What a close race in Texas means for Democrats in red states

It’s election o’clock, and that means there is, once again, chatter about Texas going blue. Democrats haven’t won statewide since 1994, but now, they’re pinning their hopes on Rep. Colin Allred, who is challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. 

Cruz leads Allred by between 1 and 7 percentage points in recent polling, though Allred has outpaced Cruz in fundraising. Together, the two campaigns and outside groups have raised $144 million so far, making it the most expensive Senate race this year.

If Allred wins, it would be the kind of massive upset that former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke nearly pulled off in his own Senate bid against Cruz in 2018, the closest statewide race in 40 years. But Allred, who began the race as a relatively unknown character, is running a different kind of campaign from O’Rourke — one that will test a theory of how Democrats can win, or at least get even closer to winning, in Texas.

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas Austin, thinks 2024 probably won’t be the year the state flips. “We’ve not seen any signs in the polling of there being a breakthrough this year,” he said.

Still, Democrats are playing offense in Texas more than they have in the past. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the state, something no Democratic presidential candidate has done this close to an election since President Bill Clinton in 1996. The national party has also poured $13 million into advertising, with reportedly millions more to come in the final stretch before Election Day. With Texas being one of few competitive Senate races this year, Democrats are seeking to leave it all on the table.

If Allred even comes close to a victory, however, there will be a postmortem examining what he did right to keep the margins narrow. That might inform how Democrats seek to compete in a solidly red state, but where Republicans aren’t winning by as much as they used to.

“What we see broadly is a continual tightening of political margins in the state dating back to 2004,” said Luke Warford, a former Democratic statewide candidate for Railroad Commission and founder of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, a Democratic PAC aimed at off-cycle investment in Texas. “I think investing here matters because it’s part of a longer-term effort to make Texas competitive.”

Allred’s theory of how Democrats can succeed in Texas

Allred, a former NFL player, has emphasized his credentials as one of the most bipartisan members of the House in a seat he won in 2018 from longtime Republican Rep. Pete Sessions. And he has sought to distance himself from the national political fight between former President Donald Trump and Harris. 

Warford said Allred’s campaign has a “very clear theory of the case of what it’s going to take to win: leaning into what it means to not be a national Democrat, but a Texas Democrat, and to really prosecute the case against Ted Cruz and his record.” 

That has notably involved hitting hard against Cruz in a recent debate and in political ads on the subject of abortion, which Texas has banned after six weeks of pregnancy even in cases of rape or incest. Though he describes himself as “pro-life,” Cruz has been reluctant to elaborate on his stance on abortion, saying during the debate that states should decide whether to implement rape or incest exceptions to abortion bans. 

Allred, for his part, asked Cruz to answer for the “26,000 Texas women who’ve been forced to give birth to their rapist’s child under this law that you called perfectly reasonable,” adding he “trusts Texas women to make their own health care decisions.”

In contrast to O’Rourke, who famously visited all 254 of Texas’s sprawling counties during his 2018 Senate bid, Allred is taking a more targeted approach to voter outreach. He’s been holding events in major cities and suburbs and courting moderate voters, rather than seeking to fire up the base. 

This has proved controversial among some party operatives, who think Allred’s campaign has been too quiet and abandoned tried-and-true tactics that allowed them to come so close with O’Rourke. But defenders of Allred’s strategy say it’s a different game in a presidential election year, where base voters are more likely to turn out. O’Rourke also failed to make much headway in rural areas of the state, suggesting that Allred’s time is better spent trying to persuade and turn out gettable voters.

“Folks can say that that theory is right or wrong,” Warford said. “We’re going to get some really interesting data back about if that approach works. We haven’t won before. So I think taking a slightly different tack makes a lot of sense for them.”

Why a close race in Texas is meaningful for Democrats

If Allred wins or comes close to winning, it wouldn’t just be an aberration. 

There’s a perception that Cruz is uniquely beatable because he’s hateable — more so than Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who is up for reelection in 2026. While even Cruz’s Republican Senate colleagues have pointed out a certain disdain for Cruz, he’s not actually that unpopular in Texas. Among Republicans, his approval ratings range between the high 70s to 80s. By comparison, Cornyn’s have recently ranged from the 40s to low 50s. Cruz’s and Cornyn’s approval ratings among independents are similar. In a red state, that should be enough for Cruz to handily win reelection.

“His job approval numbers are in the top tier of job approval numbers of the most well-known Republican state officials among Republicans,” Henson said. “And so he has a pretty firm hold on the traditional base that Republicans need to win in the state under normal circumstances.” The fact that the race is close suggests that playing just to Republican voters may no longer be a strategy by which a candidate can win by a comfortable margin in Texas. The campaign Cruz has run this year reflects that: For instance, he aired ads featuring “Democrats for Cruz” personalities like Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. 

“The campaign felt they needed to soften his image and moderate it,” Henson said. “The standard playbook is you run far to the right in the primary, and then you tack maybe a little toward the middle, but not to the point where you know you’re going around telling people, ‘Hey, look, I worked with Democrats.’”

For Democrats, this marks a continuation of a trend that has been ongoing for years. The Republican margin of victory in the state has been tightening in recent presidential elections: Sen. Mitt Romney won Texas by 14 points in 2012, and Trump won by less than 9 points in 2016 and then by less than six in 2020. That suggests, especially in presidential election years where more Democrats tend to turn out, “the buffer for Republicans is changing,” Henson said. 

So, do Democrats dare hope?

The Texas electorate may not be as red as it was a decade ago. But whether that’s enough to get Allred over the hill this year remains to be seen.

While some polls show him in a dead heat with Cruz, he’s barely within striking distance in others. Harris’s visit also seems to be designed to showcase the reality of Republican governance for an audience of swing-state voters, more than an attempt to win votes in Texas.

Still, Allred’s campaign appears to continue the trend of Texas becoming a more competitive state, Henson said. Democrat Wendy Davis lost by more than 20 points when she ran for governor in 2014, and O’Rourke lost by less than three points in 2018 and by 11 points in his 2022 bid for governor.

Warford said Democrats need to think about how to build out their infrastructure in Texas now in order to be competitive for future cycles. If Democrats can eventually make it a true battleground, that would put 40 electoral votes in play, blowing open new paths to 270. Even if Allred wins, the work will not be over, he said. 

“I think it’s incumbent on Texans to wake up the day after the election, or once we know the results, and really continue to build and continue the momentum going forward,” he said. “Colin Allred is an NFL player, so I’ll use a football analogy: Championships are won in the offseason.”