Allred Outraises Cruz, Closes Polling Gap

The race for Texas Senate is rapidly becoming one of the closest in the nation. Not only is Colin Allred closing in on Ted Cruz, he is outraising the incumbent senator.

Ted Cruz (R-TX) is vying for his third term as the junior senator from Texas. According to his most recent reports, he raised $21 million in the last three months. His opponent, Re. Colin Allred (D-Dallas), has raised $30 million, with just four weeks left in the 2024 election cycle.

This does not necessarily mean that Cruz has less money than Allred overall. The Cruz campaign reports that it has $16.2 million cash on hand to spend for the remainder of the race. The Allred campaign did not provide a number, which may indicate that the Democrat is still trailing overall.

It’s not a good sign for Cruz, though, who has the backing of Texas’s most powerful conservative donors. Allred, a former linebacker and popular representative first elected in 2018, has far less institutional backing.

What Allred does have is increased popularity. Cruz still leads in almost every poll, but not by much. Allred typically trails Cruz by one to three percentage points, well within a standard margin of error. In early September, Allred was actually ahead of Cruz by one point.

Cruz isn’t being helped by the presidential election either. Former President and current convicted felon Donald Trump maintains a tenuous hold on the state, but only leads Vice President Kamala Harris by five points. Ever since Trump’s first win in 2016, the Republican stranglehold on Texas has steadily weakened from a double-digit landslide to narrow wins of only a few percentage points.

The drubbing Trump is taking in recent polling trickles down to Cruz. While not as unpopular as Trump himself according to the Texas Politics Project, his favorability rating has ticked down since the new year to its current rate of 46 percent while his disapproval has risen to 42 percent.

Allred’s popularity has far less data to work with. It seems the primary response from those surveyed was that they don’t really know him. However, this has given him far more room to grow than Cruz, who is one of the best-known Senators in the country thanks to a failed presidential bid.

Cruz’s hold on the seat was already shaky. In 2018, he barely managed to hold on when challenged by Beto O’Rourke. The fight became one of the most-watched in the country, with O’Rourke raising a jaw-dropping $80 million for his campaign. That was twice what Cruz managed to raise.

Cruz succeed, but that was in a mid-term year, This year, with the first Black and Asian woman running for president against a twice-impeached, indicted, and recently-convicted Trump, turnout is likely to be sky high. Democrats typically do better when more voters turn out, though it may not be enough to recapture a statewide office that has been in Republican hands for more than a generation.