DALLAS — Sen. Ted Cruz has won a third term in the Senate, CNN and NBC project, once again foiling Democrats’ efforts to turn Texas blue.
Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney, appeared like a formidable challenger, narrowing the race to small single-digits in the preelection polls. Texas Democrats said the race was reminiscent of Beto O’Rourke’s run against Cruz six years ago.
There were signs Texas Republicans were taking Allred seriously. The Senate race was expensive and heated. But ultimately, the race wasn’t as competitive as Democrats hoped.
“This decisive victory should shake the Democrat establishment to its core,” Cruz told supporters, declaring victory.
The disappointment was palpable at Allred’s campaign watch party. The room started emptying out early. Once it became apparent that Allred wouldn’t come out with the win, one voter described the room as “somber,” another as “deflated.”
“It sucks, it definitely sucks,” Tina Sohne, a political consultant who works mostly on state and local races, said. “We don’t have a state infrastructure, so I don’t know why we thought we were going to do better.”
Rodolfo Wells, a college adviser at Dallas College, was likewise disappointed.
“I was expecting a win,” he said. “People did not make a similar choice, or they did not go out and vote. It’s just a reality of a lot of people didn’t go out and vote.”
Cruz and Allred spent $76.9 million and $77.6 million as of Oct. 16, respectively, according to FEC filings, making the election Texas’ most expensive Senate race ever.
The race saw influxes of outside spending from PACs, super PACs, nonprofits and hybrid committees, which invested $55.6 million in the race, according to OpenSecrets. By comparison, outside groups only contributed $14.4 million to O’Rourke and Cruz’s 2018 contest.
The race’s biggest outside spender by far was the Truth and Courage PAC, which spent roughly $22 million to oppose Allred and $3.9 million to promote Cruz, according to OpenSecrets. The super PAC paid for TV and streaming ads attacking Allred over policies affecting transgender people, singling out his vote against the Protection Women and Girls in Sports Act, which passed the House.
Cruz’s campaign and groups supporting him focused heavily on anti-trans messaging, in addition to an emphasis on immigration and the economy. Allred, on the other hand, focused primarily on abortion policies, blaming Cruz for Texas’ abortion ban. Allred also promoted border security and continually pointed out Cruz’s votes against a bipartisan border bill.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Senate Majority PAC, which both announced a “multimillion dollar” investment in the Texas race, primarily criticized Cruz’s stances on abortion.
Cruz publicly bellyached that the Republican Party wasn’t supporting his race, calling out the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The National Republican Senatorial Committee pitched in about $2.8 million for TV ads to support Cruz as of Oct. 25. NRSC took a victory lap Tuesday.
“Ted Cruz won again despite liberals from California and New York doing everything they could to bankroll his radical opponent,” said NRSC Chair Steve Daines in a statement released Tuesday night.
Allred’s campaign strategy to run up the numbers in densely populated areas in Texas, including in more moderate suburban pockets surrounding the urban centers anchoring the Texas Triangle, ultimately wasn’t enough. When the race was called, Allred was underperforming in urban-suburban Tarrant County, which O’Rourke won in 2018 and Biden won in 2020, and Williamson County, which is north of Austin, and one of the state’s fastest-growing counties. Early voting numbers were lower than in 2020, an early warning sign that Democrats wouldn’t achieve their goal.
Democrats took a notably different approach than O’Rourke did in 2018. O’Rourke traveled to all 254 Texas counties to reach rural voters and lost by about 215,000 votes.
Before Election Day, many Texas Democrats were hopeful that Allred would prove that Democrats in the state were “worth investing in,” as Texas Majority PAC director Katherine Fischer, who worked on O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign and was his 2022 campaign manager for his gubernatorial run, told NOTUS.
If Democrats have any hope of challenging Republicans statewide again, they’ll need a lot of cash. Texas has 18.6 million registered voters, and reaching them comes at great costs to statewide campaigns.
“Texas is such an expensive state to run a race. There are 20 television markets that cover Texas, so going up on TV is extremely expensive, but it’s the best way to reach out to voters at mass,” said Derek Ryan, a Republican consultant and voter database manager in Texas.
If Democrats keep spending big in future cycles to try to swing the state, Republican candidates, too, will have to expand their war chests to keep up.
“If one side engages, the other side knows they have to engage,” said Cliff Walker, co-founder of Seeker Strategies, a progressive communications firm and former deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “It’s an arms race.”
Now that the results aren’t looking as close as expected, there will be a reckoning.
“I hope that the party and various strategists and consultants and political operatives will take this opportunity and see, ‘What can we learn?’” Sohne said. “How can we do better, rather than repeat the same cycle over and over again?”
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Casey Murray, a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, reported from Texas.