican blowouts of the George W. Bush years, and a closer-than-expected Harris finish could solidify hints of a changing Texas landscape.

Such evidence that the state is in play could be self-reinforcing: unlocking the spigots of national cash that could catalyze campaigns to cement Democratic rule in key strategic counties. Such a shift has already happened on a local level, Angle said, every time a key elected position in a big urban county has flipped to Democrat over the past two decades.

In that sense, Cruz may well be right about the generational stakes of the election, at least for Republican control of the state. Over the long-term, an intensified Democratic effort could unlock an epochal shift in American politics, outweighing even Florida’s mid-2000s shift into a solidly red state. Texas, which affords a whopping 40 Electoral College Votes, went to the Republican candidate by double-digits in 2012, then by 9 points in 2016. President Biden shrunk that gap to under 6 points in 2020.

If Harris can close out Election Day with an even smaller margin, “we're going to be in swing state territory in Texas, and that's a game changer,” Hansen said.