As painful as it was for Democrats to watch the president Joe Biden‘s shaky debate performance against former president Donald Trump Thursday night must have been doubly painful for Colin Allred.
As the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in the red state of Texas, Allred’s best chance to spark an unrest is to energize and motivate his party’s base. And that usually comes with a boost from the top of the ticket. But energy was in short supply on the debate stage Thursday in Atlanta for the Democratic standard-bearer.
Allred, a three-term Congressman from Dallas, is giving up his safe seat in the House of Representatives to run against the incumbent Republican senator. Ted Cruz In the November 5 election, he faces the dual challenge of turning out all the Democratic voters in Texas and finding a way to attract more than half a million voters who will cast their ballots for Trump or a third-party candidate. party in the race for president, but who may not be eager to give Cruz a third six-year term in the Senate.
If that seems like a heavy lift, it is. But Texas’s recent and not-so-recent history offers plenty of examples of robust ticket-splitting. Let’s go back to Cruz’s last campaign in 2018. He secured his victory over Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso, by just under 215,000 votes out of a total of about 8.4 million votes cast. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, defeated Democrat Lupe Valdez by more than 1.1 million votes in the same election.
The governor also received nearly 400,000 more votes than Cruz, suggesting there were about the same number of Abbott-O’Rourke voters in 2018. Go back 20 years and Republican Governor George W. Bush received a whopping 68% of the vote. The next race on the ballot was for lieutenant governor, and Republican Rick Perry won by just 50%.
Heading into Thursday’s debate, Allred could take solace in knowing that Trump, then two years into his presidency and facing the first midterm election cycle, was a huge motivator for Democrats to go to the polls in 2018. And so did Cruz, whose first term in the Senate was marked by him helping lead a government shutdown over his opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
This election cycle, Cruz likes to brag about how he’s worked with Senate Democrats a few times to pass things like highway funding. A less polarizing Cruz makes it all the more important for Allred that Biden motivates the Democratic base in Texas.
During and after the debate, which was sponsored by CNN and broadcast from Atlanta, Allred did not post anything on X, formerly Twitter, to highlight Biden’s performance or mock Trump. The Democratic Party of Texas posted a photo of the president smiling in his signature aviator sunglasses and declared him the winner, but many of the comments on the post were brutal.
“I and the average person with at least half a functioning brain disagree,” one X user replied.
“I’m a Democrat. He needs to be replaced,” another posted.
It’s important to note that the debate was held in late June, and the election isn’t until November. That means Biden has time to rehabilitate his performance, perhaps by doing TV interviews or responding to an unexpected crisis. Trump, who has made a career of being erratic, also has time to undo his relatively lackluster debate performance, which some fact-checkers have noted was riddled with falsehoods and exaggerations.
It’s also important to note that the race for U.S. Senate in Texas has been relatively quiet so far. Certainly, there is fundraising on both sides, and Allred and Cruz are looking for ways to get their names and messages in front of voters.
Polls show Allred has a steep uphill climb. He trails Cruz by double digits, according to a Texas Politics Project poll released in mid-June, and four in 10 voters said they had not yet formed an opinion of Allred. He has yet to find a way to generate excitement about his race against Cruz to motivate Democrats, let alone steal some of the votes that Trump and possibly Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will get.
Biden did Allred no favors on Thursday, meaning he’s on his own, at least for now.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Can Colin Allred motivate Texas Democrats in the 2024 U.S. Senate race?
