Colin Allred wins the Democratic contest to face Senator Ted Cruz in Texas
Rep. Colin Allred, a Dallas-area Democrat who defeated an incumbent Republican to win his seat in Congress in 2018, won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, emerging ahead of a crowded field seeking was looking for challenges. Senator Ted Cruz.
“I can’t tell you how much it means to me to be your nominee to become the next senator from the great state of Texas,” Mr. Allred, a civil rights attorney and former NFL linebacker, told his supporters Tuesday night.
State Senator Roland Gutierrez, who trailed by a wide margin in the early return, conceded the race mid-evening Tuesday and thanked his supporters, many of whom were families of those killed in a mass shooting at a school in the small town of Uvalde, 2022.
Mr. Allred, 40, presented himself during the campaign as a run-of-the-mill politician with a working-class upbringing who could appeal to a wide range of voters. But he faces long odds in the general election: No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since the 1990s.
Democrats have believed for years that Cruz was one of their best targets to finally break that streak. That almost worked in 2018, when Mr. Cruz first ran for reelection and Beto O’Rourke, then a little-known representative from El Paso, came within about 2.5 percentage points of unseating him, an unusually narrow margin for a state-wide parliament. race.
Mr. Allred won his seat in the House of Representatives that year, riding the same wave of Democratic enthusiasm that nearly drove Mr. Cruz away. Mr. Allred’s district has since been redrawn to be more favorable to Democrats.
Mr. Allred has largely ignored his Democratic opponents in this year’s Senate primaries, focusing his campaign instead on Mr. Cruz. In a video introducing his campaign, he said the senator “embarrassed” Texans and “cheered the crowd” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Allred has attracted interest from donors in Texas and around the country, far outpacing Mr. Gutierrez, his closest opponent in the race. By mid-February, Mr. Allred had raised more than $18.4 million, compared with about $1.3 million for Mr. Gutierrez.
Mr. Gutierrez gained statewide attention for his aggressive advocacy on behalf of the adults and children killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and their families. He has taken strong positions in favor of gun control and positions on other issues, such as health care, that are to the left of Mr. Allred, calculating that a combative and partisan approach would provide a better path to defeating Mr. Cruz then Mr. Allred’s approach from across the aisle.
In a television debateMr. Gutierrez attacked Mr. Allred for trying to appeal to all parties, especially when it came to business, and for signing with Republicans a congressional resolution that criticized President Biden’s handling of immigration and the border.
Mr. Allred defended his position, saying the way to win tough races was to build coalitions and that his vote on the resolution was about “whether or not we stood for the status quo.”
“When it comes to immigration reform, there will have to be bipartisanship,” Mr. Allred said.
Ultimately, Democrats favored Allred because they saw him as the better choice in what will likely be a closely fought and expensive general election.
While Mr. Cruz is deeply unpopular among Texas Democrats, he retains support among Republicans, who are likely to vote in a presidential election year, especially with Donald J. Trump at the top of their ticket, as seems likely. .