Cruz warns donors of close campaign
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign is warning donors this week that he’s already tied with Colin Allred and bracing for a tougher 2024 reelection campaign than GOP voters might expect.
The push comes less than a week after Allred secured the Democratic nomination in the race and six years after Democrat Beto O’rourke emerged from relative obscurity to push Cruz to the brink of losing his seat.
While no Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since the 1990s, Cruz has been telling Republicans for weeks that they can’t take things for granted in Texas anymore, partly because of that close call to O’rourke.
“I will say, my race here in Texas is a battleground race,” Cruz told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo last month. “My last race I won by less than three points because I’m the Democrats’ top target.”
Allred has been telling supporters he has a real shot at toppling Cruz based on limited early public polling and fundraising data. At his primary victory party in Dallas last week, the congressman acknowledged being the underdog but pointed to his history of knocking off veteran U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, a Republican, in 2018 to win his seat.
“I’m used to overcoming long odds,” Allred said, pointing not just to his races in 2018, but his upbringing as the child of a single mother and making the NFL as a linebacker despite being undrafted.
The early polling is mixed. A University of Texas at Tyler survey released two weeks ago showed Allred and Cruz tied, but nearly 20 percent of voters were undecided. That poll showed 48 percent of the 1,167 respondents had an unfavorable impression of Cruz, compared with just 39 percent with a favorable one.
Just 18 percent of respondents had a negative view of Allred, and nearly 30 percent said they didn’t have an opinion of him.
But fundraising also suggests a closer race. Federal Election Commission reports released in February showed Allred with more campaign money on hand going into the stretch run of the primary season than Cruz had, despite the Dallas Democrat having a vastly more competitive primary.
FEC filings show Allred had more than $8.5 million in his campaign account going into last week’s primary while Cruz had just over $6.5 million.
Since launching his campaign last May, Allred has bested Cruz in every fundraising quarter.
But Cruz, thanks to a national donor network that helped him finish second to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, has proven he can raise huge sums. In 2018, he raised and spent more than $45 million in his race against O’rourke.
He needed every dollar, winning with just 50.9 percent of the vote to O’rourke’s 48.3 percent.
Allred’s already shown one big difference from O’rourke’s campaign in 2018: he’s hitting Cruz early and often. When O’rourke started his 2018 campaign, he intentionally refused to hit Cruz directly, insisting his campaign was rising above politics. He later altered that approach as the race became a single-digit toss-up at one point.
Allred spent much of his victory speech in the March 5 Democratic primary blasting Cruz on several fronts, most notably his 2021 decision to vacation in Cancun while winter storms left hundreds of Texans dead and millions more without power.
“When 30 million Texans are freezing in the dark, he decided to go to Cancun,” Allred said.
Cruz apologized in several interviews after that trip.
“It was obviously a mistake and in hindsight I wouldn’t have done it,” Cruz said.
But Cruz has also repeatedly tried to joke about the trip. In 2022, as another freeze was approaching, the senator joked on social media about the cost of tickets to Cancun being more expensive. Then in January of this year, with another freeze hitting Texas, he again posted on social media reminding voters of his trip.
“Texans, with the freeze coming, wrap your pipes, cover your plants, stay off icy roads & keep your family safe. And, if it gets too damn cold, join me in Cancun!” he wrote.
Cruz, 53, is a Houston Republican who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 after battling through a crowded GOP primary that included then-lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, whom many considered the favorite in the race.