Cruzin’ for a Bruisin: Can Anyone Defeat Ted?

Since President Joe Biden’s term began, Texas has assumed its customary position at the vanguard of resistance to the federal government, while elections here have become quasi-referendums on a Democratic-controlled White House. Historically, this terrain makes for tough traveling for Democrats—certainly more difficult than the last time that GOP Senator Ted Cruz was on the ballot.

With each passing election cycle, what once looked like a watershed event—Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s near ouster of one of the Senate’s most detested members—now resembles little more than a flash flood. Since then, Democrats up and down the ballot have fallen short of liberals’ expectations and hopes, including with the El Pasoan’s own 2022 gubernatorial drubbing at the hands of Greg Abbott.   

And yet, the march of electoral democracy continues, undeterred by matters of partisan competitiveness or existential ennui. Like death and property taxes, elections are inevitable (for now at least), and hope, by force of necessity, springs eternal. 

Cruz is sacrificing his presidential ambitions (hey, there’s always 2028) to secure a third term in the tony confines of the U.S. Senate. If he succeeds, the one-time champion of term limits will have a tenure old enough to buy lottery tickets. A small gaggle of Democrats have lined up for the chance to take him on. The most prominent are Dallas-area Congressman Colin Allred, a lawyer and former NFL linebacker, and state Senator Roland Gutierrez, a veteran of San Antonio politics. Among the longer-shot hopefuls are former Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzales, who recently resigned in the face of a lawsuit that sought to remove him from office, and Dallas-area state Representative Carl Sherman, who seemingly has had enough with the Lege after three terms.  

It’s already become effectively a two-way race between the clear frontrunner in Allred and the lead underdog in Gutierrez. While they’re both run-of-the-mill Democrats, they are each cast as symbolic tribunes of the party’s broader ideological divide: with Gutierrez standing in as the progressive, who seeks to galvanize the Democratic base, and Allred as the moderate, who plays to the middle in search of elusive crossover voters. It’s a tired political fashion, which fits awkwardly in much of Texas, but the candidates will likely wear their mantles regardless.

Now 40 years old, Allred launched his political career by ousting Republican Congressman Pete Sessions from his Dallas district—once the cradle of old-money conservatism—in the 2018 blue wave, and he’s since quietly risen through the party ranks, molding his identity as a centrist. He has leaned on his personal story—he was raised by a single mother, became a football star at Baylor University and had a brief career as an NFL linebacker before becoming a lawyer—to burnish his image.

Roland Gutierrez, a 53-year-old lawyer, is a longtime San Antonio legislator who spent more than a decade in the Texas House before winning a seat in the state Senate in 2020. Under Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s reign, the Senate is a place where Democrats are expected to quietly accept their powerlessness. But the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde, which is in Gutierrez’s district, galvanized him into taking an aggressive public role championing the victims’ families, demanding transparency from state leaders and the Texas state police and admirably leading an impossible crusade to raise the age for buying assault-style rifles to 21.   

Allred is running on the mantra of compromise and common ground in the hopes of winning over independents and moderate Republicans. “You have to have bipartisanship to get anything done in Congress,” Allred told the Dallas Morning News. “That doesn’t mean you sacrifice your values, and I never have during my time in Congress.” 

Gutierrez, meanwhile, says such rosy notions of aisle-crossing are a naive fallacy and has cast himself as a progressive fighter who will take on the GOP in Washington, push for gun reform, and help abolish the filibuster. “People in this state are tired of the same status quo politician telling you this nice word of ‘bipartisanship,’” Gutierrez said to the Morning News. “It’s not real.”

Allred has so far proven he can raise lots of money: In the first five months of his campaign, he raised nearly $11 million. That haul slightly outpaced the incumbent Cruz and dwarfed his closest rival in Gutierrez, who got in the race later, by a ratio of 20-to-1. Allred will need much of that cash to win the primary and, likely, a runoff. 

“People in this state are tired of the same status quo politician telling you this nice word of ‘bipartisanship.’ It’s not real.”

Gutierrez has so far struggled to gain traction among national Democratic power-brokers. His campaign was hit with a major setback last fall when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose super PAC provides key support for Latinos running in competitive primaries, voted against endorsing the San Antonio senator. The snub reportedly came after a pressure campaign led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and two Latino senators from Nevada and California. Schumer and his Democratic Senate Campaign Committee generally don’t endorse in competitive primaries—at least officially—but won’t hesitate to throw their weight around behind closed doors. 

Schumer and Co. were accused of similar meddling in the 2020 Texas Senate primary as they attempted to clear the path for their moderate candidate of choice, Democrat MJ Hegar, to run against GOP Senator John Cornyn. Despite a flood of national super PAC money, Hegar didn’t sniff victory and underperformed Biden. 

On January 6, 2020, Cruz led the charge to block certification of the electoral college vote, even after rioters ransacked the U.S. Capitol, and unabashedly championed Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” delusions. Cruz has since opted out of the post-Trump presidential primary sweepstakes and instead settled into a more comfortable role as a self-styled public intellectual, pontificating about the reactionary grievances that animate his party. He is a devoted podcaster and has channeled his inner Barry Goldwater as a prolific author of pulp conservative manifestos, with recent titles including Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized our Legal System and the newly released Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. 

In 2018, Cruz didn’t take O’Rourke’s campaign seriously until it was almost too late, and it nearly cost him his seat. And while he seems unworried about his third campaign so far, you can expect him to go on the offensive early against his likely opponents. Cruz will attack them as disciples of the Biden politburo, racist critical race theorists, open-borders globalists, and so forth. As a Cruz spokesperson said after Gutierrez’s entrance into the race: “Texans will now get to watch Colin Allred and Roland Gutierrez slug it out for who can be the most radical leftist in the state.”

The hope for Dems this year is that Cruz is just as unlikeable—and vulnerable—as he was in 2018. Over the past several months, Democrats, including Allred and Gutierrez, have been laying the narrative groundwork to convince (or simply remind) voters that Cruz remains not only a craven extremist but a self-interested dilettante who cares more about self-promotion and book sales than the pedestrian concerns of everyday Texans. 

Democratic attack ads, with airport footage of Cruz’s infamous voyage to Cancun for a family getaway in the middle of 2021’s deadly winter storm, virtually write themselves. But Cruz, so far, has proven highly resistant to public shaming—as has Texas.