Allred is our choice to oust Cruz in Senate
The 40-year-old, three-term representative has proved that he gets bills passed in a divided Congress
Texas voters eager to see U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz retire to Cancun permanently, not just on a quick trip during a devastating winter storm, have a choice between two very different candidates in the March 5 Democratic primary.
Choosing an effective challenger to a junior senator who has done little but talk, tweet and instigate during his dozen years in office, they can vote with their head or with their heart. That’s our impression in a contest between the two viable contenders in a nine-person race, although we suspect the impression is a bit misleading.
Voters who go with their head will likely cast a ballot for U.S. Rep. Colin
Allred, a 40-year-old, three-term Congress member from Dallas who touts his pragmatism and his ability to work with colleagues from both sides of the aisle. Calm and measured, at times to the point of being bland, the civil rights attorney and former NFL linebacker is the establishment choice. He enjoys a sizable fund-raising edge over his opponents, touts big-name endorsements and holds a commanding lead in polls.
Those who go where their heart leads them may favor state Sen. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio, a longtime Texas House member before being elected to the state Senate in 2022 to represent a district that stretches 400 miles to Big Bend National Park. A 53-year-old immigration lawyer, Gutierrez casts himself as an outspoken Bernie Sanders-style populist. He is, he says, “unapologetically progressive.”
Deeply affected by the horror of what he saw in 2022 on the day of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, a town in his Senate district, Gutierrez doesn’t hide his feelings. He told the Chronicle editorial board that he decided to run for the U.S. Senate “because of probably one day and one moment, and that was May 24. What built after that, I just never left there.”
Allred, who in 2018 defeated Republican incumbent Pete Sessions, a 22
year House veteran, as part of the “blue wave,” told Gutierrez in our screening that he admired his passion but accused him of “reflexively choosing whatever the progressive slogan of the day is.” Sitting side by side, the two men occasionally sniped at each other.
Allred kept his composure, maintaining a “consensus builder” posture that he says will help him get things done in a divided Washington, and wincing at Gutierrez namecalling of some Republicans as “crazy nuts” and “terrorists.”
“I’m proud that I was the most bipartisan member of the Texas delegation,” he told the board. “I’m proud that over 70% of the bills that I’ve cosponsored in Congress have been bipartisan.”
Longer-shot candidates in the race include former Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez, who recently resigned in the face of a lawsuit seeking to remove him from office on the basis of incompetence and official misconduct; Gonzalez dismissed the lawsuit by a conservative group leader as a political attack. Dallas-area state Rep. Carl Sherman, who didn’t seek reelection after three terms, is also running. They have no shot at winning but could siphon off enough votes to force the two top contenders into a runoff.
For Texans voting in the Democratic primary, the relevant questions are two-fold: One, which candidate represents their views and values? Two, which candidate can oust an incumbent who, despite his die-hard followers, nearly lost to Democratic former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke in 2018? (Cruz won by 2.6 points.)
Like Allred, we admire Gutierrez’s passion, even when it’s seething. It’s refreshing to see some of our own raw anger and frustration in a political candidate. He comes by it honestly. He stood up for grieving family members when they couldn’t get straight answers from law enforcement or the governor’s office. He has stayed with them to this day. He also has proudly made a useful irritant of himself in the Legislature, goading Lt. Gov. Patrick and other lawmakers, Democrat and Republican, to face what happened that day and to take legislative action on guns to make sure it never happens again.
And yet, his passion could not move them. We have to ask how it could move Washington. Incidentally, Gutierrez says that after a meeting with Patrick in which he cried trying to convey to Patrick the horrors he’d seen in Uvalde, including a little girl with her face nearly gone, Patrick responded, “Roland, there’s a reason we don’t look at the videos.”
So that’s how they can sleep at night. Gutierrez’s approach, sadly, isn’t waking them up. We’re also not persuaded that Gutierrez’s position on the issues reflects the state he seeks to serve in Washington. While his more mainstream positions include codifying Roe-era abortion rights and comprehensive immigration reform, Gutierrez also touts his “unapologetically progressive” wish list: Medicare for all, assault weapons ban (with some exceptions), an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court to temper conservative dominance, and abolishing the Senate’s filibuster to push through more Democratic priorities.
