Wait, this is Texas!
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Texas, the second-largest state, has not elected a Democrat to any statewide office since 1994. No Democratic presidential candidate has carried it since 1976. But the state’s so large, important, and most recently diverse, that Democrats nationally as well as in the Lone Star State keep hoping against hope that the next cycle will take down Texas’s remarkably arrogant and extremist GOP a notch or two. And if Colin Allred wins his U.S. Senate race in November, becoming the first Democrat to do so since 1988, his party would be delighted. The loser in that scenario would be Ted Cruz, a man who often acts as though there’s nothing he can say or do that’s too much for Texas. Cruz is the poster boy for the GOP’s total surrender to Donald Trump, the man who managed to insult Cruz, his wife, and even his father en route to crushing him in the 2016 GOP presidential primary.
Now you might think that having survived a challenge from champion fundraiser Beto O’Rourke in the fine Democratic midterm election of 2018, Cruz would be safe in a presidential year. But then again, Trump’s margin in Texas dropped from 9 percent in 2016 to just over 5 percent in 2020, shortening his coattails. His opponent, Allred, is a former NFL player who, as the Texas Tribune reported early in the race, strikes quite the contrast to the bombastic incumbent:
Allred doesn’t shout during committee hearings or deride those he disagrees with — both signature Cruz moves. He hasn’t made headlines for epic political showdowns, nor has he positioned himself as a leader of an ideological movement.
Colleagues instead describe Allred as level-headed, eager to work across the aisle and accessible to constituents in his Dallas-based district.
Allred has remained competitive with Cruz in fundraising. And in the last two public polls (both from the University of Houston), he has trailed Cruz by just three points in June and two points in August. The junior senator from Texas is not the sort of conservative Republican who has worried much about catering to swing voters; he seems to richly enjoy the discomfort of all who disagree with him. But in this particular election year, his reputation for extremism on abortion may be wrong-footing him given his state’s terrible reputation for downright cruelty in every imaginable situation involving reproductive rights, as The Guardian has observed:
Abortion is a particularly toxic issue for Republicans this presidential election cycle, so much so that even Donald Trump posted after the Democratic national convention that his administration “would be great for women and their reproductive rights”.
Cruz had openly celebrated the US supreme court overturning Roe in 2022, calling the decision a “massive victory”. But since Texas women began pouring out personal horror stories and suing the state left and right for denying them emergency abortions under the state’s draconian ban, he’s gone quiet.
The senator dodged multiple questions in December about the Texas supreme court denying 31-year-old Kate Cox’s request for an emergency abortion, which forced her to travel out of state for care after her doctor discovered a severe fetal anomaly, and has repeatedly avoided press inquiries about abortion ever since.
Cruz, notes The Guardian, has been especially active in cultivating the careers — and, during the Trump administration, securing the appointments — of multiple extremist federal judges who have made his state not only a graveyard for reproductive rights but a breeding ground for far-right judicial activism. “He can avoid questions on the subject,” The Guardian article notes, “but there’s really not much more he needs to say: The crisis in Texas already belongs to him.” Cruz is even less able than Trump to distance himself from the consequences of Roe’s reversal, and has done little or nothing even to try.
Perhaps partisan polarization will insulate Cruz from an abortion-rights backlash in November; Texas has long been to Democratic hopes like Lucy taunting Charlie Brown with the football. But at a time when Republicans have just assumed the Texas seat is safe, allowing them to concentrate on vulnerable Democrats like Montana’s Jon Tester in their bid to flip the Senate, it would be more than a little interesting if they find themselves instead forced to come to Cruz’s aid.
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