(Bloomberg) — Senator Ted Cruz won his reelection bid, holding off a challenge from a former National Football League linebacker who had sought to break the Republican party’s 30-year unbeaten streak on statewide elections in Texas.
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Cruz defeated US Representative Colin Allred, according to projections by NBC News and Fox News. His lead was about 9 percentage points, with 68% of votes counted, according to unofficial results from the Associated Press. In his last race in 2018, Cruz bested former congressman Beto O’Rourke by 2.6 percentage points.
This year’s race became closely watched as campaign fundraising exceeded $150 million. Cruz, seeking a third term, helped his party keep its iron grip on Texas politics and shore up its standing in the Senate as he painted a portrait of Allred as an “extreme” liberal whose positions on immigration and transgender issues put him out of step with the state’s conservative bent. Allred cast himself as a moderate as he sought to win over independent voters, members of the state’s growing Hispanic population and women turned off by Cruz’s strong anti-abortion stance.
Cruz’s solid win suggests Democrats are still a ways away from becoming truly competitive in the state.
Cruz “is widely seen as a partisan fighter, and that is what Republican voters are looking for,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Texas remains a solidly red state.”
Allred, 41, had been seen as the best chance for Democrats to break through this year in Texas, seeking to tap into fury over abortion restrictions and excitement over Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign while hoping for a boost from the wave of new voters amid a post-pandemic population boom in Texas.
Cruz, 53, who first won election to the Senate as a Tea Party hardliner, is closely aligned with Donald Trump. Still, he also made an effort during the campaign to emphasize his bipartisan work on issues like transportation infrastructure and spent millions on Spanish-language ads.
–With assistance from Alicia Diaz.
(Updates to add fundraising in the third paragraph.)
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