“This campaign is about pain ...,” he told the editorial board. “The vast majority of Texans are not doing OK.”
Gutierrez’s colleagues and legislative observers have been surprised by the populist Gutierrez. Since being elected to the House in 2008, he’s been seen as something of a run-ofthe-mill moderate Democrat.
As Texas Monthly noted recently, “He earned a bit of a reputation for being not the shrewdest member of his caucus — he was regarded by his Democratic colleagues, usually affectionately, as a grandstander.”
A grandstander he may still be, but no one could turn away from an impassioned speech he made on the Senate floor toward the end of the regular session last year. “So much blood,” he said, alluding to a hard drive he held in his hand that contained unbearable images of the Uvalde massacre. “We’ve abrogated our responsibilities. I’ve been angry for a long time. A long time.”
Perhaps it was his Uvalde experience, as he says, that has brought about a personal transformation, but as a newly minted populist crusader he seems to have adopted John Lennon’s famous line “you may say I’m a dreamer” as his theme song. It’s a campaign strategy, but we’re not sure how effective he would be as a Lone Star AOC — U.S. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez — in the U.S. Senate.
Allred, we believe, is more likely to be a doer in the Senate. We enthusiastically endorse his candidacy.
His conciliatory approach has been successful on several fronts. He points out that he worked with the Trump administration to acquire a VA hospital for his district. He notes that he worked with U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to pass the Safer Communities Act, legislation that Allred characterizes as “an ice-breaker” for more ambitious gunsafety measures: “It’s important to note that for the first time in 30 years, we did pass something,” he told us.
He supports the White House on aid to Ukraine and Taiwan and on Israel’s right to wage war against Hamas, although Gutierrez dogged him for joining Republicans in signing a factually-challenged letter criticizing President Joe Biden for his “open border” policies. One of the biggest items on Allred’s wish list is national paid family leave, affordable birth control and restoring the Voting Rights
Act.
Allred’s life story is also appealing. Biracial — his father is Black, his mother white — he grew up in Dallas in a singleparent household, with his mother, a public-school teacher, sometimes holding down a second job to make ends meet. “I was raised by a single mother as public school teacher in Dallas — we don’t pay our teachers enough — so there was a bit of a struggle. I relied on my community, in my YMCA, my teachers, my coaches,” he told us, underscoring it took a village to raise him.
A star athlete and senior class president at Hillcrest
High School, he won a football scholarship to Baylor and signed as an undrafted free agent with the Tennessee Titans in 2006. He played in the NFL for five seasons, until a neck injury in a game against the Dallas Cowboys ended his career.
Graduating from law school at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, he worked as a civil rights attorney in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Obama administration under Secretary Julian Castro, the former San Antonio mayor. Describing himself as a student of the civil rights movement, his hero, he said, is the late John Lewis, the civil rights icon and longtime congressman. For Allred — as with Lewis — voting rights is a passion.
“I believe that our fundamental freedoms are under attack, that Texans believe in freedom,” he told us, “freedom to make your own health-care decisions, including access to abortion, the freedom to vote and to have our vote not overturned, the freedom to retire with dignity. Ted Cruz opposes and has opposed all of these things. It also doesn’t have to be this way.”
Strategically, Gutierrez contends that a Spanish-speaking Latino candidate who’s willing to travel the state and talk to voters about their concerns can lure those Hispanic Texans drifting toward Donald Trump back to the Democratic fold. Maybe. More likely, though, is that Allred will attract crossover voters — particularly White suburban, traditionally Republican female voters — who either oppose the party’s position on abortion, can’t tolerate Trump, or both.
The question is, can he attract enough of those voters to prevail against a Republican incumbent in a fervid-red state?
It’s been more than 30 years since U.S. Sen. Bob Krueger, a Democrat appointed by Gov. Ann Richards, came home to New Braunfels after losing a special election to finish out the term of U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who had become President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary. No Democrat has held a Senate seat since.
Texas Democrats have now wandered in the wilderness almost as long as the Israelites’ 40-year sojourn.
It’s likely the Promised Land will still be a distant dream after November, but at least the party seems eager to put up a fight.
The most polarizing figure in the U.S. Senate deserves no less.