Texas Democrats battle for shot at challenging Cruz

National party plans big focus on a race state’s voters largely ignoring

2023-12-17 - By Benjamin Wermund

WASHINGTON — If money is any indication, the crowded contest to challenge U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz next year is Democrat Colin Allred’s to lose.

The congressman from Dallas has set campaign fundraising records and outpaced his closest primary competitor by roughly $10 million. Allred has ignored the seven other Democrats in the race and focused squarely on Cruz, pitching himself to voters as a pragmatic and bipartisan alternative who proved he can beat an incumbent Republican when he flipped the congressional seat he holds in 2018.

“We’ve generated support around the country because folks realize I’m battle-tested, I know how to win in tough races — but I also know how to bring people together,” Allred said.

But state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat seen as Allred’s closest rival, has been turning up the heat on the former professional football player he calls too moderate and too hesitant to throw political punches.

Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde and has focused his campaign on curbing gun violence after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, has staked out a series of positions to Allred’s left. He is calling for “Medicare for All” while slamming Allred for supporting border barriers and refusing to back calls for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with Hamas.

“The other candidate, he’s so afraid to talk about these things because he thinks he’s going to back himself out of his moderate world,” Gutierrez said. “We’re not in those times anymore. I know he loves to talk about bipartisanship, but that’s not what this is about anymore. Our world and our country and our state are on fire.”

It’s an effort to generate some competition in a race that

tion from Texas voters — even as national Democrats have made clear they plan to pour significant resources into the state to unseat Cruz, whom they view as one of the very few potentially vulnerable Senate Republicans on the ballot next year. Cruz fended off Beto O’Rourke in 2018 by just 2.6 percentage points.

Political scientists say a more competitive primary could give Texas Democrats a much-needed boost heading into a difficult general election match after years of disappointing results in statewide races.

“There are very interesting X factors in Gutierrez’s candidacy that potentially make this a lot more interesting race than it’s been so far, but that also suggest it could get more interesting once people start paying attention,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Gutierrez’s strategy in particular is to set himself up as the more progressive, combative candidate, versus a more complacent, process-oriented alternative — a safe alternative,” he noted.

It’s a common dilemma for Texas Democrats who have spent cycle after cycle searching for anyone to break the GOP’s decadeslong hold on statewide offices: Is the best route to win through a moderate who can sway key suburban voters and possibly even some Republicans, or a more progressive candidate who can fire up the base and get voters to the polls.

“You have two candidates who are right out of central casting,” Henson said.

Cruz, meanwhile, has dismissed his potential competition as too far left for Texas and has issued fundraising pleas anticipating the outside support the Democratic nominee is sure to receive after the March 5 primary.

“One would think that after running failed Democratic candidate and radical gun-grabber ‘Beto’ O’Rourke in back-to-back election losses, America’s socialist party would get the hint that Texas’ voters want nothing to do with their extreme liberal agenda,” a recent Cruz campaign email said. “Nevertheless, it appears the Democrats are prepared to do the opposite and go ALL IN on flipping Texas BLUE in 2024.”

Money will be ‘critical’

Eight Democrats are running in the crowded primary field, which also includes state Rep. Carl Sherman, a minister who represents a Dallas district and is touting endorsements from religious leaders and civil rights figures such as Ben Crump, the go-to attorney for Black Americans injured or killed by police.

So far, all but Allred and Gutierrez have struggled to gain traction fundraising, with most pulling in less than $100,000 by the end of September, the most recent federal filing deadline. Gutierrez, meanwhile, raised more than $600,000 by that point, while Allred raked in more than $10.6 million.

Money will be key for a field of candidates who political scientists say are largely unknown outside of the districts they represent. With multiple large media markets, Texas is a notoriously expensive state to campaign in.

“This is just so important in this particular race because I don’t think folks are going to know who these guys are outside of San Antonio or the Dallas, North Texas area,” said Renee Cross, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “That money is going to be critical to get their names out there.”

With early voting just weeks away, the limited polling so far indicates that Texans are largely not paying attention to the race and that even self-identified Democrats are relatively unfamiliar with the top candidates.

An October survey by the University of Houston found that half of likely Democratic primary voters were unsure about how they would vote, largely because of a lack of familiarity with the candidates, with the partial exception of Allred. A UT-Austin poll in August found that 46% had no opinion of the candidates in the primary field and that 56% of Democrats said they had no opinion of or did not know about Allred.

Still, Henson said, there is time for Gutierrez, especially, to make it competitive — if he can manage to generate some excitement. The state senator has been campaigning relentlessly across the state, even as multiple special legislative sessions this year have hampered his ability to spend time outside of Austin.

Contrasting approaches

Allred argues that he has proved that his approach can win against a Republican incumbent. In 2018, Allred was one of two Democrats in Texas who won in long-Republican districts. He beat U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, who had held the Dallas-area seat for two decades, by 6.5 percentage points.

Allred points to bipartisan victories in Congress since then, such as successfully pushing a Veterans Affairs funding bill that greenlighted a new hospital in Dallas. He also touted support for the infrastructure law Congress passed in 2021 and legislation aimed at juicing microchip manufacturing in Texas that passed the next year. Cruz opposed both.

“We have a senator who is so ideological that he voted against them, even though they’re in our interests,” Allred said. “We can’t replace a senator who is so ideological with someone who is ideological on the other end. That’s not the Texas I know.”

Gutierrez, who has been in the GOP-dominated Legislature since 2008, says he prefers to put Republicans in a corner than reach across the aisle. He has developed a habit of trying to force votes on legislation by offering it up as amendments to larger bills under consideration.

In 2021, for example, as the state Senate was considering a bill to keep the Texas Department of Agriculture running, he offered an amendment that would create a suicide prevention hotline for farmers, who have a significantly higher suicide rate than other occupations.

The amendment was adopted, and the hotline went on to earn praise from Sid Miller, the conservative agriculture commissioner with whom Gutierrez agrees on little.

“I said, ‘Go ahead, vote against farmers,’” Gutierrez said. “That didn’t happen through bipartisanship, it happened through brute force. They had no choice. And sometimes you have to put them in spots where they have no choice.”

“You have two candidates who are right out of central

casting.”

James Henson, of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at

Austin, on state Sen. Roland Gutierrez and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred